Raymond Roussel

1. Raymond Roussel

Locus Solus

1. Raymond Roussel

Locus Solus

Robbe-Grillet’s fourth novel, stands as his most fully realized example of Noveau Roman (New Novel)

1. Raymond Roussel

Locus Solus

1. Raymond Roussel

Impressions of Africa

The long-awaited new translation of the most dazzling and unclassifiable work of fiction in any language.

1. Raymond Roussel

Impressions of Africa

The first of Roussel's two major prose works, Impressions of Africa is not, as the title may suggest, a conventional travel account, but an adventure story put together in a highly individual fashion and with an unusual time sequence, whereby the reader is even made to choose whether to begin with the first or the tenth chapter.

1. Raymond , Roussel

The Alley of Fireflies and Other Stories

"Things, words, vision and death, the sun and language make a unique form ... Roussel, in some way, has defined its geometry." -Michel Foucault Raymond Roussel is one of the most distinctive and compelling French writers of the 20th century, yet many aspects of his life remain shrouded in mystery. An extremely wealthy and always exquisitely dressed homosexual dandy, Roussel was also a compulsive writer. Despite the strangeness of his work, he was convinced that it would make him as popular as Victor Hugo or Shakespeare. His suicide at the age of 56 was in part prompted by the continual disappointment of his hopes for fame. However, Roussel's work was vociferously championed by Surrealist writers and painters such as André Breton, Marcel Duchamp and Salvador Dalì, and later proved a significant influence on Oulipians (particularly Georges Perec), on nouveaux romanciers like Alain Robbe-Grillet, as well as on John Ashbery and Harry Mathews, who named their pioneering magazine of the 1960s Locus Solus, after Roussel's second novel.The full extent of Roussel's writing only became clear in 1989 when a trunk was unearthed in a furniture warehouse containing a vast trove of his manuscripts. The most exciting discoveries were the full draft of Locus Solus (over twice as long as the published version) and the typescript of what would have been his third novel, The Alley of Fireflies, which is translated here for the first time into English by the leading Roussel scholar, Mark Ford. Ford has also translated two haunting extracts from the drafts of Locus Solus, and versions of two of the young Roussel's most intriguing short stories, "Chiquenaude" and "Among the Blacks." Raymond Roussel (1877-1933) is best known for his novels Impressions of Africa (1910) and Locus Solus (1914), and for his posthumously published account of his peculiar compositional techniques, How I Wrote Certain of My Books (1935).