Scholarly

Legendary publisher and writer John Calder said of Barbara Wright that she was "the most brilliant, conscientious and original translator of 20th century French literature." Wright introduced to an English-speaking readership and audience some of the most innovative French literature of the last hundred years: a world without Alfred Jarry's Ubu, Raymond Queneau'sZazie, and Robert Pinget's Monsieur Songe scarcely bears thinking about. This wonderful collection of texts about and by Barbara Wright-including work by David Bellos, Breon Mitchell, and Nick Wadley, as well as a previously unpublished screenplay written and translated by Wright in collaboration with Robert Pinget-begins the work of properly commemorating a figure toward whom all of English letters owes an unpayable debt.

The influential, daring, and lacerating novels of Ann Quin were very much products of their time-but Quin herself had more than a little influence upon shaping the era in which she lived. Her works bracket the '60s and embrace their drive to experiment and break through to another form of consciousness, and so another means of telling stories, as J. G. Ballard, and B. S. Johnson were doing, and as, later-in many ways following directly in Quin's footsteps-Kathy Acker would as well. In reading Quin we are taught to question the very enterprise of fiction itself; to read Quin one must be prepared to lose one's way. Re: Quin is an unabashedly personal and partisan critical biography of one of the greatest and yet most neglected fiction writers of the so-called "experimental" wave of British novelists of the 1960s.

French Fiction Today focuses on the French novel in the twenty-first century, examining a series of works that are exemplary of broader currents in the genre. Each of these texts wagers insistently upon our willingness to speculate about literature and its uses, in an age when the value of literature is no longer taken as axiomatic. Each of these texts may be thought of as a critical novel, a form that calls upon us to engage with it in a critical manner, promising that meaning will arise in the articulation of writing and reading. Each of these authors participates in a debate about what the novel is as a cultural form in our present-and about what it may become, in a future that begins right now.