In his most famous and perhaps most typical work, Robbe-Grillet explores his principal preoccupation: the meaning of reality. The novel is set on a tropical banana plantation, and the action is seen through the eyes of a narrator who never appears in person, never speaks and never acts. He is a point of observation, his personality only to be guessed at, watching every movement of the other characters' actions as they flash like moving pictures across the distorting screen of a jealous mind. The result is one of the most important and influential books of our time, a completely integrated masterpiece that has already become a classic.

Includes the full French text, accompanied by French-English vocabulary. Notes and a detailed introduction in English put the work in its social and historical context.

The full French text is accompanied by French-English vocabulary. Notes and a detailed introduction in English put the work in its social and historical context.

Set in an unspecified island kingdom, A Regicide tells the story of the statistician Boris who, after the electoral victory of the Church party in the country s elections, decides to assassinate the King on the day he is to visit the factory where he is employed. As the crime is described and relived, doubt sets in as to whether it has ever taken place. Written in 1949 but only published in 1979, Robbe-Grillet's first novel is a disquieting and satirical avant-garde political thriller which bridges the gap between traditional novel and the Nouveau Roman genre he would later espouse and make famous.

When Mathias, a travelling watch salesman, returns after many years to the island of his birth, a young girl is found dead on the rocks. As Mathias makes an increasingly tense recapitulation of his movements on the day of the event, tiny details slowly and inexorably accumulate. Through the warped screen of his distorted mind, the remembered images pile up until the reader is caught in his web of desperation. And yet in the end reality has lost all meaning, as the distinction between the narrator's recollections and the underlying facts are more and more blurred. This brilliantly executed novel, which showcases all the techniques that have secured Robbe-Grillet's place in the canon of Western literature, leaves behind a disturbing sense of unrest.

The Battle of Reichenfels has been fought and lost. The army is in flight. The enemy is expected to arrive in town at any moment. A soldier, carrying a parcel under his arm, is wandering through an unknown town. All the streets look the same, and he cannot remember the name of one where he was supposed to meet the man who had agreed to take the parcel. But he must deliver the parcel or at least get rid of it... A brilliant work from one of the finest exponents of the Nouveau Roman, In the Labyrinth showcases an inventive, hypnotic style which creates an uncanny atmosphere of deja vu, yet undermines the reader's expectations at every turn.

Here, in one volume, are two remarkable novels by the chief spokesman of the so-called "new novel" which has caused such discussion and aroused such controversy. This volume, which offers incisive essays on Robbe-Grillet by Professor Bruce Morrissette of the University of Chicago and by French critics Roland Barthes and Anne Minor, also contains a helpful bibliography of writings by and about the author.

One of Robbe-Grillet's most important works and winner of the 1955 Prix des Critiques, The Voyeur tells the gripping story of a thirteen-year-old girl who is found drowned and mutilated. Suspicion surrounds Mathias, a reclusive traveling salesman, and as the circumstances are eerily recreated through the eyes of the suspected killer, the reader is drawn into a haunting mystery. Writing with eerie precision but nonetheless flouting the established rules of fiction, Robbe-Grillet puts us at the scene of the crime and takes us inside the mind of an unreliable narrator penned by an unreliable author.

After a failed attempt on his life by an unknown terrorist cell, Professor Daniel Dupont decides to fake his own death. The government authorities, believing that the attack is part of a series of political assassinations, send Wallas, a recently promoted special investigator, to the provincial town where the crime took place. As he wanders the confusing streets of the town, he finds himself increasingly lost in a web of conspiracies, doppelgangers and memories. Cleverly deconstructing the detective genre, The Erasers, Alain Robbe-Grillet's first published novel, shifts between various characters and time frames, while maintaining the suspense of a conventional thriller. The result is an engrossing examination of consciousness and reality which is also one the founding texts of the nouveau roman school.

We are in the bombed-out Berlin of 1949, after the Second World War, rendered with an atmosphere reminiscent of Orson Welles' The Third Man. Henri Robin, a special agent of the French secret service, arrives in the ruined former capital to which he feels linked by a vague but recurrent childhood memory. But the real purpose of his mission has not been revealed to him, for his superiors have decided to afford him only as much information as is indispensable for the action expected of his blind loyalty. But nothing is what it seems, and matters do not turn out as anticipated. Indeed, the events that punctuate the secret agent's stay in Berlin are liable to abrupt transitions, thrilling and questionable in equal measure: a shooting, a kidnapping, druggings, encounters with pimps and teenage whores, police interrogations, even some elegantly staged torture. These bloody events take place amid thick fog along the city's canals, and even more mysterious narrative tricks. Robin--or is the narrator actually twin brothers?--falls in love with a mysterious woman named Jo Kast (a reference to Oedipus's mother Jocasta). Her teenaged daughter Gegenecke (the German translation of Antigone), a provocative blonde, will form a strange partnership reminiscent of the blind Oedipus led into exile by Antigone. Dupont, the hero of The Erasers, returns here as van Brucke (both names mean "Of the Bridge," one in French, the other in German). In this astonishing fictional cat-and-mouse game, reminiscent of Daedalus's labyrinth, nothing that is remembered can be altogether true, but only what is remembered can be real. Readers of Robbe-Grillet's novel Erasers will recognize, as the secret agent of Repetition slowly becomes aware that he was in Berlin before--as a child, with his mother, perhaps looking for his father--the same allusions to bits and pieces of the Oedipus story built into the hero's own. Indeed "erasing" a story by retelling it is the central motif of all Robbe-Grillet's fiction and films, of which this latest and probably last novel is in many ways the most revealing and triumphant version.

These two novellas demonstrate why Alain Robbe-Grillet, the leading practitioner and theorist of the noveau roman, is one of the most discussed and controversial writers of the post-war era. In La Maison de Rendez-vous, the master of the new novel creates a world of crime, intrigue, and passion dominated by Lady Ava's mysterious Blue Villa. Set in Hong Kong, the novella unfolds over the course of one evening, but the events of that night recur repeatedly, from the perspectives of different characters. Robbe-Grillet creates an unsettling work that challenges ideas about subjectivity and objectivity, fiction and fact, and the entire process of storytelling. A haunting, disorienting, and brilliantly constructed novel, Djinn is the story of a young man who joins a clandestine organization under the command of an alluring, androgynous American girl named Djinn. His search for the meaning of his mission and for possible clues to the identity of the mysterious Djinn, becomes a quest for his own identity in an ever-shifting time-space continuum.

Thriller written and directed by Alain Robbe-Grillet. Alice (Anicée Alvina) and Nora (Olga Georges-Picot) experiment with bondage and creating human art together using various substances. But Alice becomes the chief suspect in a murder investigation when their flat is broken into and Nora is seemingly killed by the intruder with a pair of scissors while she is tied to the bed. Once questioned by the police, a judge and a priest, Alice is sent to a convent prison and interrogated on suspicion of being a witch. The judges may just be proved right as those inside the walls of the convent also begin to fall under the spell of Alice's charms.

Collection of erotic films by French director Alain Robbe-Grillet. 'The Immortal One' (1963) stars Jacques Doniol-Valcroze and Françoise Brion as a sad man and a beautiful woman who meet unexpectedly and persue a passionate affair. 'Trans-Europe Express' (1967) tells the story of a film director, Jean (Robbe-Grillet), his producer and his assistant as they ride the Trans-Europe Express train from Paris to Antwerp. In 'The Man Who Lies' (1968), Jean-Louis Trintignant stars as Boris, a man who is believed to have betrayed his country during World War II. After he is taken in by the family of a dead rebel, he witnesses the lesbian affair between the man's sister and a servant and must decide whether to continue down the path of deception or get back on the straight and narrow. 'Eden and After' (1970) is an erotic horror starring Catherine Jourdan and Lorraine Rainer as students who take part in a series of games in a quiet café. In 'N. Rolls the Dice' (1971), a young man who makes a living playing dice becomes haunted by the image of two women with short hair. 'Successive Slidings of Pleasure' (1974) examines the story of a young woman believed to be a witch. When her partner Nora (Olga Georges-Picot) is found dead, stabbed through the heart with a pair of scissors, she is incarcerated in a convent prison where her sexual fantasies are perceived as the devil's work.

Collection of erotic films by French director Alain Robbe-Grillet. 'The Immortal One' (1963) stars Jacques Doniol-Valcroze and Françoise Brion as a sad man and a beautiful woman who meet unexpectedly and persue a passionate affair. 'Trans-Europe Express' (1967) tells the story of a film director, Jean (Robbe-Grillet), his producer and his assistant as they ride the Trans-Europe Express train from Paris to Antwerp. In 'The Man Who Lies' (1968), Jean-Louis Trintignant stars as Boris, a man who is believed to have betrayed his country during World War II. After he is taken in by the family of a dead rebel, he witnesses the lesbian affair between the man's sister and a servant and must decide whether to continue down the path of deception or get back on the straight and narrow. 'Eden and After' (1970) is an erotic horror starring Catherine Jourdan and Lorraine Rainer as students who take part in a series of games in a quiet café. In 'N. Rolls the Dice' (1971), a young man who makes a living playing dice becomes haunted by the image of two women with short hair. 'Successive Slidings of Pleasure' (1974) examines the story of a young woman believed to be a witch. When her partner Nora (Olga Georges-Picot) is found dead, stabbed through the heart with a pair of scissors, she is incarcerated in a convent prison where her sexual fantasies are perceived as the devil's work.

A man tells a woman that they have met before – that they became lovers but then agreed to separate for a year. The year is now up, and he has come back for her. At first, she remembers nothing, but as he relates their past together, real or imaginary, snapshots of memory appear – and she begins to believe him. As more details begin to re-emerge from the woman’s mind, the reader is shunted backwards and forwards between the past and the present, the actual and the illusory, that which is seen and that which is only glimpsed and guessed at. The director Alain Resnais was already famous for films such as Hiroshima, Mon Amour when he asked Alain Robbe-Grillet – the author of several seminal novels, including Jealousy and The Voyeur, and the leader of the Nouveau Roman school – to write a script for him. The result was Last Year at Marienbad, a film that, as well as winning the Golden Lion at the 1961 Venice Film Festival, has enthralled the critics, fascinated the public and become one of the greatest cult classics of modern cinema.

Alain Robbe-Grillet has long been regarded as the chief spokesman for the controversial nouveau roman. This collection of brilliant short pieces introduces the reader to those techniques employed by Robbe-Grillet in his longer works. These intriguing, gemlike stories represent Robbe-Grillet's most accessible fiction.