French Literature

Finding himself locked in his room for six weeks, a young officer journeys around his room in his imagination, using the various objects it contains as inspiration for a delightful parody of contemporary travel-writing and an exercise in Sternean...

Shortly before his death at the age of twenty, the young literary sensation Raymond Radiguet compiled a volume of his poetry, composed between the ages of fourteen and eighteen. Presented here, this prodigious oeuvre is notable as much for its...
By: Raymond Radiguet

A spoof encyclopedia of contemporary accepted wisdom and commonplaces, Dictionary of Received Ideas sees Flaubert at his witty and satirical best. Perhaps intended as a companion to his final, unfinished novel Bouvard and Pécuchet , this compilation...
By: Gustave Flaubert

Céline’s third novel, first published in 1944 but dealing with events taking place during the First World War, Guignol’s Band follows the narrator’s meanderings through London after he has been demobilized due to a war injury. The result is a frank,...
By: Louis-Ferdinand Céline

The Battle of Reichenfels has been fought and lost. The army is in flight. The enemy is expected to arrive in town at any moment. A soldier, carrying a parcel under his arm, is wandering through an unknown town. All the streets look the same, and he...
By: Alain Robbe-Grillet

When the immoral libertine Monsieur de Franval marries and fathers a daughter, he decides to inculcate in her a sense of absolute freedom, an unconventional education that involves the two becoming secret lovers. But Franval’s virtuous, Godfearing...
By: Marquis de Sade

In his most famous and perhaps most typical work, Robbe-Grillet explores his principle preoccupation, the meaning of reality. The novel is set on a tropical banana plantation and the action is seen through the eyes of a narrator who never appears in...
By: Alain Robbe-Grillet

A major work by one of France’s most important authors of the twentieth century, London Bridge is a riotous novel about the London underworld during World War I. Picking up where its predecessor Guignol’s Band left off, Céline’s semiautobiographical...
By: Louis-Ferdinand Céline

Beautiful Emma Rouault yearns for the life of wealth, passion and romance she has encountered in popular sentimental fiction, and when her doctor, the well-meaning but awkward and unremarkable Charles Bovary, begins to pay her attention, she...
By: Gustave Flaubert