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Moving through a variety of locales and adventures, The Truth about Marie revisits the unnamed narrator of Toussaint's acclaimed Running Away, reporting on his now disintegrated relationship with the titular Marie-the story switching deftly between first- and third-person as the narrator continues to drift through life, and Marie does her best to get on with hers. Like all of Toussaint's novels, The Truth about Marie's plot matters far less than its pace and tempo, its chain of images, its sequence of events. From pouring rain in Paris to blazing fires on the island of Elba, from moments of intense action to perfectly paced lulls, The Truth about Marie relies on a series of contrasts to tell a beguiling, and finally touching, story of intimacy forever being regained and lost.

In a mythical African land, some shipwrecked and uniquely talented passengers stage a grand gala to entertain themselves and their captor, the great chieftain Talou. In performance after bizarre performance-starring, among others, a zither-playing worm, a marksman who can peel an egg at fifty yards, a railway car that rolls on calves' lungs, and fabulous machines that paint, weave, and compose music-Raymond Roussel demonstrates why it is that Andre Breton termed him "e;the greatest mesmerizer of modern times."e; But even more remarkable than the mind-bending events Roussel details-as well as their outlandish, touching, or tawdry backstories-is the principle behind the novel's genesis, a complex system of puns and double-entendres that anticipated (and helped inspire) such movements as Surrealism and Oulipo. Newly translated and with an introduction by Mark Polizzotti, this edition of Impressions of Africa vividly restores the humor, linguistic legerdemain, and conceptual wonder of Raymond Roussel's magnum opus.

Two minutes into the second act, there is a knock on Nicolas Boehlmer's dressing-room door, just as he's smoking his last cigarette before having to go back on stage . . . and, without thinking, he says, "e;Come in,"e; still in character. He quickly finds himself bound, gagged, and stripped by a man who appears to be his mirror image: costumed in the same wig, make-up, and clothes. Nicolas is powerless to prevent his usurper from going out and playing his role-with increasingly ridiculous consequences. Is this "e;upstaging"e; the act of a depraved amateur? Sabotage by a rival? A piece of guerrilla theater? A political statement? Whatever the cause, Nicolas and his fellow actors soon find their play-and their lives-making less and less sense, as the parts they play come under assault by this irrational intruder.

In this nominally true story of an epic, transcontinental road trip, Jean Rolin travels to Africa from darkest France, accompanying a battered Audi to its new life as a taxi to be operated by the family of a Congolese security guard. The ghost of Joseph Conrad haunts Rolin's journey, as do memories of his expatriate youth in Kinshasa in the early 1960s-but no less present are W. G. Sebald and Marcel Proust, who are the guiding lights for Rolin's sensual and digressive attack upon history: his own as well as the world's. By turns comic, lyrical, gruesome, and humane, The Explosion of the Radiator Hose is a one-of-a-kind travelogue, and no less an exploration of what it means to be human in a life of perpetual exile and migration.

Martereau is narrated by a tubercular young man driven by a compulsion to discover what lies behind faades, especially in relation to the adults around him. He's particularly interested in Martereau, his uncle's devoted friend and business associate. All in all, Martereau seems like a trustworthy, benign, self-sufficient man, but under the narrator's intense scrutiny--and Martereau's suspect behavior concerning a shady real-estate deal--his motives seem much more complex and seedy. In a subtle, skillful way, Nathalie Sarraute explores the difference between those who are wealthy and those who pretend to be so, and the manipulative way in which some people get ahead in the world.

"Mobile is not only a memorable experience, accomplishing that rich task of all true art providing the reader with new eyes but it is also work which fellow writers and artists can profit from because it supplies the best of all ingredients: stimulation." New York Herald Tribune

In the tradition of Flann O'Brien's At Swim-Two-Birds, Gilbert Sorrentino's Mulligan Stew, and Raymond Queneau's The Flight of Icarus, Robert Pinget's Mahu or The Material tells the story of Mahu, a lazy man who may be a character in his friend Latirail's failing novel, which is taken over by characters invented by Sinture, yet another writer. The latter half of the novel consists of Mahu's strange and hilarious musings on everything from belly dancers to how he catches ideas from other people in the same way he catches germs. Mahu is Pinget's funniest novel, featuring a mix of dark humor and manic word-games, and is as inventive and energetic now as when it was first published.

In the tradition of Joe Brainard's "I Remember" and Georges Perec's "Je me souviens," this delightful "novel" offers a thousand answers to the question, "What are you thinking?" (Or, as translator Ian Monk puts it: "Penny for them?") The answers are spontaneous, revealing, ominous, insignificant, grotesque, amusing, lecherous, tragic and trivial by turns, and lovable in their cheerful imperfection. This is a book about the basics: love, sexuality, death, and all the other things that lurk in our everyday thoughts.

The delightful and daring entertainment by French author Herv? Le Tellier is a series of short, intimately interconnected stories making up a lively user's manual to pleasure, relating the various liaisons of couples from Anna and Ben to Yolande and Zach (taking in Chloe and Xavier along the way, as well as twenty others, as you may have guessed), until the crisscrossing of their lives and partners makes up a pattern as intricate as the fresco on the ceiling of a chapel... Harkening back to another playful book on an intimate subject-- Harry Mathews's "Singular Pleasures"--Herv? Le Tellier's "The Sextine Chapel" celebrates the wonderful, often random, often excruciating possibilities of sexual intimacy, with something here for just about everyone--and their wife, husband, lover, or passing fancy.

Edouard Leve delivered the manuscript for his final book, Suicide, just a few days before he took his own life.