In this brilliant and sobering self-portrait, Edouard Lev? hides nothing from his readers, setting out his entire life, more or less at random, in a string of declarative sentences. "Autoportrait" is a physical, psychological, sexual, political, and philosophical triumph. Beyond "sincerity," Lev? works toward an objectivity so radical it could pass for crudeness, triviality, even banality: the author has stripped himself bare. With the force of a set of maxims or morals, Lev?'s prose seems at first to be an autobiography without sentiment, as though written by a machine -- until, through the accumulation of detail, and the author's dry, quizzical tone, we find ourselves disarmed, enthralled, and enraptured by nothing less than the perfect fiction... made entirely of facts.

In his second "novel," Newspaper, the acclaimed writer, photographer, and artist Edouard Leve made perhaps his most radical attempt to remove himself from his own work. Made up of fictionalized newspaper articles, arranged according to broad sections-some familiar, some not-Newspaper gives us a tour of the modern world as reported by its supposedly impartial chroniclers. Much of this "news" is quite sad, some is funny, but the whole serves as a gory parody of the way we have been taught to see our lives and the lives of our fellow human beings.