In this, his fifth novel in English (and its first paperback edition), the acclaimed French-born writer and poet, Raymond Federman, has given us the bittersweet tale of Moinous and Sucette who fall in love "across a smile" in Washington Square. Smiles on Washington Square is a charming and complex novel. With the masterful ease of a tightrope walker, Federman plays with our sense of time and space as he creates, with extraordinary compassion, a tale that makes us see our own vulnerability and worthiness. Stylistically, his links to Beckett are evident in the stripped down prose, the remarkable symbolism and word games, and in his focus on the downtrodden and inarticulate cast-aways of an industrialized world. Ultimately, Smiles on Washington Square is a book that teaches us there is no easy story, no safe entrance, no line of action not fraught with obstacles and humiliation; but finally, in the face of the inevitable disappointment of the human condition, Federman shows us how sweet possibility is.

This collection of essays offers an authoritative examination and appraisal of the French-American novelist Raymond Federman's many contributions to humanities scholarship, including Holocaust studies, Beckett studies, translation studies, experimental fiction, postmodernism, and autobiography. Although known primarily as a novelist, Federman (1928–2009) is also the author of numerous books of poetry, essays, translations, and criticism. After emigrating to the United States in 1942 and receiving a Ph.D. in comparative literature at UCLA in 1957, he held professorships in the University at Buffalo's departments of French and English from 1964 to 1999. Together with Steve Katz and Ronald Sukenick, he was one of the original founders of the Fiction Collective, a nonprofit publishing house dedicated to avant garde, experimental prose. Far too many accounts treat Federman as merely a member of a small group of writers who pioneered "metafictional" or "postmodern" American literature. Federman's Fiction will introduce (or, for some, reintroduce) to the broader scholarly community a creative and daring thinker whose work is significant not just to considerations of the development of innovative fiction, but to a number of other distinct disciplines and emerging critical discourses.

A story of two strong-willed and passionate women who are compelled to unite their senses and sensibilities, from the author of The Professors? Wives? Club. Professor Diana Monroe is a highly respected scholar of Sylvia Plath. Serious and aloof, she steadfastly keeps her mind on track. Professor Rachel Grey is young and impulsive, with a penchant for teaching relevant contemporary women?s stories like Bridget Jones? Diary and The Devil Wears Prada, and for wearing her heart on her sleeve. The two conflicting personalities meet head-to-heart when Carson McEvoy, a handsome and brilliant professor visiting from Harvard, sets his eyes on both women and creates even more tension between them. Now Diana and Rachel are slated to accompany an undergraduate trip to London, where an almost life-threatening experience with a student celebrity will force them to change their minds and heal their hearts?together.

An illuminating history of Washington Square Park and its inhabitants.

"Who or what gives the text its authority?" Everman offers three main sources of authority: the author, the discourse, and the reader. His first section examines the authority of the author by studying the works of contemporary American writers. An essay on "docufiction" focuses on the paradox of using the techniques of fiction to discover reality. The probability of writers revealing truths about themselves is exemplified by Raymond Federman's quasi-autobiographical novels. The second part discusses the authority of discourse, challenging writers with the possibility that literary form, not the author, is the major force in creating works. The final section explores the authority of the reader. Italo Calvino's If on a winter's night a traveler makes the reader the main character of the novel and implicates him in its creation.

The essays in this volume all originated at the 2001 conference of the International Society for the Study of Time. The theme 'Time and Uncertainty' sounds redundant, but the contributions try to come to terms with the irreducible openness of time and the impermanence of life. The essays from various disciplines have been grouped around 'fracture and rupture' (grappling with time and uncertainty as a breach) and 'rapture and structure (solving uncertainty into pattern).

Narrative Innovation and Cultural Rewriting undertakes a systematic study of postmodernism's responses to the polarized ideologies of the postwar period that have held cultures hostage to a confrontation between rival ideologies abroad and a clash between champions of uniformity and disruptive others at home. Considering a broad range of narrative projects and approaches (from polysystemic fiction to surfiction, postmodern feminism, and multicultural/postcolonial fiction), this book highlights their solutions to ontological division (real vs. imaginary, wordly and other-worldly), sociocultural oppositions (of race, class, gender) and narratological dualities (imitation vs. invention, realism vs. formalism). A thorough rereading of the best experimental work published in the US since the mid-1960s reveals the fact that innovative fiction has been from the beginning concerned with redefining the relationship between history and fiction, narrative and cultural articulation. Stepping back from traditional polarizations, innovative novelists have tried to envision an alternative history of irreducible particularities, excluded middles, and creative intercrossings.

A piercingly raw debut story collection from a young writer with an explosive voice; a treacherously surreal, and, at times, heartbreakingly satirical look at what it's like to be young and black in America.