"This is no mere literary game: what hides behind all this is a deep observation of the links between one's age and one's culture; a subtle reflection on the construction of canon, schools, and literary cults that structures our idea of great literature and thus closes our mind to a more dynamic, alternative, or revisionist view... It is also a very moving illustration of close reading as a sort of rewriting that goes beyond the specialist consensus, a political novel that dares not say its name, and one of the funniest books I've read in a long while." --Fran ois Monti, The Quarterly Conversation "A sort of mildly crazed Talmud, nestling in its pages the encyclopedia of the universe, with dozens of pages of marginal notes. A giant, meandering Joycean monster, demanding, poetic, and full of humor, a succession of folds, wrinkles, and furrows, in which figures such as Seneca and Punchinello make their appearance, as well as Euclid's calculations and Lavater's physiognomy, the shadow of Snow White's eighth dwarf, and Goethe on his deathbed." --Telerama "Situated halfway between Borges's labyrinthine library and the constraints of Oulipian manipulation, this extremely baroque autodidact, former jazz guitarist... has produced an impressive inter-textual machine, endowed with a tremendous power of invention." --Le Nouvel Observateur

Born in 1968, Pierre Senges is the author of fifteen works of fiction and essays, and nearly twenty radio plays. He has won numerous literary prizes, including the Prix SACD for New Radio Talent in 2007.