Journey to the End of the Night

When it was published in 1932, this then-shocking and revolutionary first fiction redefined the art of the novel with its black humor, its nihilism, and its irreverent, explosive writing style, and made Louis-Ferdinand Celine one of France's--and literature's--most important 20th-Century writers. The picaresque adventures of Bardamu, the sarcastic and brilliant antihero of Journey to the End of the Night move from the battlefields of World War I (complete with buffoonish officers and cowardly soldiers), to French West Africa, the United States, and back to France in a style of prose that's lyrical, hallucinatory, and hilariously scathing toward nearly everybody and everything. Yet, beneath it all one can detect a gentle core of idealism.

• Death on the Installment Plan (ND Paperbook)
• Ask the Dust
• Hunger
• Hunger (Penguin Twentieth-Century Classics)
• The Book of Disquiet (Penguin Classics)
• America Day by Day
• Ham on Rye: A Novel
• Factotum
• America
• Castle to Castle (French Literature)