Praise for Jean Echenoz: "The most distinctive voice of his generation and the master magician of the contemporary French novel." —The Washington Post "Writing lives! [Echenoz's] words are full of grace and surprises, and he has the ability to throw relationships among them just off-center enough to make the images of people they convey seem all the more compelling and fresh." —The New York Times Book Review "Rarely has the difficult craft of storytelling been as well mastered." —Times Literary Supplement "A gentle tending to perversity links Echenoz to that other master of perverse detail, Vladimir Nabokov." —Los Angeles Times "[A] miniaturist who paints frescoes." —Journal du Dimanche "Jean Echenoz’s short short stories are quirky, playful and subversive: Admiral Nelson is always seasick, the statues in the Luxembourg Garden wear baffling expressions, a beautiful woman swims underwater to an assignation. Once again, Echenoz masterfully reinvents the world by creating the illusion that improbable events might in fact be probable." —Lily Tuck, author of The News from Paraguay "There is an echo of García Márquez in these simple yet enigmatic pages. Echenoz gives us a slim series of elegant, tightly written tales, achieving a simple kind of magic.” —Kirkus Reviews