The French novelist Alain Robbe-Grillet (born 1922) achieved fame for his innovative techniques in writing fiction. Influential in avant-garde Paris intellectual circles, his controversial critical theories regarding the concept of the modern novel were...

Born in Brest, in Brittany, on 18 August 1922, Alain Robbe-Grillet, the most influential French writer of his generation, is the son of Gaston Robbe-Grillet, owner of a small manufacturing business (himself the son of a school-teacher) and of Yvonne Canu...

FOR a modern travel writer, William Dalrymple is a wild experimentalist. He writes not about voyages of self-discovery, but about foreign countries. His "City of Djinns" is about the past and present of Delhi; and, unlike much modern travel-writing, it is informative, learned...

In his introduction to Fantastic Tales: Visionary and Everyday, Italo Calvino notes a "triumphant resurgence" of the fantastic tale, offering the explanation that in such writings we recognize "the modern dimension of the fantastic." Like a historical mirror a reader luminously passes through,...