Overview
Published by Les Éditions de Minuit, the articles which constitute the book had been published between 1955 and 1963 in a number of French publications, and some were revised prior to inclusion in the book.
Les Éditions de Minuit is a French publishing house which has its origins in the French Resistance of World War II and still publishes books today.
In it, he argues (with reference to his own novels and those of prominent modernist writers such as Proust and Samuel Beckett) that the novel form must be re-imagined by each generation. He takes issue with the common idea that the 19th century bourgeois novel (exemplified by Balzac) is the benchmark by which all novels must be judged. After all, he argues, each new form of artistic expression was once new and strange. It is the obligation of the artist to create new and strange artworks which in turn create reference points to judge future artworks (and which will by necessity be useless to do so).
Samuel Barclay Beckett was an Irish novelist, playwright, short story writer, theatre director, poet, and literary translator who lived in Paris for most of his adult life. He wrote in both English and French.
A novel is a relatively long work of narrative fiction, normally written in prose form, and which is typically published as a book.
Controversially, he argues against "several obsolete notions" such as character, story and depth.
The English translation is by Richard Howard, and publication in the US was originally by Grove Press, and in the UK by Calder Publishing.
Richard Joseph Howard is an American poet, literary critic, essayist, teacher, and translator. He was born in Cleveland, Ohio, and is a graduate of Columbia University, where he studied under Mark Van Doren, and where he teaches. He lives in New York City.
Grove Press is an American publishing imprint that was founded in 1947. Imprints include: Black Cat, Evergreen, Venus Library, and Zebra. Barney Rosset purchased the company in 1951 and turned it into an alternative book press in the United States. He partnered with Richard Seaver to bring French literature to the United States. The Atlantic Monthly Press, under the aegis of its publisher, Morgan Entrekin, merged with Grove Press in 1991. Grove later became an imprint of the publisher Grove/Atlantic, Inc.
Calder Publications is a publisher of books. Since 1949, it has published many books on all the arts, particularly musical subjects like opera and painting, the theatre and critical and philosophical theory. Calder's authors have achieved nineteen Nobel Literature Prizes and three for Peace.
Asterix or The Adventures of Asterix is a series of French comics. The series first appeared in the Franco-Belgian comics magazine Pilote on 29 October 1959. It was written by René Goscinny and illustrated by Albert Uderzo until the death of Goscinny in 1977. Uderzo then took over the writing until 2009, when he sold the rights to publishing company Hachette. In 2013, a new team consisting of Jean-Yves Ferri (script) and Didier Conrad (artwork) took over. As of 2017, 37 volumes have been released.
Jean Henri Gaston Giraud was a French artist, cartoonist and writer who worked in the Franco-Belgian bandes dessinées (BD) tradition. Giraud garnered worldwide acclaim under the pseudonym Moebius, as well as Gir outside the English-speaking world, used for the Blueberry series – his most successful creation in the non-English speaking parts of the world – and his Western themed paintings. Esteemed by Federico Fellini, Stan Lee and Hayao Miyazaki among others, he has been described as the most influential bandes dessinées artist after Hergé.
Pierre Loti was a French naval officer and novelist, known for his exotic novels and short stories.
The French Lieutenant's Woman is a 1969 postmodern historical fiction novel by John Fowles. It was his third published novel, after The Collector (1963) and The Magus (1965). The novel explores the fraught relationship of gentleman and amateur naturalist Charles Smithson and Sarah Woodruff, the former governess and independent woman with whom he falls in love. The novel builds on Fowles' authority in Victorian literature, both following and critiquing many of the conventions of period novels.
At Swim-Two-Birds is a 1939 novel by Irish writer Brian O'Nolan, writing under the pseudonym Flann O'Brien. It is widely considered to be O'Brien's masterpiece, and one of the most sophisticated examples of metafiction.
The Nouveau Roman is a type of 1950s French novel that diverged from classical literary genres. Émile Henriot coined the term in an article in the popular French newspaper Le Monde on May 22, 1957 to describe certain writers who experimented with style in each novel, creating an essentially new style each time. Most of the founding authors were published by Les Éditions de Minuit with the strong support of Jérôme Lindon.
Raymond Roussel was a French poet, novelist, playwright, musician, and chess enthusiast. Through his novels, poems, and plays he exerted a profound influence on certain groups within 20th century French literature, including the Surrealists, Oulipo, and the authors of the nouveau roman.
Michel Faber is a Dutch-born writer of English-language fiction, including his 2002 novel The Crimson Petal and the White.
Novel with Cocaine, or sometimes Cocain Romance, is a mysterious Russian novel first published in 1934 in a Parisian émigré publication, Numbers, and subtitled "Confessions of a Russian opium-eater". Its author was given as M. Ageyev. The English translation of the title fails to convey the double meaning of the Russian "Роман," meaning both "novel" and "romance."
Michèle Bernstein is a French novelist and critic, most often remembered as a member of the Situationist International from its foundation in 1957 until 1967, and as the first wife of its most prominent member, Guy Debord.
A Perfect Vacuum is a 1971 book by Polish author Stanisław Lem, the largest and best known collection of Stanislaw Lem's fictitious criticism of nonexisting books. It was translated into English by Michael Kandel. Some of the reviews remind the reader of drafts of his science fiction novels, some read like philosophical pieces across scientific topics, from cosmology to the pervasiveness of computers, finally others satirize and parody everything from the nouveau roman to pornography, Ulysses, authorless writing, and Dostoevsky.
Oktay Rifat Horozcu, better known as Oktay Rifat, was a Turkish writer and playwright, and one of the forefront poets of modern Turkish poetry since the late 1930s. He was the founder of the Garip movement, together with Orhan Veli and Melih Cevdet.
Joseph Connolly is a British journalist, novelist, non-fiction writer and bibliophile.
Shahriar Mandanipour (Persian: شهریار مندنی پور; also Shahriar Mondanipour
, Shiraz, Iran, is an Iranian writer, journalist and literary theorist.
Vers une architecture, recently translated into English as Toward an Architecture but commonly known as Towards a New Architecture after the 1927 translation by Frederick Etchells, is a collection of essays written by Le Corbusier, advocating for and exploring the concept of modern architecture. The book has had a lasting effect on the architectural profession, serving as the manifesto for a generation of architects, a subject of hatred for others, and unquestionably a critical piece of architectural theory. The architectural historian Reyner Banham wrote that its influence was "beyond that of any other architectural work published in this [20th] century to date", and that unparalleled influence has continued, unabated, into the 21st century.
The sociology of literature is a subfield of the sociology of culture. It studies the social production of literature and its social implications. A notable example is Pierre Bourdieu's 1992 Les Règles de L'Art: Genèse et Structure du Champ Littéraire, translated by Susan Emanuel as Rules of Art: Genesis and Structure of the Literary Field (1996).
And Then There Were None is a mystery novel by English writer Agatha Christie, her best selling novel and described by her as the most difficult of her books to write. It was first published in the United Kingdom by the Collins Crime Club on 6 November 1939, as Ten Little Niggers, after the minstrel song, which serves as a major plot point.
La Jalousie (Jealousy) is a 1957 novel by Alain Robbe-Grillet. The French title: "la jalousie" is a play on words that can be translated as "jealousy", but also as "the jalousie window". The jealous husband in the novel spies on his wife through the Venetian blind-like slats of the jalousie windows of their home.
Human rights literature is a literary genre that deals with human rights issues, and thus - directly or indirectly - promotes values of human rights. The goal of human rights literature is to combine the literary driving force with the motivation for action, which is a fundamental and integral element of the struggle for protection of human rights. This literary genre is based on the concept of "Engaged Literature" that was articulated by the French writer and philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre.
