Impish, foul-mouthed Zazie arrives in Paris from the country to stay with her uncle Gabriel. All she really wants to do is ride the metro, but finding it shut because of a strike, Zazie looks for other means of amusement and is soon caught up in a comic a
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 heartw
The Last Days is Raymond Queneau's autobiographical novel of Parisian student life in the 1920s: Vincent Tuquedenne tries to reconcile his love for reading with the sterility of studying as he hopes to study his way out of the petite bourgeoisie to which
Le Vol d'Icare est le dernier roman de Raymond Queneau, paru en 1968. Huber, un auteur à partir de 1895, crée un roman dont le personnage principal se nomme Icare. Ce dernier sort de son livre, emporté par un coup de vent et se retrouve perdu dans Pari
The plot of Exercises in Style is simple: a man gets into an argument with another passenger on a bus. However, this anecdote is told 99 more times, each in a radically different style, as a sonnet, an opera, in slang, and with many more permutations. Thi
One of the most extraordinary events of the late nineteenth century in Paris was the opening on December 11, 1896, at the Théâtre de l’Oeuvre, of Alfred Jarry’s play Ubu Roi. The audience was scandalized by this revolutionary satire, developed from
With the very first word of his famous play Ubu Roi---Shite!---Alfred Jarry (1873-1907) threw down his challenge to literature, permanently altering its course thereafter. Jarry's equally revolutionary novels form the cornerstones of a science he named -P
Tristan Tzara—poet, literary iconoclast, and catalyst—was the founder of the Dada movement that began in Zürich during World War I. His ideas were inspired by his contempt for the bourgeois values and traditional attitudes towards art that existed at
