"Sheer pleasure." — Kirkus Reviews

"Sheer joy." — The New York Times

"Compared to his, most literary criticism is a genteel snooze"— Publishers Weekly

"Accessible to ordinary readers" — Small Press Book Review

The author of such celebrated novels as Rat Man of Paris, The Very Rich Hours of Count von Stauffenberg, and The Place in Flowers Where Pollen Rests has collected in this volume a quarter-century of essays, short and long, on modern and contemporary fiction from around the world. More than a mere collection, however, Sheer Fiction [Vol. 1] proposes an understanding of how language and "reality" interlock, and how the novel incorporates dimensions of imaginative, scientific, and philosophical consciousness. From Virginia Woolf's Orlando to the "magic realists" Andrade, Marquez, and Vargas Llosa; from the early French symbolism of Lautreamont to Blaise Centrars and Andre Schwarz-Bart; from Heinrich Boll and Christa Wolf to Samuel Beckett, Italo Calvino, G. V. Desani and Witold Gombrowicz; from the principal European languages, in short, Paul West uncovers surprising developments in the 20th-century novel.