French Fiction Today focuses on the French novel in the twenty-first century, examining a series of works that are exemplary of broader currents in the genre. Each of these texts wagers insistently upon our willingness to speculate about literature and its uses, in an age when the value of literature is no longer taken as axiomatic. Each of these texts may be thought of as a critical novel, a form that calls upon us to engage with it in a critical manner, promising that meaning will arise in the articulation of writing and reading. Each of these authors participates in a debate about what the novel is as a cultural form in our present-and about what it may become, in a future that begins right now.

For seventeen years, Narcisse Dieze, chronic sufferer of a mysterious condition called "cerebral rheumatism"; has lived in the protective confines of a psychiatric hospital. There he has been attended by a contingent of nurses, for whom he has obligingly fathered somewhere between thirty-five and one hundred seventy-one children. (No one knows the exact number.) But the doctors abruptly decide that he is cured and prod him to reenter the outside world. Narcisse is floored, yet he gradually summons the will to try. What follows is an account of this naive and timid patient's adventures in the realm of the so-called sane. An endearing misfit in the tradition of Walter Mitty and Forrest Gump, Narcisse is destined to totter precariously on the highwire of his existence. Will we see him fall? A quirky fable that pokes holes in the accepted mental health verities and pleads for a touch of madness. With an introduction by Warren Motte.

Mirror Gazing is a book about reading and looking, about what people seek when they read, and about what stares back at them from the printed page. It is an archival project, based on a wealth of material collected daily by celebrated critic Warren F. Motte over thirty-five years and squirreled away for some eventual winter. It is also a love letter, a confession, a tale of deep obsession, and a cry for help addressed to anyone who takes literature seriously. "At heart, this is not just a book about mirror scenes, interesting as they are- and they are interesting. It's also a look at passion, at collection, at personal taxonomies and the game of creating order from disorder (do we ever win that game?). It's about how we read and why we read. And it's about the Delphic maxim, "Know thyself." Motte explores how characters look for (or suddenly catch) themselves in mirrors, as well as how (or whether) the act of writing is a reflection, distorted or true, of writers themselves."- Julie Larios, Numero Cinq "I believe (and I'm choosing my words carefully) that this is the most extraordinary book about reading I have ever read" - Jacques Jouet "Wonderfully luminous, entertaining, thought-provoking, and wide-ranging...an essential book" - Gerald Prince "Motte has collected around ten thousand mirror scenes from roughly 1,500 books. This, in and of itself, is noteworthy, but the book is not simply a reprinting of quotes from various books. It is a deeply considered analysis of what it actually means to look into a mirror. For the serious reader, this book will serve as a trip through your reading past. I was reminded-somewhat nostalgically-of much of the literature that has defined the early part of my adult life. From Nabokov to Salinger to Rilke to Calvino, the book makes its way into just about every corner of American and European literature." - Nancy Smith, YourImpossibleVoice

Marcel Benabou is quick to acknowledge that his own difficulty in writing has plenty of company. Words stick and syntax is stubborn, meaning slips and synonyms cluster. A blank page taunts and a full one accuses. Benabou knows the heroic joy of depriving critics of victims, the kindness of sparing publishers decisions, and the public charity of leaving more room in bookstore displays. "Why I Have Not Written Any of My Books" (Pourquoi je n'ai ecrit aucun de mes livres) provides both a respectful litany of writers' fears and a dismissal of the alibis offered to excuse them.

This is an amazing anthology of writings by members of the group known a Oulipo (Ouvroir de litterature potentiale), comprised of Italo Calvino, Harry Mathews, Georges Petec, Jacques Roubaud, Raymond Queneau, and others. Rather than inspiration, rather than experience, rather than self-expression, the Oulipians view imaginative writing as an exercise dominated by the method of "constrains". A major contribution to literary theory and an indispensable guide to an approach to writing that has yet to make its impact on the United States.

Small Worlds examines the minimalist trend in French writing, from the early 1980s to the present. Warren Motte first considers the practice of minimalist in other media, such as the plastic arts and music, and then proposes a theoretical model of minimalist literature. Subsequent chapters are devoted to the work of a variety of contemporary French writers and a diversity of literary genres.

In his discussion of minimalism, Motte considers smallness and simplicity, a reduction of means (and the resulting amplification of effect), immediacy, directness, clarity, repetition, symmetry, and playfulness. He argues that economy of expression offers writers a way of renovating traditional literary forms and allows them to represent human experience more directly.

Motte provides close readings of novels by distinguished contemporary French writers, including Edmond Jabes, Annie Ernaux, Herve Guibert, Marie Redonnet, Jean Echenoz, Olivier Targowla, and Emmanuele Bernheim, demonstrating that however diverse their work may otherwise be, they have all exploited the principle of formal economy in their writing.

Warren Motte is a professor of French at the University of Colorado, Boulder. Playtexts: Ludics in Contemporary Literature (Nebraska 1995) is his most recent book.