Asero

(Paperback)

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FOR TRUE BELIEVERS IN THE POWER OF ART & LITERATURE: Asero expects much from its readers but returns their attention with revelatory insights into the power of art, poetry, and language. As it traipses through the great tropes of experimental literature, including an unforgettable section on the symbolist poet, Arthur Rimbaud, it awakens the mind and the senses. Asero is a delicious extravagance for the literate Francophile and fans of authors such as Paul Auster and William S. Burroughs, who lead their readers down rabbit holes to experience the ultimate philosophical fairy tale.

AN ENCHANTING WORK OF AUTOFICTION: Interviewers will find that Franois Dominique, who speaks English, is as fascinating as Aseros narrator. Like him, Dominique is an avid mushroom hunter, radical bibliophile, learned philologist, and practitioner of sances noires (sessions of sensory deprivation) meant to achieve a Rilkean or Shelleyesque state of utter dark.

EAGERLY AWAITED ENGLISH-LANGUAGE EDITION FROM DISTINGUISHED TRANSLATOR: Richard Sieburths work in translation has been recognized on the lists of numerous PEN, French-American Foundation, and Best Translated Book Award prize juries. He is also the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship in Translation and the Annual Award in Letters from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. A close friend of the author, he agreed to complete the draft first began in 1996 by the late Howard Limoli, and has delivered a translation long anticipated by American fans of this avant-garde tour de force, such as Lydia Davis and Mary Ann Caws, who have both endorsed Asero and Sieburths exceptional contribution to its English language debut.

Reviews

Big Other Book Award Finalist
World Literature Today Notable Translations of the Year selection

Fiercely original. Kirkus Reviews

Full of wonder. . . . Aseroe is a lyrical contemplation of how words affect reality. Foreword Reviews

[An] enigmatic and radiant book. Maurice Blanchot

This over-the-top, extraordinary novel, in its no less stupendous translation, begins with a mycological intimacy that brings to mind the great mushroom scenes of the film Phantom Thread. How not to be aroused by this whopping treat of verbal virtuosity Mary Ann Caws, author of The Modern Art Cookbook and Creative Gatherings: Meeting Places of Modernism

A singular novel. Aseros storyteller speaks from within the grasp of mysterious and urgent preoccupations. Yet his confident narration, rich in colorful, familiar detail, and sensitively and gracefully rendered into English by master translator Richard Sieburth, assures us of his obsessions importance to him and, within his brilliant and bizarrely convincing world, increasingly to us. Lydia Davis, author of Cant and Wont and Essays One

What a wonderful piece of writing! What an exhilarating adventure! What a madcap exploration of mushrooms, paintings, Rimbaud, the legend of Orpheus, and the mazes of a poets mind, in a jigsaw puzzle of a book that ultimately (like Alices Wonderland) makes absolute sense! Alberto Manguel, author of The Library at Night and Fabulous Monsters: Dracula, Alice, Superman, and Other Literary Friends

An immensely pleasurable read. Pascal Quignard, Prix Goncourt awardwinning author of The Roving Shadows

In this book oblivion is daylight. ric Vuillard, Prix Goncourt awardwinning author of The Order of the Day

A book filled to the gills with a veritable feast of literary ingredients. To read Asero is to experience a kind of inebriation as we drink in the intelligence and the talent of its author. Marie tienne, La Quinzaine Littraire

Ranging from the mysterious mushroom known by the name of Asero to Giorgiones painting The Tempest, while meditating on the millions made off the work of Rimbaud, [Asero] offers a series of astonishing and detailed variations on the theme of the figures of forgetfulness. Claire Devarieux, Libration

Author Bio

Franois Dominique is an acclaimed novelist, essayist, poet, and translator. He has received the Burgundy Prize for Literature and is the author of eight novels, including Asero (forthcoming from Bellevue Literary Press in September 2020) and Solne, winner of the Wepler Award and Prix littraire Charles Brisset. He has translated the poetry of Louis Zukofsky and Rainer Maria Rilke and is the cofounder of the publishing house Ulysses-Fin-de-Sicle. He has also taught law and political science at the University of Burgundy.

Richard Sieburth, emeritus professor of English, French, and comparative literature at New York University, is an essayist, editor, literary scholar, and award-winning translator working in several languages. His translations from the French include works by Grard de Nerval, Charles Baudelaire, Stphane Mallarm, Michel Leiris, Henri Michaux, and Antonin Artaud. His essays and translations have appeared in the New York Times Book Review, Times Literary Supplement, New York Review of Books, Paris Review, Bookforum, Harpers Magazine, Poetry, Conjunctions, and elsewhere.

Howard Limoli (19332013) was the translator of works by Marguerite Duras and of the poetry of Tristan Tzara. For thirty years he taught in the Foreign Language Department of Sonoma State University in California.