“Michon demonstrates the independence of voice that marks a true writer. . . . His supple prose, dappled with chiaroscuro effects, is used in straightforward chronicles. But his writing can at any time lift or lower into semi-hallucinatory effects that recall Arthur Rimbaud’s assaults on conventional perception.”—Roger Shattuck, New York Review of Books “Excellent news on the Michon translation ... Read morefront: an exceptional translator has, at last, appeared. . . . There is the velocity, the precision, the music, the compression, the singularity, the power. . . . [Michon’s] vision . . . appears with all its French force in Ann Jefferson’s exceptional transplantation.”—Wyatt Mason, New York Review of Books Longlisted for the 2015 Best Translated Book Award, fiction category, organized by Three Percent, a resource for international literature based at the University of Rochester Selected as a finalist of the French-American Foundation Translation Prize “[Michon] has become a member of that family known as the authors I admire, I trust, I want to read.”—Richard Howard “An astonishingly rich, mythic new direction in modern French narrative.”—Guy Davenport Show Less