French Literature

A spoof encyclopedia of contemporary accepted wisdom and commonplaces, 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 compilation...
By: Gustave Flaubert

Céline’s third novel, first published in 1944 but dealing with events taking place during the First World War, Guignol’s Band follows the narrator’s meanderings through London after he has been demobilized due to a war injury. The result is a frank,...
By: Louis-Ferdinand Céline

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

This volume, which collects a wide range of some of Antonin Artaud’s most significant writings – from poems to plays, scenarios, production plans, articles, letters and historical fiction – is an ideal companion to his seminal manifesto The Theatre...
By: Antonin Artaud

This volume contains Tristan Tzara’s famous manifestos, which first appeared between 1916 and 1921 and became essential texts of the modern movement and models for Breton’s Surrealist manifestos. Art for Tzara was both deadly serious and a game, and...
By: Tristan Tzara

Paul Scarron’s masterpiece, The Comic Romance , recounts the adventures of a troupe of provincial itinerant actors, skilfully weaving comic anecdotes of their amorous exploits and the central love story between Léandre and his beloved Angélique into...
By: Paul Scarron

When the young and sensitive Auguste Saint-Clair notices an Etruscan vase on the mantelpiece of his beloved Mathilde, he becomes gradually consumed by jealousy at the thought that it could be the gift of another man, and the situation escalates...
By: Prosper Mérimée