Project for a Revolution in New York

by Alain Robbe-Grillet, Richard Howard (Translator)

Overview

Part prophecy and part erotic fantasy, this classic tale of otherworldly depravity features New York itself—or a foreigner's nightmare of New York—as its true protagonist. Set in the towers and tunnels of the quintessential American city, Alain Robbe-Grillet's novel turns this urban space into a maze where politics bleeds into perversion, revolution into sadism, activist into criminal, vice into art—and back again. Following the logic of a movie half-glimpsed through a haze of drugs and alcohol, Project for a Revolution in New York is a Sadean reverie that bears an alarming resemblance to the New York, and the United States, that have actually come into being.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781564788184
Publisher:	Deep Vellum Publishing
Publication date:	09/04/2012
Series:	French Literature
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	184
File size:	1 MB

About the Author

Following The Erasers (1953), his first novel, Alain Robbe-Grillet (1922–2008) quickly established himself as the chief spokesman for the nouveau roman movement. Along with his fiction, his essay collection For a New Novel and his screenplay for Alain Resnais’s Last Year at Marienbad have influenced countless artists across the world.

Richard Howard is the author of eleven books of poetry,
including Untitled Subjects, which won the Pulitzer Prize in 1970. He is the translator for more than 150 works from the French language. He received the American Book Award for his translation of Charles Baudelaire’s Les
Fleurs du Mal.

Editorial Reviews

“There is a universal principle at work [in Project] . . . I can describe it best as rhyme. Painters rhyme shapes and colors. Poets rhyme terminal syllables, sometimes moods. Robbe-Grillet rhymes events themselves—fits them inside or outside one another like Chinese boxes, like sounds heard in a whispering gallery . . . ””

Roger Shattuck - New York Times Book Review

"Robbe-Grillet introduced . . . a revolution in reading: in his works, there is no sense of a privileged text. No one, not even the author, has the last word, and nobody could, because there is no last word—or for that matter, first . . . What the author provides, with an extreme precision, an extreme beauty . . . are the elements of scenes. Stereotypes, archetypes, frozen images—it is the reader’s imagination that does the rest."

L'Express - Madeleine Chapsal

"There is a universal principle at work [in Project] . . . I can describe it best as rhyme. Painters rhyme shapes and colors. Poets rhyme terminal syllables, sometimes moods. Robbe-Grillet rhymes events themselves—fits them inside or outside one another like Chinese boxes, like sounds heard in a whispering gallery . . . "

New York Times Book Review - Roger Shattuck