Queneau's Fiction

Queneau's Fiction

Author: Christopher Shorley

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 1985-09-05

Total Pages: 260

ISBN-13: 0521303974

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A general study of Queneau in English, originally published in 1985, which offers a straightforward introduction to his novels and short stories.


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.


Stories and Remarks

Stories and Remarks

Author: Raymond Queneau

Publisher: U of Nebraska Press

Published: 2000-01-01

Total Pages: 196

ISBN-13: 9780803288522

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Stories and Remarks collects the best of Raymond Queneau's shorter prose. The works 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. Talking dogs, boozing horses, and suicides come head to head with ruminations on the effects of aerodynamics on addition, rhetorical dreams, and a pioneering example of permutational fiction influenced by computer language. Also included is Michel Leiris's preface from the French edition, an introduction by the translator, and endnotes addressing each piece individually. Raymond Queneau?polyglot, novelist, philosopher, poet, mathematician, screenwriter, and translator?was one of the most significant figures in twentieth-century French letters. His work touches on many of the major literary movements of his lifetime, from surrealism to the experimental school of the nouveau roman. He also founded the Oulipo, a collection of writers and mathematicians dedicated to the search for artificial inspiration via the application of constraint.


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.


The Sunday of Life

The Sunday of Life

Author: Raymond Queneau

Publisher: New Directions Publishing

Published: 1977

Total Pages: 204

ISBN-13: 9780811206457

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The Sunday of Life, the late Raymond Queneau's tenth novel, was first published in French by Gallimard in 1951 and is now appearing for the first time in this country. In the ingenuous ex-Private Valentin Bru, the central figure in The Sunday of Life, Queneau has created that oddity in modern fiction, the Hegelian naif. Highly self-conscious yet reasonably satisfied with his lot, imbued with the good humor inherent in the naturally wise, Valentin meets the painful nonsense of life's adventures with a slightly bewildered detachment.


We Always Treat Women Too Well

We Always Treat Women Too Well

Author: Raymond Queneau

Publisher: New York Review of Books

Published: 2003-01-31

Total Pages: 204

ISBN-13: 9781590170304

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We Always Treat Women Too Well was first published as a purported work of pulp fiction by one Sally Mara, but this novel by Raymond Queneau is a further manifestation of his sly, provocative, wonderfully wayward genius. Set in Dublin during the 1916 Easter rebellion, it tells of a nubile beauty who finds herself trapped in the central post office when it is seized by a group of rebels. But Gertie Girdle is no common pushover, and she quickly devises a coolly lascivious strategy by which, in very short order, she saves the day for king and country. Queneau's wickedly funny send-up of cheap smut—his response to a popular bodice-ripper of the 1940s—exposes the link between sexual fantasy and actual domination while celebrating the imagination's power to transmute crude sensationalism into pleasure pure and simple.


The Skin of Dreams

The Skin of Dreams

Author: Raymond Queneau

Publisher: New York Review of Books

Published: 2024-01-30

Total Pages: 190

ISBN-13: 1681377713

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In this delightful, cinema-inspired daydream of a novel, an identity-shifting protagonist uses the everyday inspirations of his life to catapult himself into the realm of imagination, blurring the boundaries between reality and fantasy. The Skin of Dreams is a novel of waking dreams. Even as he lives his life, Jacques L’Aumône, its hero, daydreams a hundred other possible lives. A few lines on a page, a chance encounter, a remark overheard in passing, any of these are enough to kick things into gear and send him off outside of himself to become a boxer, a general, a bishop, or a lord. He lives alongside his life with diligence and steadfastness; and the passage from real to dream is so natural for him that he no longer knows precisely which him he is. Eventually he becomes an actor in Hollywood, and the basis of countless dreams for others. This Jacques L’Aumône, like the characters who surround him, has the same sort of haunting and fluid consistency as someone that we might dream of in our beds at night. And reverie, here, is born through the tale’s humor, which is as gentle as it is cruel, as well as by way of a writing technique that is itself drawn from one of Queneau’s great loves, the cinema.


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.


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).


The Blue Flowers

The Blue Flowers

Author: Raymond Queneau

Publisher: New Directions Publishing

Published: 1985

Total Pages: 244

ISBN-13: 9780811209458

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Humorous dream fantasy in which a Duke keeps changing identity as he travels effortlessly through French history.