<p>The classic Grimms’ fairy tale of the valiant little tailor, as you’ve never read it before\n“A creative take on storytelling, suggesting the potential in even the most familiar tale, with Chevillard riffing comfortably across subject-matters and stories old and new.”—M. A.Orthofer, Complete Review\nOnce upon a time, there lived a valiant little tailor who killed seven flies with one blow—but who is this narrator who has abruptly inserted himself into the story, claiming authorship? He’s indignant: the fairy tale, borne carelessly along by the popular imagination, subjected to the transformations of oral tradition, was collected in a lamentable state by the Brothers Grimm, and he intends to restore the tale and its giant-slaying, unicorn-fighting, boar-hunting star to their original magnificence. But the true hero of the story remains to be seen: Is it the tailor, the narrator, or someone else entirely?\nIn this explosive retelling of the classic tale, Éric Chevillard enlists the reader in a dizzying game of crack-the-whip, with new directions and delights in every paragraph. At once irreverent and deeply sincere, this book is a mischievous, multifarious celebration of the power of stories and those who tell them.</p>

The Valiant Little Tailor: A Novel (The Margellos World Republic of Letters)

Literature & Fiction

Chevillard, Éric

Humor & Satire

Yale University Press

Museum Visits (The Margellos World Republic of Letters)

Short Stories & Anthologies

The Crab Nebula

Literary

University Of Nebraska Press

On the Ceiling

On the Ceiling tells the story of a young man who wears a chair upside down on his head. He falls in love with a young woman named Méline, and soon he and his friends move in with her and her family. They are disappointed by the life they find at Méline’s, however, and in search of something better they make the collective decision to move to the ceiling of her house, where they expect to find a more orderly, more rational, and less encumbered existence. Éric Chevillard’s trademark is inventing characters who have little choice but to dream up the most hopelessly outlandish and breathtakingly brilliant schemes if they are to survive the rigors of their existence. He is fascinated by the imperious need we all feel to make life bearable and by the lengths to which we are willing to go in that pursuit. The characters in On the Ceiling are prepared to go rather further than most of us. Chevillard, one of the most inventive young authors on the French literary scene, is the author of eight novels.

<p><div><i>The Crab Nebula</i> (La Nébuleuse du crabe) is comprised of fifty-two vivid chapters that provide startling insights into the existence of this nebulous man named Crab: his nightmarish--and none too solid--physique, his mysterious absence from the pages of history, his birth in prison, his never having been born at all. In his portrait of Crab, Éric Chevillard gives us a character who is genuinely strange and curiously like ourselves.</div> <div>&nbsp;</div> <div>A postmodernist novel par excellence, <i>The Crab Nebula</i> parodies literary conventions, deconstructs narrative and meaning, and brilliantly combines absurdity and hopelessness with irony and humor. What distinguishes it most of all is the startling originality of Chevillard's voice and vision. There is whimsy and despair in this novel, pathos and laughter, satire and warm affection.</div> <div>&nbsp;</div> <div><i>The Crab Nebula</i> is the fifth novel--and the first to be translated into English--by the brilliant young French author Éric Chevillard. His sympathetic yet outrageous portrait of Crab calls to mind works by Melville, Valéry, and Kafka, while never being less than utterly unique.</div></p>

Contemporary

Bison Books

<i>On the Ceiling</i> tells the story of a young man who wears a chair upside down on his head. He falls in love with a young woman named Méline, and soon he and his friends move in with her and her family. They are disappointed by the life they find at Méline’s, however, and in search of something better they make the collective decision to move to the ceiling of her house, where they expect to find a more orderly, more rational, and less encumbered existence. <p>Éric Chevillard’s trademark is inventing characters who have little choice but to dream up the most hopelessly outlandish and breathtakingly brilliant schemes if they are to survive the rigors of their existence. He is fascinated by the imperious need we all feel to make life bearable and by the lengths to which we are willing to go in that pursuit. The characters in <i>On the Ceiling</i> are prepared to go rather further than most of us. Chevillard, one of the most inventive young authors on the French literary scene, is the author of eight novels.</p>

<p>Eric Chevillard’s visionary play of word and thought has been compared to the work of Beckett, Michaux, and Pinget, yet the universe he spins is utterly his own. Palafox (Editions de Minuit, 1990), Chevillard’s third novel of eleven, explores the ecosystem of an unclassifiable yet enchanting protean creature, Palafox. A team of experts armed with degrees of higher learning is determined to label, train, baptize, and realize the elusive creature, while Palafox effortlessly and wordlessly defies them all.</p>

Palafox

Arts & Photography

History & Criticism

Archipelago

New work from the acclaimed author of "The Crab Nebula" and "Palafox."

Demolishing Nisard (French Literature)

Dalkey Archive Press

<p>?ric Chevillard here seeks to clear up a persistent and pernicious literary misunderstanding: the belief that a novel's narrator must necessarily be a mouthpiece for his or her writer's own opinions. Thus, we are introduced to a narrator haunted by a deep loathing for cauliflower gratin (and by a no less passionate fondness for trout almondine), but his monologue has been helpfully and hilariously annotated in order to clarify all the many ways in which this gentleman and ?ric Chevillard are nothing alike. Language and logic are pushed to their farthest extremes in one of Chevillard's funniest novels yet.</p>

The Author and Me (French Literature)

<p><p>Fiction. Translated by Chris Clarke. The literary world owes a great debt of gratitude to the executors who, charged with burning the remaining papers of their authorial charges, refuse, instead publishing them for the fanatic and meddlesome among us. Collected here are the remaining unpublished works --diaries and drafts, aphorisms and ephemera --of the late Thomas Pilaster, compiled by Marc-Antoine Marson, a longtime friend and fellow writer with whom Pilaster maintained a healthy rivalry. With rough edges and glints of genius present in equal measure, scholars and lay-readers alike will treasure these curious texts --"So Many Seahorses," "The Vander Sons Company," and "Three Attempts at the Reintroduction of the Man-Eating Tiger Into Our Countryside," to name a few --for generations to come.</p></p>

The Posthumous Works of Thomas Pilaster

Chris Clarke (Translator)

Sublunary Editions

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Chevillard, Éric. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Books by Chevillard, Éric

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Chevillard, Éric. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

The Valiant Little Tailor: A Novel (The Margellos World Republic of Letters)

Museum Visits (The Margellos World Republic of Letters)

The Crab Nebula

On the Ceiling

The Crab Nebula

On the Ceiling

Palafox

Demolishing Nisard (French Literature)

The Author and Me (French Literature)

The Posthumous Works of Thomas Pilaster