Alain Robbe-Grillet - Novels, Short Stories and Essays (14 books)

ALAIN ROBBE-GRILLET (1922 - 2008) was a French writer and filmmaker. Along with Nathalie Sarraute, Michel Butor and Claude Simon, he was one of the figures most associated with the controversial Nouveau Roman (new novel) trend that emerged in the 1950s. Though varied in age, personality, and style, they shared certain preoccupations, chiefly a questioning of the old and the search for a new form of récit—narrative.

Robbe-Grillet claimed to write novels for his time, especially attentive "to the ties that exist between objects, gestures, and situations, avoiding all psychological and ideological 'commentary' on the actions of the characters" (FOR A NEW NOVEL [1963]). His world is neither meaningful nor absurd; it merely exists. Omnipresent is the object—hard, polished, with only the measurable characteristics of pounds, inches, and wavelengths of reflected light. It overshadows and eliminates plot and character. The story is composed of recurring images, either actually recorded by an objective eye or drawn from reminiscences and dreams.

If his fiction, with its timetables, careful inventories of things, and reports on arrivals and departures, owes anything to the traditional novel, it is to the detective story. His first published work, THE ERASERS (1953), superficially resembles a detective novel, but contains within it a deeper structure based on the tale of Oedipus: the detective is seeking the assassin in a murder that has not yet occurred, only to discover that it is his destiny to become that assassin. THE VOYEUR (1955) deals with the murder of a young girl by a passing stranger. His third and most famous novel, JEALOUSY (1957), in which a jealous husband views the actions of his wife and her suspected lover through a louvre shutter (jalousie), was enthusiastically reviewed by Roland Barthes, already one of the most serious and influential voices in Parisian literary circles. PROJECT FOR A REVOLUTION IN NEW YORK (1970) is a classic tale of otherworldly depravity set in the towers and tunnels of the quintessential American city, turning the urban space into a maze where politics bleeds into perversion, revolution into sadism, activist into criminal, vice into art—and back again.

Also included here is SNAPSHOTS (1962), a series of intriguing, gemlike short stories represent his most accessible fiction and introduce the reader to those techniques employed by Robbe-Grillet in his longer works. FOR A NEW NOVEL (1963) is a collection of previously-published theoretical writings concerning the novel.


The following books are in ePUB format unless otherwise noted:

* Erasers, The (Grove Press, 1964). Richard Howard, trans.
* Erotic Dream Machine: Interviews with Robbe-Grillet (Southern Illinois, 1992) -- PDF
* For a New Novel: Essays on Fiction (Grove, 1965). Richard Howard, trans. -- PDF
* Jealousy / In The Labyrinth (Grove Press, 1965). Richard Howard, trans.
* La Maison de Rendez-Vous / Djinn (Grove, 1987). Richard Howard / Y. Lenard, trans.
* Project for a Revolution in New York (Dalkey Archive, 2012). Richard Howard, trans.
* Recollections of the Golden Triangle (Grove, 1986). J.A. Underwood, trans.
* Repetition (Grove, 2003). Richard Howard, trans.
* Snapshots (Northwestern, 1986). Bruce Morrissette, trans. -- PDF
* Target, The [with Jasper Johns] (Fairleigh Dickinson, 2006). Ben Stoltzfus, trans. -- PDF
* Topology of a Phantom City (Grove, 1977). J.A. Underwood, trans. -- ePUB + PDF
* Voyeur, The (Grove Press, 1986). Richard Howard, trans.

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