Product Description

** Named a Best Book of 2007 by Ready Steady Book, an independent book review website, working in association with The Book Depository, which is devoted to reviewing the best books in literary fiction, poetry, history and philosophy.  

The first volume of Paths to Contemporary French Literature offered a critical panorama of over fifty French writers and poets. With this second volume, John Taylor—an American writer and critic who has lived in France for the past thirty years—continues this ambitious and critically acclaimed project.

Praised for his independence, curiosity, intimate knowledge of European literature, and his sharp reader’s eye, John Taylor is a writer-critic who is naturally skeptical of literary fashions, overnight reputations, and readymade academic categories. Charting the paths that have lead to the most serious and stimulating contemporary French writing, he casts light on several neglected postwar French authors, all the while highlighting genuine mentors and invigorating newcomers. Some names (Patrick Chamoiseau, Pascal Quignard, Jean-Philippe Toussaint, Jean Rouaud, Francis Ponge, Aimé Césaire, Marguerite Yourcenar, J. M. G. Le Cléio) may be familiar to the discriminating and inquisitive American reader, but their work is incisively re-evaluated here. The book also includes a moving remembrance of Nathalie Sarraute, and an evocation of the author’s meetings with Julien Gracq Other writers in this second volume are equally deserving authors whose work is highly respected by their peers in France yet little known in English-speaking countries. Taylor’s pioneering elucidations in this respect are particularly valuable. This second volume also examines a number of non-French, originally non-French-speaking writers (such as Ghérasim Luca, Petr Král, Armen Lubin, Vénus Ghoura-Khata, Piotr Rawic, as well as Samuel Beckett) who chose French as their literary idiom. Taylor is in a perfect position to understand their motivations, struggles, and goals. In a day and age when so little is known in English-speaking countries about foreign literature, and when so little is translated, the two volumes of Paths to Contemporary French Literature are absorbing guides for literary scholars, writers, poets, students of French culture, and readers of contemporary fiction and poetry.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #1030947 in Books
• Published on: 2007-01-05
• Original language: English
• Dimensions: 1.55 pounds
• Binding: Hardcover
• 381 pages

Review

"This is heavyweight literary criticism from an expert in the field. John Taylor is, among other things, a contributor to the Times Literary Supplement and wrote the section on France in the Oxford Guide to Contemporary Writing.... The book is intended to carry the voices of little-known or unknown French writers across the Channel-not simply their works, but their own interpretations of English-language texts with which we are more familiar.... Taylor's own writing is a reminder of the breadth of English, concise construction and the comic value of a well-timed French word.... Here is a real cultural challenge." --The Connexion, May 2009

"From Transaction, you can get the second volume of John Taylor's Paths to Contemporary French Literature; Taylor's short pieces on a huge range of writers are the literary equivalent of a superb travel guide." ---John Wilson, Books and Culture "For English readers, John Taylor's fascinating overview of Klossowski's oeuvre, in the second volume of his 'Paths to Contemporary French Literature.' His angle on the writer is more especially literary and situates him with respect to his peers: Louis-Ren des Forts, Samuel Beckett, Georges Bataille. Taylor's title is 'Meta-Eroticism and Simulacra.' "Meta-erotic"-now that's a perfect way of describing...Denise (Klossowski's wife, and a character in his novels)." --Ronald Klapka, remue.net

"I would like to use this opportunity to draw attention to an essential reference work, John Taylor's two splendid volumes, Paths to Contemporary French Literature volumes 1 and 2....In these well written, consistently instructive and often illuminating pages, Taylor discusses well over a hundred French writers, including many of my favourites: Sarraute, Des Forets, Duras, Antelme, Perec, Jabs, Marcel Cohen, Roland Barthes, Bonnefoy, Ponge, Deguy, Quignard, Paulhan, Rawic, Beckett, Emmanuel Bove. The long essays on Pascal Quignard and Michel Deguy are particularly insightful, and essential reading for the sympathetic newcomer seeking an introduction to these major writers." --Anthony Rudolf, ReadySteadyBook.com

"As a literary critic, John Taylor is considered to be one of the most important and knowledgeable 'explainers' of contemporary French literature to foreign readers." (Translated) --Maison des ?crivains et de la Littrature "In these well written, consistently instructive and often illuminating pages, Taylor discusses well over a hundred French writers, including many of my favorites: Sarraute, Des Forets, Duras, Antelme, Perec, Jabs, Marcel Cohen, Roland Barthes, Bonnefoy, Ponge, Deguy, Quignard, Paulhan, Rawic, Beckett, Emmanuel Bove. The long essays on Pascal Quignard and Michel Deguy are particularly insightful, and essential reading for the sympathetic newcomer seeking an introduction to these major writers." --Anthony Rudolf

"[A deeply informed, delightful, and provocative 'stroll' through the literature of postwar France."

—Erika Funkhouser

"This is critical writing that is satisfying at every single level."

—Richard Goodman

"[This work offers the English-speaking reader an original and poetic way to understand and appreciate French contemporary culture."

—Richard Stamelman  

“While Mr. Taylors’s work will be used as a research tool, a reference source and a classroom text, it can be equally well approached as a vast, non-fiction novel… Between the two volumes, over 100 authors are introduced …The subjects’ lives, souls and places in French literature are fully revealed…The degree of reading and analysis that goes into any one of these studies could comprise a decade’s labor for an ordinary scholar, but Mr. Taylor takes it in stride.”

–-Martin Abramson, Book/Mark

About the Author

John Taylor is the author of Paths to Contemporary French Literature (Volumes 1-3) and Into the Heart of European Poetry. He has written numerous books of stories, short prose, and poetry, including The Apocalypse Tapestries. He writes the “Poetry Today” column in the Antioch Review and has long been a regular contributor to the Times Literary Supplement. He has lived in France since 1977. In 2010, he received a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts for his project to translate Georges Perros’s Papiers collés.