Jean-Philippe Toussaint
Jean-Philippe Toussaint is the author of seven novels. His writing has been compared to the work of Samuel Beckett, Jacques Tati, the films of Jim Jarmusch, and even Charlie Chaplin.
Read Fourteen Questions for Jean-Philippe Toussaint on The Quarterly Conversation
For more information, visit his website:
http://www.jptoussaint.com/etats-unis.html
Reticence
In Jean-Philippe Toussaint's take on the detective novel, we find a man on vacation in a tiny village, where a writer named Biaggi appears to be keeping him under surveillance. To what end? Ah, but it's far more pleasant to enjoy the . . . [continued]
The Truth about Marie
Moving through a variety of locales and adventures, The Truth about Marie revisits the unnamed narrator of Toussaint's acclaimed Running Away, reporting on his now disintegrated relationship with the titular Marie.
Self-Portrait Abroad
In Self-Portrait Abroad, our narrator—a Belgian author much like Toussaint himself—travels the globe, finding the mundane blended everywhere with the exotic.
Running Away
A European man arrives in Shanghai, ostensibly on vacation, yet a small task given him by his Parisian girlfriend Marie starts a series of complications. There is a mysterious Chinese man and a manila envelope full of cash. Later, he meets a woman at...
Camera
In this improbable love story, Toussaint creates a character who is obsessed with himself: how he does things and all the ways he might have done them, how he thinks, why he thinks the way that he thinks, how he might do or think otherwise. What...
The Bathroom
First published in France in 1985, The Bathroom was Jean-Philippe Toussaint's debut novel, and it heralded a new generation of innovative French literature. In this playful and perplexing book, we meet a young Parisian researcher who lives...
Monsieur
Meet Monsieur, your hero, a successful young executive in Paris whose daily life you will follow in precise detail. He is nothing if not unremarkable. Meet his secretary, his nieces, his fiancée and her parents, his neighbor whose scientific reports...
Television
The amusingly odd protagonist and narrator of Jean-Philippe Toussaint's novel is an academic on sabbatical in Berlin to work on his book about Titian. With his research completed, all he has left to do is sit down and write. Unfortunately, he can't...
Contributions:
Best European Fiction 2010
Best European Fiction 2010 is the inaugural installment of what will become an annual anthology of stories from across Europe.
Context N°12
- Reading Douglas Woolf's Ya! & John-Juan
- Reading Dubravka Ugresic Through Six Selected Sentences
- Reading Louis Calaferte
- Reading Joaquim Maria Machado de Assis
- Reading Jean-Philippe Toussaint
Context N°22
- Reading Stanley Crawford's Log of the S.S. The Mrs Unguentine
- The Making of John Ashbery and James Schuyler’s A Nest of Ninnies
- Interview with Micheline Aharonian Marcom
- Reading Rikki Ducornet