When he comes into some money, Michel takes a leave of absence from his Civil Service job and embarks on a package tour to Thailand, where he meets Valerie. This leads to an attempt to set up a package-holiday company based on the idea of sexual tourism in the Third World.[...]
'Those who love life do not read. Nor do they go to the movies, actually. No matter what might be said, access to the artistic universe is more or less entirely the preserve of those who are a little fed up with the world.' In this prescient work, now with an introduction by Stephen King, Michel Hou[...]
Half-brothers Michel and Bruno have a mother in common but little else. Michel is a molecular biologist, a thinker and idealist, a man with no erotic life to speak of and little in the way of human society. Bruno, by contrast, is a libertine, though more in theory than in practice, his endless lust [...]
In this novel, Michel Houellebecq explores the hedonism of Lanzarote. Pam and Barbara are non-exclusive German lesbians, who can give rise to some interesting combinations. Will they succeed in seducing Rudi, the police inspector from Luxembourg?[...]
Artist Jed Martin emerges from a ten-year hiatus with good news. It has nothing to do with his broken boiler, the approach of another lamentably awkward Christmas dinner with his father or the memory of his doomed love affair with the beautiful Olga. It is that, for his new exhibition, he has secure[...]
Michel Houellebecq is France's most famous and controversial living novelist. Since his first novel in 1994, Houellebecq's work has been called pornographic, racist, sexist, Islamophobic, and vulgar. His caricature appeared on the cover of the French satirical weekly Charlie Hebdo on January 7, 2015[...]
The most celebrated and controversial French novelist of our time delivers a riveting masterpiece about art and money, love and friendship, and fathers and sons.
Jed Martin is an artist. His first photographs feature Michelin road maps, and global success arrives with his series on professions: [...]
An international literary phenomenon, The Elementary Particles is a frighteningly original novelâpart Marguerite Duras and part Bret Easton Ellis-that leaps headlong into the malaise of contemporary existence.
Bruno and Michel are half-brothers abandoned by their mother, an unabashed[...]
Who, among you, deserves eternal life? Daniel is a highly successful stand-up comedian who has made a career out of playing outrageously on the prejudices of his public. But at the beginning of the twenty-first century, he has begun to detest laughter in particular and mankind in general. Despite th[...]
Widely acknowledged as an important, if highly controversial, figure in contemporary literature, French novelist and poet Michel Houellebecq has elicited diverse critical responses. In this book, Carole Sweeney examines his novels as a response to the advance of neoliberalism into all areas of affec[...]
In his new work, Michel Houellebecq combines erotic provocation with a terrifying vision of a world teetering between satiety and fanaticism, to create one of the most shocking, hypnotic, and intelligent novels in years.
In his early forties, Michel Renault skims through his days with as little [...]
Michel Houellebecq is perhaps the single most successful and controversial of all contemporary novelists writing in French. Houellebecq has become a global publishing phenomenon: his books have been translated worldwide, three film adaptations of his work have been produced, and the author has bee[...]
Just thirty, with a well-paid job, no love life and a terrible attitude, the anti-hero of this grim, funny novel smokes four packs of cigarettes a day and writes weird animal stories in his spare time. A computer programmer by day, he is tolerably content, until he's packed off with a colleague - th[...]
Just thirty, with a well-paid job, no love life and a terrible attitude, the anti-hero of this grim, funny novel smokes four packs of cigarettes a day and writes weird animal stories in his spare time. A computer programmer by day, he is tolerably content, until he's packed off with a colleague -[...]
Bestselling novelist Michel Houellebecq, and bestselling philosopher Bernard-Henri Levy ('BHL'), are two of the most celebrated and controversial intellectual figures in France today. In Public Enemies they clash head on in an awe-inspiring, hilarious and revealing battle of the literary titans.[...]