Volodine's reputation has been growing over the past few years, with books coming out from Open Letter, Dalkey Archive Press, Dorothy, and the University of Nebraska. He won the Prix Médicis in 2014 for his latest novel, Terminus radieux, which is forthcoming from Open Letter. His lengthy essay in The New Inquiry about post-exoticism and his project—one in which he publishes numerous books under a plethora of pseudonyms, all connected in oblique and direct ways—generated a lot of social...
"The interconnected works of Volodine—think Faulkner, but after an apocalypse—constitute the most exciting project in contemporary French literature."—Maria Clementi That is what we had called post-exoticism. It was a construction connected to revolutionary shamanism and literature. . . . It was an interior construction, a withdrawal, a secret welcoming land, but also something offensive that participated in the plot of certain unarmed individuals against the...
"Irreducible to any single literary genre, the Volodinian cosmos is skillfully crafted, fusing elements of science fiction with magical realism and political commentary."– Music & Literature The most patently sci-fi work of Antoine Volodine's to be translated into English, Radiant Terminus takes place in a Tarkovskian landscape after the fall of the Second Soviet Union. Most of humanity has been destroyed thanks to a number of nuclear meltdowns, but a few communes remain,...
