French Literature

The Battle of Reichenfels has been fought and lost. The army is in flight. The enemy is expected to arrive in town at any moment. Wandering through the snow-laden devastated streets of what once was a city, a soldier on the losing side has a parcel...
By: Alain Robbe-Grillet

In his most famous and perhaps most typical work, Robbe-Grillet explores his principle preoccupation, the meaning of reality. The novel is set on a tropical banana plantation and the action is seen through the eyes of a narrator who never appears in...
By: Alain Robbe-Grillet

Set in a modern, urban Paris, the prose pieces in this volume constitute a further exploration of the terrain Baudelaire had covered in his verse masterpiece, The Flowers of Evil : the city and its squalor and inequalities, the pressures of time and...
By: Charles Baudelaire

A spoof encyclopedia of contemporary accepted wisdom and commonplaces, The Dictionary of Received Ideas sees Flaubert at his witty and satirical best. Perhaps intended as a companion to his final, unfinished novel Bouvard and Pécuchet , this...
By: Gustave Flaubert

A delightful variation on the long tradition of bestiary writing, Jules Renard’s short verse and prose poems have captured the imagination of readers and artists since they were originally written in 1894, with Ravel famously setting five of them to...
By: Jules Renard

The first of Roussel’s two major prose works, Impressions of Africa is not, as the title may suggest, a conventional travel account, but an adventure story put together in a highly individual fashion and with an unusual time sequence, whereby the...
By: Raymond Roussel

Published originally as the purported French translation of a novel by fictional Irish writer Sally Mara, We Always Treat Women too Well is set in Dublin during the 1916 Easter Rising and tells the story of the siege of a small post office by a...
By: Raymond Queneau

Published posthumously, The Red Notebook is an autobiographical account of the youth of the author of the seminal Romantic novel Adolphe , relating Constant’s European travels and readings, as well as his first steps in society and romance. A...
By: Benjamin Constant

'Atala', published in 1801, tells the tragic tale of the eponymous heroine, the mixed-race Christian daughter of a Native American chief, who saves the captured Chactas and tragically falls in love with him. ‘René’, published the following year, is...
By: François-René de Chateaubriand