The Posthumous Works of Thomas Pilaster – Eric Chevillard
The Posthumous Works of Thomas Pilaster by Eric Chevillard / Translated by Chris Clarke / 182-page paperback / ISBN 9781734976670 / Sublunary Editions / 2021
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Éric Chevillard is counted among the most inventive prose stylists writing in the French language. He has published more than twenty novels, along with several volumes based on his blog, L’Autofictif. Previous translations of his work into English include Prehistoric Times (tr. Alyson Waters, Archipelago), Palafox (tr. Wyatt Mason, Archipelago), The Crab Nebula (tr. Jordan Stump and Eleanor Hardin, Nebraska), Demolishing Nissard (tr. Jordan Stump, Dalkey), and On the Ceiling (tr. Jordan Stump, Nebraska).
The literary world owes a great debt of gratitude to the executors who, charged with burning the remaining papers of their authorial charges, refuse, instead publishing them for the fanatic and meddlesome among us. Collected here are the remaining unpublished works–diaries and drafts, aphorisms and ephemera–of the late Thomas Pilaster, compiled by Marc-Antoine Marson, a longtime friend and fellow writer with whom Pilaster maintained a healthy rivalry. With rough edges and glints of genius present in equal measure, scholars and lay-readers alike will treasure these curious texts–“So Many Seahorses,” “The Vander Sons Company,” and “Three Attempts at the Reintroduction of the Man-Eating Tiger Into Our Countryside,” to name a few–for generations to come.
