A rambling novel of dreams and reflection inspired by a library in a German castle full of books and maps. The narrator is a young Frenchman who works for the owner. The author is a leading practitioner of the French nouveau roman. He wrote Mobile.

This book gathers French writer Michel Butor's essays on his travels in the Mediterranean. Included are pieces on Cordova, Istanbul, Salonica, Delphi, Mallia in Crete, and Ferrara and Mantua in northern Italy. There is an extended essay on Egypt, where, when Butor was twenty-four, he spent a year teaching French in a secondary school in a provincial city. Far from the bland comments on the landscapes by an enchanted walker, inspired by memories, Butor digresses on the history and the literature of the places that he visits. He raises what he calls "geographical criticism" to the rank of art, never forgetting that cities are not miracles of nature but the masterpieces of men. Emperors built palaces where conquerors had previously destroyed them. Sculptors erected statues and writers wrote books. Michel Butor registers these as a part of the memory of place. Butor went on to become one of the leading exponents of the avant-garde writing that emerged in France in the 1950s.

Middle-aged man reflects on his life and loves as he travels by train from Paris to Rome--from his wife to his beloved.

"But Vernier finds that the core of what he actually knows is useless unless he can spin around it a concentric web of larger suppositions, endowed with varying "degrees" of truth. Relying on his nephew's information, he writes Part Two of his manuscript as if it were being written by his nephew. Finally, in Part Three, the raw material of life overwhelms his delicate literary structure, thus exposing the impossibility of his obsession and the damaging effect this obsession has on both himself and those who surround him."--BOOK JACKET.

This volume explores the influence of the avant-garde French novel form known as Nouveau Roman on experimental prose fiction and post-war literary culture in Britain.

The first book from the French avant-gardist and author of Jealousy. “Robbe-Grillet is the forerunner of a revolution in the novel” (Claude Mauriac, cultural critic for Le Figaro). Alain Robbe-Grillet is internationally hailed as the chief spokesman for the nouveau roman and one of the great novelists of the twentieth century. The Erasers, his first novel, reads like a detective story but is primarily concerned with weaving and then probing a complete mixture of fact and fantasy. The narrative spans the twenty-four-hour period following a series of eight murders in eight days, presumably the work of a terrorist group. After the ninth murder, the investigation is turned over to a police agent—who may in fact be the assassin. Both an engrossing mystery and a sinister deconstruction of reality, The Erasers intrigues and unnerves with equal force as it pulls us along to its ominous conclusion. “On the surface, and surface is the key word with this author, The Erasers is a mystery story, where a police agent named Wallas stalks an unknown assassin through a nameless puzzleboard Flemish town . . . Nothing is certain. The only thing the reader can be sure of is the laser precise detail in which all that isn’t clear is described, catalogued and analyzed.” —The Millions “A haunting, mystifying evocation of a murder that will keep your attention riveted.” —The Dallas Morning News Praise for Alain Robbe-Grillet “I can think of no other writer who can render the banal so fearfully fantastic.” —Books and Bookmen “I doubt that fiction as art can any longer be seriously discussed without Robbe-Grillet.” —The New York Times

A posthumously published collection of thirty-six essays offering Italo Calvino's invigorating and illuminating analysis of his most treasured literary classics.

Essays on memory by the author of Our of Egypt "We remember not because we have something we wish to go back to, nor because memories are all we have. We remember because memory is our most intimate, most familiar gesture. Most people are convinced I love Alexandria. In truth, I love remembering Alexandria. For it is not Alexandria that is beautiful. Remembering is beautiful." Celebrated as one of the most poignant stylists of his generation, André Aciman has written a witty, surprising series of linked essays that ponder the experience of loss, moving from his forced departure from Alexandria as a teenager, through his brief stay in Europe, and finally to the home he's made (and half invented) on Manhattan's Upper West Side.