Death On The Installment Plan

Cultural Writing. Fiction. New to SPD. Celine's first novel, Journey to the End of the Night and its sequel, Death on Credit, were a new kind of novel, frank about the author's thoughts and actions in a way that readers had never encountered, ultra-realistic, and full of incidents that could not possibly be true to life, characters that stretched the imagination in spite of their having obviously been drawn from life. In Death on Credit, Ferdinand Bardamu, Celine's alter ego, is a doctor in Paris treating the poor, who seldom pay him but who take every advantage of his availability. The action is not continuous but goes back in time to earlier memories and often moves into fantasy. This fascinating book by one of the greatest 20th-century novelists is an unforgettable experience for the reader. Translated and with an introduction by Ralph Manheim.

Second great novel by Louis-Ferdinand Céline, Death on credit, published in 1936, recounts the childhood of Bardamu of "journey to the edge of the night", published four years ago. After a prologue situating his present, a doctor in the thirties, the narrating hero, Ferdinand, remembers his younger days, in a middle-class environment, around 1900. He is an only son, raised in a Parisian passage between an educating, fine and intuitive grandmother, a sacrificial mother owner of a small store of lace and objects of curiosity and a violent and rascal father, employed in an insurance company. He grew awkwardly, constantly victim of the bitter reproaches of his parents, multiplies the learnings and the sentimental and professional failures, stays in an English college before seeing his destiny rock with the meeting of a wacky inventor, Leonardo da Vinci of the fumisterie scientist, to always live tragicomic adventures ... Text of the origins, marked by the seal of the maternal image, Death on credit is an initiatory journey, all in violence and emotion, where memories are accompanied by the miseries and revolts of childhood.

Death on the Installment Plan is a companion volume to Louis-Ferinand Céline's earlier novel Journey to the End of Night. Death on the Installment Plan is a companion volume to Louis-Ferdinand Céline’s earlier novel, Journey to the End of the Night. Published in rapid succession in the middle 1930s, these two books shocked European literature and world consciousness. Nominally fiction but more rightly called “creative confessions,” they told of the author’s childhood in excoriating Paris slums, of service in the mud wastes of World War I and African jungles. Mixing unmitigated despair with Gargantuan comedy, they also created a new style, in which invective and obscenity were laced with phrases of unforgettable poetry. Céline’s influence revolutionized the contemporary approach to fiction. Under a cloud for a period, his work is now acknowledged as the forerunner of today’s “black humor.”

In Guignol's Band, first published in France in 1943, Céline explores the horror of a disordered world.

When it was published in 1932, this revolutionary first fiction redefined the art of the novel with its black humor, its nihilism, and its irreverent, explosive writing style, and made Louis-Ferdinand Celine one of France's--and literature's--most important 20th-century writers. The picaresque adventures of Bardamu, the sarcastic and brilliant antihero of Journey to the End of the Night move from the battlefields of World War I (complete with buffoonish officers and cowardly soldiers), to French West Africa, the United States, and back to France in a style of prose that's lyrical, hallucinatory, and hilariously scathing toward nearly everybody and everything. Yet, beneath it all one can detect a gentle core of idealism.

An NYRB Classics Original Winner of the 2014 PEN Translation Prize Winner of the 2014 Read Russia Prize The stakes are wildly high in Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky’s fantastic and blackly comic philosophical fables, which abound in nested narratives and wild paradoxes. This new collection of eleven mind-bending and spellbinding tales includes some of Krzhizhanovsky’s most dazzling conceits: a provincial journalist who moves to Moscow finds his existence consumed by the autobiography of his room’s previous occupant; the fingers of a celebrated pianist’s right hand run away to spend a night alone on the city streets; a man’s lifelong quest to bite his own elbow inspires both a hugely popular circus act and a new refutation of Kant. Ordinary reality cracks open before our eyes in the pages of Autobiography of a Corpse, and the extraordinary spills out.