Using the first letters of the keyboard as his guide, Eric Chevillard assembles here an eclectic medley of reflections and autobiographical experiences. Yet his attempt to subject content to the formal order of a French keyboard is twice undermined: through its translation into English, and by the nature of the texts themselves, which demonstrate insistently the power exercised by disorder over writing. Chevillard addresses important yet disparate topics: the experience of turning fifty years old, water closets, enemies, returns, and eyes. Complemented with drawings and engravings by the great French etcher Philippe Favier, QWERTY Invectives is a humorous little cahier that delights and enchants as Chevillard wanders along his keyboard.

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

The daring, mischievous micro-essays of award-winning French humorist Éric Chevillard, published in English for the first time   Éric Chevillard is one of France’s leading stylists and thinkers, an endlessly inventive observer of the everyday whose erudition and imagination honor the legacy of Swift and Voltaire—with some good-natured postmodern twists.   This ensemble of comic miniatures compiles reflections on chairs, stairs, stones, goldfish, objects found, strangers observed, scenarios imagined, reasonable premises taken to absurd conclusions, and vice versa. The author erects a mental museum for his favorite artworks, only to find it swarming with tourists. He attends a harpsichord recital and lets his passions flare. He happens upon a piece of paper and imagines its sordid back story. He wonders if Hegel’s cap, on display in Stuttgart, is really worth the trip.   Throughout, Chevillard’s powers of observation chime with his verbal acrobatics. His gaze—initially superficial, then deeply attentive, then practically sociopathic—manages time and again to defamiliarize the familiar with a coherent and charismatic charm. Daniel Levin Becker’s translation deftly renders the marvels of the original, and a foreword by Daniel Medin offers rich contextual commentary, making a vital wing of French literature and humor newly accessible in English.

"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 Meline, and soon he and his friends move in with her and her family. They are disappointed by the life they find at Meline'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.

Eric 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.