Written between 1932 and 1940, Blanchot's first novel, here brilliantly translated by Robert Lamberton, contains all the remarkable aspects of his famous and perplexing invention, the ontological narrative--a tale whose subject is the nature of being itself. This paradoxical work discovers being in the absence of being, mystery in the absence of mystery, both to be searched for limitlessly. As Blanchot launches this endless search in his own masterful way, he transforms the possibilities of the novel. First issued in English in 1973 in a limited edition, this re-issue includes an illuminating essay on translation by Lamberton.

    Crevel explores the private worlds of children and their sexual imaginations in this important novel, now republished in the prestigious Sun & Moon Classics. A free-spirited young girl witnesses her father elope with a beautiful English cousin, the chambermaid run off with and then kill the gardener, her grandmother seduce her mother's new fiance, and her mother finally accept an arranged marriage with the bizarre Mac-Louf, darling of the Society for Protection by Rational Experience.

    The years 1880-1900 saw an extraordinary, hothouse flowering of talent, that produced some of the most exotic, stylized, and cerebral literature in the French language. While 'Decadence' was a European movement, its epicentre was the French capital. On the eve of Freud's early discoveries, writers such as Gourmont, Lorrain, Maupassant, Mirbeau, Richepin, Schwob, and Villiers engaged in a species of wild analysis of their own, perfecting the art of short fiction as they did so. Death and Eros haunt these pages, and a polymorphous perversity by turns hilarious and horrifying. Their stories teem with addicts, maniacs, and murderers as they strive to outdo each other. This newly translated selection brings together the very best writing of the period, from lesser known figures as well as famous names. Provocative and unsettling, these extraordinary, corrosive little tales continue to cast a cold eye on the modern world.CONTENTSJULES BARBEY D'AUREVILLYDon Juan's Crowning Love AffairLÉON BLOYA Dentist Terribly PunishedThe Last BakeThe Lucky SixpenceGUSTAVE GEFFROYThe StatueRÉMY DE GOURMONTDanaetteDon Juan's SecretThe FaunOn the ThresholdJULES LAFORGUEPerseus and AndromedaJEAN LORRAINAn Unidentified CrimeThe Man with the BraceletThe Student's TaleThe Man Who Loved ConsumptivesPIERRE LOUYSA Case without PrecedentGUY DE MAUPASSANTAt the Death-BedThe NightA WalkThe TressesCATULLE MENDÈSWhat the Shadow DemandsOCTAVE MIRBEAUThe BathThe First EmotionThe Little Summer-HouseOn a CureJEAN RICHEPINConstant GuignardDeshoulièresPft! Pft!GEORGES RODENBACHThe TimeMARCEL SCHWOBThe BrothelThe Sans-Gueule52 and 53 OrfilaLucretius, PoetPaolo Uccello, PainterVILLIERS DE L'ISLE ADAMSentimentalismThe PresentimentThe Desire to be a Man

    In his portrait of Crab, Éric Chevillard gives us a character who is genuinely strange and curiously like ourselves. A postmodernist novel par excellence, The Crab Nebula parodies literary conventions, deconstructs narrative and meaning, and brilliantly combines absurdity and hopelessness with irony and humor. What distinguishes it most of all is the startling originality of Chevillard’s voice and vision. There is whimsy and despair in this novel, pathos and laughter, satire and warm affection. The Crab Nebula is the fifth novel—and the first to be translated into English—by the brilliant young French author Éric Chevillard. His sympathetic yet outrageous portrait of Crab calls to mind works by Melville, Valéry, and Kafka, while never being less than utterly unique.

    The coin becomes the symbol of contact between human beings, each lost in private passions and nearly impenetrable solitude."A Coin in Nine Hands has . . . passages that move close to poetry and a story that belongs in both literature and history."—Doris Grumbach, Los Angeles Times Book Review"What lingers at the end of A Coin in Nine Hands is the shadowiness and puppetlike vagueness of the Dictator, and the compelling specificity of the so-called 'common people' revolving all around him."—Anne Tyler, The New Republic"Within a few pages we have met half the major characters in this haunting, brilliantly constructed novel. . . . The studied perfection, the structural intricacy and brevity remind one of Camus. Yet by comparison, Yourcenar's prose is lavish, emotional and imagistic."—Cynthia King, Houston Post"Transcends its specific time and place to become a portrait of vividly delineated characters caught in the vise of a tragically familiar political situation."—Publisher's WeeklyBest known as the author of Memoirs of Hadrian and The Abyss, Marguerite Yourcenar (1903-87) achieved countless literary honors and was the first woman ever elected to the Académie Française.

    Works ranks with the fiction of Georges Perec for its seemingly limitless, ingenious, and comical inventiveness. A lampoon of conceptual art–if not, indeed, an exemplar of its charms at their best–Works is another piece in the puzzle of Levé’s brief and fascinating life.

    Leading a team of top French physicists, Mathieu develops a method to capture and harness this incredible life-force as it escapes from a man's body at the moment of death. The result is the gasp: a pulsating sphere of energy that looks as harmless as a ping-pong ball but contains a power source that makes the atom obsolete.

    He reminds Anna of Jude the Obscure and—adift and lovelorn—she tries unsuccessfully to fend off her attraction, literally torn between the two men: How strange it is to leave someone you love for someone you love. You cross a footbridge that has no name, that’s not named in any poem. No, nowhere is a name given to this bridge, and that is why Anna found it so difficult to cross. Anne Serre offers here, in her third book in English, her most direct novel to date. The Beginners is wildly unpredictable, sensual, exhilarating, oddly moral, perverse, absurd, and entirely unforgettable.

    To this gifted French photographer, who died of AIDS in 1991 at the age of 36, photographs were objects of wonder and mystery, even possessing a touch of the supernatural. "Photographs are not innocent." Guibert writes in one of the most provocative essays in Ghost Image, a collection of critical and autobiographical writings on photography translated for the first time into English by Robert Bononno. "They influence and...betray what is hidden beneath the skin. They weave not only lines and grids, but plots, and they cast spells....They are an impressionable material that welcomes spirits." Guibert, photography critic of La Monde for many years, himself weaves a spell with his many topics and moods, delineated in a continually unpredictable mixture of precise descriptions and poetic musing. Guibert recalls family members through the frozen reality of pictures taken at different times. He offers a compact history of the Polaroid, and informative remarks on noted travel journals resembling photography. He confesses to having betrayed an actress he photographed, and silently ponders whether certain pictures should arouse him, adding his views on the differences between visual erotica and pornography. His own occasional role as model causes ambivalence. A flurry of other incidents and thoughts - some real, others fantasy - crowd Guibert's pages as he struggles to fathom the essence of that which captures life. In an unforgettable conclusion, through his account of an enigmatic portrait and its strange fate, Guibert finally achieves the union of person and picture he sought. Ghost Image is a collection of beautifully and hauntingly written essays on what is and what lies behind any photograph.

    . . And now, dear reader, for your intellectual toilet, here is a little piece of soap. Well handled, we guarantee it will be enough. Let us hold this magic stone."The poet Francis Ponge (1899-1988) occupied a significant and unchallenged place in French letters for over fifty years, attracting the attention and admiration of generations of leading intellectuals, writers, and painters, a notable feat in France, where reputations are periodically reassessed and undone with the arrival of new literary and philosophical schools.Soap occupies a crucial, pivotal position in Ponge's work. Begun during the German occupation when he was in the French Resistance, though completed two decades later, it determined, according to Ponge, the form of almost all his postwar writing. With this work, he began to turn away from the small, perfect poem toward a much more open form, a kind of prose poem which incorporates a laboratory or workshop, recounting its own process of coming into being along with the final result. The outcome is a new form of writing, which one could call "processual poetry." Ponge's later work, from Soap on, is a very important tool in the questioning and rethinking of literary genres, of poetry and prose, of what is literature.There is a blurring of boundaries between Soap and soap (which was hard to come by during the Resistance and is also, of course, metaphorical for a larger social restitution). Soap contains the sum of Ponge's aesthetics and materialist ethics and his belief in the supremacy of language as it becomes the object of the text. In the words of Serge Gavronsky, "this work, perhaps one of the longest running metaphors in literature, slowly unwinds, bubbles in verbal inventions, and finally evaporates, leaving the water slightly troubled, slightly darker, but the hands clean, really clean. . . . Out of murky literary habits, Ponge has devised a way of cleaning his text, and through it, man himself, his vocabulary, and as a consequence, his way of being in the world."

    The other guests soon become obsessed with the man, the equivocal unsettling Allan. One by one they realise who he is-that Death has come to spend the summer with them. Amid the ceaseless thunder of the waves, the wild and often surreal Breton landscape, the group that gravitates around Allan-an uncannily contemporary figure-gradually disintegrates. His death seems to symbolize the end of a generation, the approach of war.That Gracq wrote this oblique, prescient novel in a remote German prisoner-of-war camp makes its carefree jazz age setting particularly poignant.

    Les Champs magnétiques (1920; The Magnetic Fields) is known as the first major surrealist work.

    In this collection of short stories and prose poems, Vivien manages to touch on all the themes and ideas that obsessed her throughout her short life.This is the first English translation of Vivien's short stories, with an introduction by Karla Jay. Readers of all ages will be enchanted with tales such as "Prince Charming," in which Vivien takes a fresh, incisively feminist approach to old themes and deftly destroys fairly tales. She reworks adventure stories, Biblical tales, Greek and Roman Fables to offer a radically different, explicitly feminist alternative to common lore.

    Translated from the French by Wyatt Alexander Mason. Pierre Michon is one of the foremost contemporary French writers. He has won many prizes, including the Prix de la Ville de Paris. In THE ORIGIN OF THE WORLD, a twenty-year-old takes his first teaching job in a sleepy French town. Lost in a succession of rainy days and sleepless nights, he falls under the spell of one of the town's residents, Yvonne. "Everything about her screamed desire, something that people say enough that it's almost meaningless, but it was a quality that she gave of generously to everyone, to herself, to nothing, when she was alone and had forgotten herself, setting something in motion while settling a fingertip to the counter, turning her head slightly, gold earrings brushing her cheek while she watched you or watched nothing at all; this desire was open, like a wound; and she knew it, wore it with valor, with passion. But what are words?"