F r e n c h Li t e r at u r e S e r ies
D a l ke y a r c h i v e p r ess
Writers
Fragments of Lichtenberg
Translated by Katina Rogers
Translated by Gregory Flanders
“Dazzling in its epic proportions and
“This is no mere literary game: what hides behind all
Antoine Volodine
Pierre Senges
imaginative scope.”
this is a deep observation of the links between one’s
—The Nation
age and one’s culture; a subtle reflection on the construction of canon, schools, and literary cults
“Clever and incisive.” —New York Times Book Review Antoine Volodine
has published nineteen books under
that structures our idea of great literature.” —The Quarterly Conversation
Georg Christoph Lichtenberg (1742–1799) was a hunchback, mathematician, electrical theorist, skirt-chaser, asthmatic, hypochondriac, and author of 8,000 aphorisms. Some scholars believe his writings are the scattered pieces of a great novel, and this brilliant, polymorphous novel tracks their attempt to piece it together. The reader discovers how a spinal column gets twisted, what happened to Snow White’s eighth dwarf, how the CIA functions, how to burn down libraries, and how to get a lunar crater named after you.
for sale throughout the world
Here we have the anatomy of the contemporary writer, imagined by the pseudonymous, “post-exotic” Antoine Volodine. His writers are not the familiar, bitter, alcoholic kind; nor are they great, romantic, tortured geniuses; and least of all are they media darlings and socialites. In Volodine’s universe, the writer is pitted in a pathetic struggle against silence and sickness, when she is not about to be murdered by random lunatics or fellow inmates. Consisting of seven loosely interlocking stories, Writers exposes a chaotic reality in which self expression elicits repercussions both absurd and frighteningly familiar.
“An impressive inter-textual machine, endowed with a tremendous power of invention.” —Le Nouvel Observateur
is the author of fifteen works of fiction
this name, including Minor Angels and Naming the Jungle,
Pierre Senges
both available in English.
and essays and close to twenty radio plays.
$14.50t / £10.00 paper 978-1-62897-040-1
$19.00t / £13.00 paper 978-1-62897-046-3
J u ly 190 pages
A u g u s t 640 pages
F r e n c h L i t e r at u r e
F r e n c h L i t e r at u r e
c u p. c o l u m b i a . e d u | 111