In the 1930s, a young Samuel Beckett confessed to a friend that he had been living his life according to an ‘abject self-referring quietism’. Andy Wimbush argues that ‘quietism’—a philosophical and religious attitude of renunciation and will-lessness—is a key to understanding Beckett’s artistic vision and the development of his career as a fiction writer from his early novels Dream of Fair to Middling Women and Murphy to late short prose texts such as Stirrings Still and Company. Using Beckett’s published and archival material, Still: Samuel Beckett’s Quietism shows how Beckett distilled an understanding of quietism from the work of Arthur Schopenhauer, E.M. Cioran, Thomas à Kempis, Fyodor Dostoevsky, and André Gide, before turning it into an aesthetic that would liberate him from the powerful literary traditions of nineteenth-century realism and early twentieth-century high modernism. Quietism, argues Andy Wimbush, was for Beckett a lifelong preoccupation that shaped his perspectives on art, relationships, ethics, and even notions of salvation. But most of all it showed Beckett a way to renounce authorial power and write from a position of impotence, ignorance, and incoherence so as to produce a new kind of fiction that had, in Molloy’s words, the ‘tranquility of decomposition’.

This book contains the English and French texts and a complete record of the genesis of each. Besides Comment C'est How It Is, O'Reilly has included L'Image and an excerpt from Comment C'est that was published later in another volume.

This book contains the English and French texts and a complete record of the genesis of each. Besides Comment C'est How It Is, O'Reilly has included L'Image and an excerpt from Comment C'est that was published later in another volume.

This work relates the adventures of an unnamed narrator crawling through the mud while dragging a sack of canned food. It is written as a sequence of unpunctuated paragraphs divided into three sections.

Called by many France's foremost philosopher, Gilles Deleuze is one of the leading thinkers in the Western World. His acclaimed works and celebrated collaborations with Félix Guattari have established him as a seminal figure in the fields of literary criticism and philosophy. The long-awaited publication of What Is Philosophy? in English marks the culmination of Deleuze's career. Deleuze and Guattari differentiate between philosophy, science, and the arts, seeing as means of confronting chaos, and challenge the common view that philosophy is an extension of logic. The authors also discuss the similarities and distinctions between creative and philosophical writing. Fresh anecdotes from the history of philosophy illuminate the book, along with engaging discussions of composers, painters, writers, and architects. A milestone in Deleuze's collaboration with Guattari, What Is Philosophy? brings a new perspective to Deleuze's studies of cinema, painting, and music, while setting a brilliant capstone upon his work.

The iconic trilogy of novels by the era-defining Nobel laureate, relaunched for a new generation. I can't go on, I'll go on. Molloy: a sordid vagrant riding his bicycle through the countryside, sucking stones, on a quest for his mother. Moran: a private detective sent on his trail, investigating his crimes - but soon to deteriorate alongside him. Malone: an octogenarian man on his deathbed, naked in piles of blankets, wiling away the time with stories - writing, reminiscing, raging, surviving. The Unnameable: an armless and legless creature from a nameless place, weeping and watching in his urn, orbited by visitors outside a chop-house. Together, these selves speak, debate, exist: the prose as alive, or more, than them. 'The master innovator of them all.' Guardian

This is the first book to study the middlebrow novel in France. It asks what middlebrow means, and applies the term positively to explore the 'poetics' of the types of novel that have attracted 'ordinary' fiction readers - in their majority female - since the end of the 19th century.

Tattooed Memory (La Mémoire tatouée) is the first novel of the great Moroccan critic and novelist Abdelkébir Khatibi (1938-2009). Only one other novels has been translated into English (Love In Two Languages, 1991). Khatibi belongs to the generation following the foundational generation of writers such as Driss Chraïbi. For Khatibi's generation, French colonialism is a vibrant memory - but a memory from childhood. Tattooed Memory is part bildungsroman, part anticolonial treatise, and part language experiment, and it takes us from earliest childhood memory to young adulthood.

In Kafka Deleuze and Guattari free their subject from his (mis)intrepreters. In contrast to traditional readings that see in Kafka's work a case of Oedipalized neurosis or a flight into transcendence, guilt, and subjectivity, Deleuze and Guattari make a case for Kafka as a man of joy, a promoter of radical politics who resisted at every turn submission to frozen hierarchies.