Journey to the End of the Night
Journey to the End of the Night

Author: Louis-Ferdinand Céline

Publisher: Calder Publications Limited

Published: 1988

Total Pages: 0

ISBN-13: 9780714541396

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When it was published in 1932, this revolutionary first fiction redefined the art of the novel with its black humor, its nihilism, and its irreverent, explosive writing style, and made Louis-Ferdinand Celine one of France's--and literature's--most important 20th-century writers. The picaresque adventures of Bardamu, the sarcastic and brilliant antihero of Journey to the End of the Night move from the battlefields of World War I (complete with buffoonish officers and cowardly soldiers), to French West Africa, the United States, and back to France in a style of prose that's lyrical, hallucinatory, and hilariously scathing toward nearly everybody and everything. Yet, beneath it all one can detect a gentle core of idealism.

Louis-Ferdinand Céline
Louis-Ferdinand Céline

Author: Damian Catani

Publisher: Reaktion Books

Published: 2021-10-13

Total Pages: 393

ISBN-13: 178914468X

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The first English-language biography in more than two decades of the French writer, one of the great novelists of the twentieth century. Louis-Ferdinand Céline was one of the most innovative novelists of the twentieth century, and his influence both in his native France and beyond remains huge. This book sheds light on Céline’s groundbreaking novels, which drew extensively on his complex life: he rose from humble beginnings to worldwide literary fame, then dramatically fell from grace only to return, belatedly, to the limelight. Céline’s subversive writing remains fresh and urgent today, despite his controversial political views and inflammatory pamphlets that threatened to ruin his reputation. The first English-language biography of Céline in more than two decades, this book explores new material and reminds us why the author belongs in the pantheon of modern greats.

Guignol's Band
Guignol's Band

Author: Louis-Ferdinand Céline

Publisher: New Directions Publishing

Published: 1969

Total Pages: 294

ISBN-13: 9780811200189

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In Guignol's Band, first published in France in 1943, Céline explores the horror of a disordered world.

North
North

Author: Louis-Ferdinand Céline

Publisher: Commonwealth Secretariat

Published: 1996

Total Pages: 468

ISBN-13: 9781564781420

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A desperate man frantically flees France in the closing months of World War II.

Death on Credit
Death on Credit

Author: Louis-Ferdinand Céline

Publisher:

Published: 2017

Total Pages: 0

ISBN-13: 9781847496348

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When Céline's first novel, Journey to the End of the Night was first published in 1932, it created an instant scandal, being extravagantly praised by its supporters and savagely attacked by its horrified opponents. Four years later came the sequel, Death on Credit. Both were a new kind of novel, frank about the author's thoughts and actions in ways that readers had never encountered, ultra-realistic - and full of incidents that could not possibly be true to life - and characters that stretched the imagination. In Death on Credit, Ferdinand Bardamu, Céline's alter ego, is a doctor in Paris, treating the poor who seldom pay him but who take every advantage of his availability. The action is not continuous but goes back in time to earlier memories and often moves into fantasy, especially in Bardamu's sexual escapades; the style becomes deliberately rougher and sentences disintegrate to catch the flavour of the teeming world of everyday Parisian tragedies, the struggle to make a living, illness, venereal disease, the sordid stories of families whose destiny is governed by their own stupidity, malice, lust and greed. This fascinating book by one of the greatest twentieth-century novelists is an unforgettable experience for the reader.

Castle to Castle
Castle to Castle

Author: Louis-Ferdinand Céline

Publisher: Dalkey Archive Press

Published: 1997

Total Pages: 372

ISBN-13: 9781564781505

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In Germany near the end of World War II, 1,400 members of the Vichy France government hide in a labyrinthine castle and attempt to postpone the postwar reckoning.

Conversations with Professor Y
Conversations with Professor Y

Author: Louis-Ferdinand Céline

Publisher: Dalkey Archive Press

Published: 2006

Total Pages: 186

ISBN-13: 9781564784490

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So begins the imaginary interview that comprises this novel. Professor Y, the interviewing academic, asks questions that allow Céline, a character in his own book, the chance to rail against convention and defend his idiosyncratic methods. In the course of their outrageous interplay, Céline comes closer to defining and justifying his poetics than in any of his other novels. But this is more than just an interview. As the book moves forward, Professor Y reveals his real identity and the characters travel through the streets of Paris toward a bizarre climax that parodies the author, the critic, and, most of all, the establishment.

Rigadoon
Rigadoon

Author: Louis-Ferdinand Céline

Publisher: Dalkey Archive Press

Published: 1997

Total Pages: 300

ISBN-13: 9781564781628

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Often comic and always angry, the first-person autobiographical narrator, with his wife and their cat in tow, takes the reader with him on his flight from Paris to Denmark after finding himself on the losing side of World War II. The train rides that encompass the novel are filled with madness and mercy, as Céline, a physician, aids refugees while ignoring his own medical needs.Céline's inventive style and black humor profoundly influenced many writers who came after him, including Kurt Vonnegut, Jack Kerouac, William Burroughs, Allen Ginsberg and Charles Bukowski. As Kurt Vonnegut states in his introduction to this edition, "[Céline] demonstrated that perhaps half of all experience, the animal half, had been concealed by good manners. No honest writer or speaker will ever want to be polite again."

The Conspiracy against the Human Race
The Conspiracy against the Human Race

Author: Thomas Ligotti

Publisher: Penguin

Published: 2018-10-02

Total Pages: 273

ISBN-13: 0525504915

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In Thomas Ligotti's first nonfiction outing, an examination of the meaning (or meaninglessness) of life through an insightful, unsparing argument that proves the greatest horrors are not the products of our imagination but instead are found in reality. "There is a signature motif discernible in both works of philosophical pessimism and supernatural horror. It may be stated thus: Behind the scenes of life lurks something pernicious that makes a nightmare of our world." His fiction is known to be some of the most terrifying in the genre of supernatural horror, but Thomas Ligotti's first nonfiction book may be even scarier. Drawing on philosophy, literature, neuroscience, and other fields of study, Ligotti takes the penetrating lens of his imagination and turns it on his audience, causing them to grapple with the brutal reality that they are living a meaningless nightmare, and anyone who feels otherwise is simply acting out an optimistic fallacy. At once a guidebook to pessimistic thought and a relentless critique of humanity's employment of self-deception to cope with the pervasive suffering of their existence, The Conspiracy against the Human Race may just convince readers that there is more than a measure of truth in the despairing yet unexpectedly liberating negativity that is widely considered a hallmark of Ligotti's work.

MEA CULPA & The Life and Work of Semmelweis
MEA CULPA & The Life and Work of Semmelweis

Author: Louis-Ferdinand Céline

Publisher:

Published: 2020-03-03

Total Pages: 178

ISBN-13:

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Coming just after his masterpieces Journey to the End of the Night and Death on the Installment Plan, Mea Culpa is Céline's scathing denunciation of Soviet communism, written after a personal visit to that "worker's paradise" in the 1930s. In his inimitable, blistering style, Céline strips bare not only the communist experiment but also all other modern systems, showing them for what they are: illusions destined to fail because they are based on false ideas about the nature of Man. At a time when many other writers and intellectuals were fawning over the Soviet Union and the ideas of Marx and Lenin, Céline was quick to see them for what they really were, and Mea Culpa now stands as a prescient and accurate statement about the true nature of communism in the modern world. Also included in this volume is The Life and Work of Semmelweis, Céline's first book. This meditation on the heroic and tragic physician who pioneered antisepsis in medicine gives us a key to understanding Céline's vision of life and all of his subsequent work. Written in a more conventional style than his later books, Céline's genius for trenchant observation is nonetheless fully apparent.