Pierrot Mon Ami

Pierrot Mon Ami

Author: Raymond Queneau

Publisher: Deep Vellum Publishing

Published: 2023-10-10

Total Pages: 159

ISBN-13: 1628974885

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Pierrot Mon Ami, considered by many to be one of Raymond Queneau’s finest achievements, is a quirky coming-of-age novel concerning a young man’s initiation into a world filled with deceit, fraud, and manipulation. From his short-lived job at a Paris amusement park where he helps to raise women’s skirts to the delight of an unruly audience, to his frustrated and unsuccessful love of Yvonne, to his failed assignment to care for the tomb of the shadowy Prince Luigi of Poldevia, Pierrot stumbles about, nearly immune to the effects of duplicity. This “innocent” implies how his story, at almost every turn, undermines, upsets, and plays upon our expectations, leaving us with more questions than answers, and doing so in a gloriously skewed style (admirably re-created by Barbara Wright, Queneau’s principle translator).


Witch Grass

Witch Grass

Author: Raymond Queneau

Publisher: New York Review of Books

Published: 2003-01-31

Total Pages: 332

ISBN-13: 9781590170311

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Seated in a Paris café, a man glimpses another man, a shadowy figure hurrying for the train: Who is he? he wonders, How does he live? And instantly the shadow comes to life, precipitating a series of comic run-ins among a range of disreputable and heartwarming characters living on the sleazy outskirts of the city of lights. Witch Grass (previously titled The Bark Tree) is a philosophical farce, an epic comedy, a mesmerizing book about the daily grind that is an enchantment itself.


Saint Glinglin

Saint Glinglin

Author: Raymond Queneau

Publisher: Dalkey Archive Press

Published: 2000

Total Pages: 202

ISBN-13: 9781564782304

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Queneau's tragicomic masterpiece which retells in an array of styles the primal Freudian myth of sons killing the father. Queneau satirizes anthropology, folklore, philosophy, and epistemology while spinning a story as appealing as a fairy tale about a land where it never rains and a bizarre festival is held every Saint Glinglin's Day.


Odile [English Ed

Odile [English Ed

Author: Raymond Queneau

Publisher:

Published: 1988

Total Pages: 140

ISBN-13:

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"Even though I can't remember my childhood, my memory being as if ravaged by some disaster, there nevertheless remains a series of images from the time before my birth . . . of my first twenty years, only ruins are left in a memory devastated by unhappiness." These opening lines from Queneau's novel, first published in France in 1937, are a brilliant, moving introduction to a story about the devastating psychological effects of war, about falling in love, about politics subverting human relationships, about life in Paris during the early 1930s amid intellectuals and artists whose activities range from writing for radical magazines to conjuring the ghost of Lenin in séances. Most of all, it's about Roland Travy's agonizing search for happiness after having been conditioned to live unhappily but safely for so long, about his growing self-awareness and need for another human being, about his willingness to shed his fears and accept his humanity.


The Flight of Icarus

The Flight of Icarus

Author: Raymond Queneau

Publisher: New Directions Publishing

Published: 1973

Total Pages: 200

ISBN-13: 9780811204835

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The Flight of Icarus is Raymond Queneau's only novel written in the form of a play: seventy-four short scenes, complete with stage directions. Consciously parodying Pirandello and Robbe-Grillet, it begins with a novelist's discovery that his principal character, Icarus by name, has vanished. This in turn, sets off a rash of other such disappearances.


The Last Days

The Last Days

Author: Raymond Queneau

Publisher: Dalkey Archive Press

Published: 1991

Total Pages: 260

ISBN-13: 9780916583637

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Naming and Unnaming

Naming and Unnaming

Author: Jordan Stump

Publisher: U of Nebraska Press

Published: 1998-01-01

Total Pages: 206

ISBN-13: 9780803242685

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Naming and Unnaming is a dazzling study that centers on the work of Raymond Queneau, one of the most influential French novelists of the twentieth century. Jordan Stump takes as his subject the many implications?epistemological, political, literary, sometimes even physical?of naming in Queneau?s remarkable novels. From the idea that the names of characters offer a more immediate and perhaps even a more intimate understanding of their souls than we might glean from their words and deeds has grown the broad field of inquiry known as literary onomastics. Stump argues that there is another approach to the literary proper name, one that concentrates not on the meaning of names but on the meaning of the use of those names?the ways in which the characters and narrator of a novel address or refer to others. Naming and Unnaming considers the literary and philosophical implications of names and naming. Stump examines four issues in Queneau?s novels?the nature of writing and of creation in general, the possibility or impossibility of knowledge, the relationship between the individual and the group, and the uses of power and control?in relation to which naming emerges as a force both powerful and utterly impotent. By exploring these forces and their evocation, Stump reveals the complexity of both the act of naming and the novels of Queneau.


Letters, Numbers, Forms

Letters, Numbers, Forms

Author: Raymond Queneau

Publisher: University of Illinois Press

Published: 2007

Total Pages: 274

ISBN-13: 0252031873

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The first English translation of essays from one of the twentieth century's most intriguing avant-garde writers Compiled from two volumes of Raymond Queneau's essays (Bâtons, chiffres et lettres and Le Voyage en Grèce), these selections find Queneau at his most playful and at his most serious, eloquently pleading for a certain classicism even as he reveals the roots of his own wildly original oeuvre. Ranging from the funny to the furious, they follow Queneau from modernism to postmodernism by way of countless fascinating detours, including his thoughts on language, literary fashions, myth, politics, poetry, and other writers (Faulkner, Flaubert, Hugo, and Proust). Translator Jordan Stump provides an introduction as well as explanatory notes about key figures and Queneau himself.


Exercises in Style

Exercises in Style

Author: Raymond Queneau

Publisher: New Directions Publishing

Published: 1981

Total Pages: 212

ISBN-13: 9780811207898

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Queneau uses a variety of literary styles and forms in ninety-nine exercises which retell the same story about a minor brawl aboard a bus.