Books in the French Modernist Library series

A dystopian novel of post-World War II Europe.

Features ten of the author's best short stories, evoking the seamy side of '50s Parisian night life.

Offers an adulation of love as both mystery and revelation. This book is dedicated to defying "the widespread opinion that love wears out, like the diamond, in its own dust."

Describes the enigmatic condition of a man and woman alone in a sparsely furnished hotel room who try to remember what has happened to bring them there as they await whatever will happen next. This book tells of their reserved confusion and quiet desperation that impress upon them (and us) the realization that imagination can create reality.

A collection of critical and polemical essays.

Collects the best of the author's shorter prose that span his career and include short stories, an uncompleted novel, melancholic and absurd essays, occasionally baffling 'Texticles', a pastiche of "Alice in Wonderland", and his only play.

Offers a different perspective on the war and the postwar political purges in France. This book tells the tale of a man imprisoned and reviled by his own countrymen, and follows its character's decline from virulent hatred to near madness as a result of his violent frustration with the hypocrisy and banality of his fellow human beings.

A collection of critical and polemical essays. It features such essays as: "Refusal to Inter", "Legitimate Defense", "Surrealism and the Treatment of Mental Illness", "Introduction to the Strange Tales of Achim von Arnim", and "Picasso in His Element".

Provides both a litany of writers' fears and a dismissal of the alibis offered to excuse them. The author aims to acknowledge that his own difficulty in writing has plenty of company.

A fitful interloper among the Surrealists, the author rejected all forms of dogmatic thought, whether religious, philosophical, aesthetic, or political. He combined his skepticism about Western metaphysics with mystic's effort to maintain intense wakefulness to the present moment and to the irreducible particularity of all objects and experience.

Having broken decisively with Marxism in the mid-1930s, the author addresses the horrors of the Stalinist regime (which denounced him during the Moscow trials of 1936). He argues for the autonomy of art and poetry and condemns the subservience to "revolutionary" aims exemplified by socialist realism.

Features Thomas who upon seeing a women gesture to him from a window of a large boarding house, enters the building and slowly becomes embroiled in its inscrutable workings. Although Thomas is constantly reassured that he can leave the building, he seems to be separated forever from the world he has left behind.