Prehistoric Times

(Paperback)

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Eric Chevillard is a bright new talent in the French literary scene. His style, with its burlesque variations, accelerations and ruptures, takes the reader into a frightening and jubilatory delirium. In Prehistoric Times, Chevillard's characters are reminiscent of the inhabitants of Beckett's world: dreamers who in their savage and deductive folly try to modify reality. In an entirely original voice, Chevillard asks looming, luminous questions about who we really are.

Reviews

Prehistoric Times shows Chevillard at his best: off-kilter and linguistically dazzling, playful and acrobatic, quite mad but always entertainingand all impossibly captured by Alyson Waters' fluid and masterful translation. Brian Evenson, author of Windeye and Immobility

Chevillards book is a very profound contemplation on the nature of posterity; it may even be inferred that throughout Prehistoric Times Chevillard writes with an awareness that his own artistic production will be dwarfed within the great span of time against which all human beings must live out their brief existence. Jordan Anderson, The Quarterly Conversation

Praise for Chevillards Palafox:

Mix together one pinch of surrealism, one pinch of situationalism, stir in a large measure of poetry, quite a bit of talent and you will get a glittering novel of intelligence and humor . . . Jean-Claude Lebrun, Rvolution

Eric Chevillard involves his reader in a powerful meditation on evil, foolishness, and inhumanity lurking in the heart of man. Jean-Maurice de Montremy, Lire

The current American new fabulism could learn a great deal from this very amusing book and its willingness to take real narrative risks...Beautifully translated by Wyatt Mason, Palafox is a must for anyone interested in anti-realist fiction. Rain Taxi

Eric Chevillard involves his reader in a powerful meditation on evil, foolishness, and inhumanity lurking in the heart of man. Jean-Maurice de Montremy

Author Bio

Eric Chevillard is one of the most inventive authors writing in French today. His novels include On the Ceiling, The Crab Nebula, and Demolishing Nisard, all translated by Jordan Stump, and Palafox (Archipelago), translated by Wyatt Mason. Alyson Waters's translations include Albert Cossery's A Splendid Conspiracy and The Colors of Infamy, Vassilis Alexakis's Foreign Words, Rene Belletto's Coda, and - with Donald Nicholson-Smith - Yasmina Khadra's Cousin K. She lives in Brooklyn and teaches at Yale University and New York University.