About the Author

Louis-Ferdinand Celine (1894-1961) was a French writer and doctor whose novels are antiheroic visions of human suffering. Accused of collaboration with the Nazis, Celine fled France in 1944 first to Germany and then to Denmark. Condemned by default (1950) in France to one year of imprisonment and declared a national disgrace, Celine returned to France after his pardon in 1951, where he continued to write until his death. His classic books include Journey to the End of the Night, Death on the Installment Plan, London Bridge, North, Rigadoon, Conversations with Professor Y, Castle to Castle, and Normance. Marlon Jones grew up in California, and lives in England. With Josephine Berganza and Jeff Fort, he translated French Theory by Francois Cusset.

Reviews

Celine is one of the great revolutionaries of prose of our century, as great as Joyce or Kafka. --The London Spectator

To read any one single novel by Celine is to receive, in a bracing style, a hysterical primer on the abjection of being. --Wyatt Mason

Celine was the black humorist to his age three decades before the term was invented . . . Alongside this apocalyptically-minded Paris doctor our local batch of black comics are pretty gray cats.

Increasingly, it does look as if the novels of Gunter Grass, of William Burroughs, and of Norman Mailer would not have been written without Celine's precedent.

Celine is one of the great revolutionaries of prose of our century, as great as Joyce or Kafka. --The London Spectator
To read any one single novel by Celine is to receive, in a bracing style, a hysterical primer on the abjection of being. --Wyatt Mason
Celine was the black humorist to his age three decades before the term was invented . . . Alongside this apocalyptically-minded Paris doctor our local batch of black comics are pretty gray cats.
Increasingly, it does look as if the novels of Gunter Grass, of William Burroughs, and of Norman Mailer would not have been written without Celine's precedent.