An anthology of True Crime...Some strange disappearances...Some unsolved murders... For many musicians, becoming famous is part of the dream of making music. While some musicians don't ever truly reach their peak until long after their death, others become famous for far different reasons other than the songs they create. Imagine pouring your heart and soul into your music, only to have people remember you for something far more insidious.The particular disappearance of an American songwriter has stumped and intrigued people for decades. Of course, the disappearance of Jim Sullivan seemed to be of more note than any of his other accomplishments. Those who hadn't heard of Jim Sullivan are in good company, as not many had heard for Jim Sullivan before he disappeared. No one knows where he went, what happened to him, or if there's still hope of ever understanding how he disappeared.

"Tanguy Viel's parody/pastiche of the American novel is subtle and experimental; it tells a story at the same time as it implicitly poses questions about the narrative structure it is deploying." —The French Review In The Disappearance of Jim Sullivan, disappearance is both a theme and a stylistic device. Indeed, this publication narrates the disappearance of Dwayne Koster, who, fascinated by the story of Jim Sullivan, commits suicide in the New Mexico desert which was the setting of the rocker’s disappearance in 1975. But this novel is for the most part set in the metanarrative tale of its own genesis, and, as a result, is partially eclipsed: its -fictitious- author doesn’t relate it in its entirety and keeps adding bits and pieces of first drafts and preliminary sketches to his text, thus blurring its boundaries. Tanguy Viel’s work can therefore be perceived as a double response, existential and aesthetic, to the question of the end.

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.

Demonstrates how contemporary fiction in French has become a polycentric and transnational field of vibrant and varied experimentation.

Beloved New York Times bestseller M.C. Beaton's cranky, crafty Agatha Raisin—the star of her own hit T.V. series—is back on the case again in Devil's Delight. Agatha and her assistant, Toni, are driving to their friend Bill Wong’s long-awaited wedding, thinking of nothing more than what the beautiful bride will be wearing when a terrified young man comes running down the country lane towards them wearing...nothing at all. The encounter leads them to become embroiled with a naturist group, a disappearing corpse, fantasy games, witchcraft, an ice cream empire, intrigue and murder. In the meantime, Agatha’s hectic life swirls along at dizzying pace, her private detective agency as busy as ever and her private affairs in turmoil, with old loves to contend with and a new suitor on the scene. But when she begins to close in on a suspected murderer, she finds herself in deadly peril, as the sinister nature of the ice cream business leads her to a chilling conclusion...