The author recounts his experiences in building collections of rare books and manuscripts of French literature, and reveals little-known facts about French artists, composers, and writers.

Gertrude Stein's "Composition as Explanation" delves into the intricate relationship between language and artistic expression. Published in 1926, the essay explores Stein's unique approach to writing and challenges conventional perceptions of composition. With a distinctive prose style, she reflects on the nature of creativity, emphasizing the significance of repetition and abstraction. Stein's work serves as both an exploration of her own artistic process and a broader commentary on the essence of language in shaping our understanding of art.

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

Beckett's first 'literary landmark' ( St Petersburg Times) is a wonderfully savoury introduction to the Nobel Prize-winning author. Written in 1932, when the twenty-six-year-old Beckett was struggling to make ends meet, the novel offers a rare and revealing portrait of the artist as a young man. When submitted to several publishers, all of them found it too literary, too scandalous or too risky; it was only published posthumously in 1992. As the story begins, Belacqua - a young version of Molloy, whose love is divided between two women, Smeraldina-Rima and the little Alba - 'wrestles with his lusts and learning across vocabularies and continents, before a final "relapse into Dublin"' ( New Yorker). Youthfully exuberant and Joycean in tone, Dream is a work of extraordinary virtuosity.

A long-time companion of Picasso describes the artistic and personal friendship between two giants of twentieth-century art, capturing the affection, rivalry, and creative interaction of the two geniuses, along with examples of their works

Franse en Engelse gedichten.

The most blackly humorous and disenchanted voice in all of French literature. London Review of Books