Solomon examines the principal themes and structures of the novels of French writer Louis-Ferdinand Celine, taking into account his theatre, anti-Semitic pamphlets, and critical works. A biographical introduction and a chronology note the historical and private events that shaped the author's life and influenced his development as a writer. An overview of Celine's writings explores the author's vision of the human condition and his perception of the redemptive value of the work of art by which the disorder of life is resolved by the order of writing. Emphasis is placed on the self-reflective nature of Celine's fiction, particularly on the function of the mythologized head wound to express the transition between autobiography and fiction. Each of the volume's principal chapters is devoted to an individual novel or closely related group of novels, considered in chronological order. A brief plot summary and indication of the work's particular relevance for the reader precedes the analysis of the text. Each work, from Journey to the End of the Night to Rigadoon, is considered not only with respect to its intrinsic interest but also in terms of its describing a phase in the apprenticeship of life that Celine's picaresque protagonist undergoes as he is progressively stripped of his illusions and comes to resemble the narrator more closely.

Eleven scholars provide a new interpretation of Celine's work and its underlying historical, cultural, and political matrix.

The first English-language biography in more than two decades of the French writer, one of the great novelists of the twentieth century. Louis-Ferdinand Céline was one of the most innovative novelists of the twentieth century, and his influence both in his native France and beyond remains huge. This book sheds light on Céline’s groundbreaking novels, which drew extensively on his complex life: he rose from humble beginnings to worldwide literary fame, then dramatically fell from grace only to return, belatedly, to the limelight. Céline’s subversive writing remains fresh and urgent today, despite his controversial political views and inflammatory pamphlets that threatened to ruin his reputation. The first English-language biography of Céline in more than two decades, this book explores new material and reminds us why the author belongs in the pantheon of modern greats.

NATIONAL BESTSELLER • From the author of The River and The Dog Stars comes another "gorgeously wrought story—equal parts character study and mystery—a young woman asks Celine, a badass Brooklyn private eye, to investigate the death of her father, a nature photographer" (Entertainment Weekly). Celine is not your typical private eye. With prep school pedigree and a pair of opera glasses for stakeouts, her methods are unconventional but extremely successful. Working out of her jewel box of an apartment nestled under the Brooklyn Bridge, Celine has made a career out of tracking down missing persons nobody else can find. But when a young woman named Gabriela employs her expertise, what was meant to be Celine's last case becomes a scavenger hunt through her own memories, the secrets there and the surprising redemptions. Gabriela's father was a National Geographic photographer who went missing in Wyoming twenty years ago and while he was assumed to have been mauled by a grizzly his body was never found. Celine and her partner set out to Yellowstone National Park to follow a trail gone cold but soon realize that somebody desperately wants to keep this case closed. Combining ingenious plotting with crystalline prose and sweeping natural panoramas, Peter Heller gives us his finest work to date. Look for Peter Heller's new novel, The Last Ranger, coming soon!

Engaged debate among feminist, political, and psychoanalytic thinkers has secured Julia Kristeva's status as one of the most formidable figures in twentieth-century critical theory. Nevertheless, her precise relevance to the study of literature - the extent to which her theory is specifically a literary theory - can be hard for new readers to fathom. This approachable volume explores Kristeva's definition of literature, her methods for analyzing it, and the theoretical ground on which those endeavors are based. Megan Becker-Leckrone argues that Kristeva's signature concepts, such as abjection and intertextuality, lose much of their force when readers extract them from the specific, complex theoretical context in which Kristeva produces them. Early chapters situate her theory in a broader conversation with Roland Barthes, Sigmund Freud, Jacques Lacan and others around the issues of reading, textuality, and subjectivity. Subsequent chapters look at Kristeva's actual engagements with literary texts, specifically her challenging, highly performative reading of French novelist Louis-Ferdinand Céline in Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection and her career-long preoccupation with James Joyce. A final chapter of the book looks at the way contemporary literary critics have marshaled her ideas in re-reading the poetry of William Wordsworth, while a helpful glossary identifies Kristeva's most pertinently "literary" theoretical concepts, by way of synopses of the texts in which she presents them.

This book is neither an apology nor a defense, it's a critical biography of the late French novelist.