Novelist and literary theorist, playwright and university lecturer, short-story writer and critic: Gabriel Josipovici is all of these. His erudition is surpassed only by his sensitivity to language and artistic form, making him one of the leading experimentalists writing fiction in Britain today. Modernist and postmodernist writers such as Franz Kafka, Marcel Proust, T. S. Eliot, Alain Robbe-Grillet, and Claude Simon have deeply influenced him,but his work also reveals his fondness for Igor Stravinsky, Pablo Picasso, and Georges Braque, among those in other fields of art, as well as Roland Barthes, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Maurice Blanchot, and other philosophers and thinkers of this century. As his critical essays show, his knowledge extends well beyond this century, for he has written interesting and informed essays about Dante, Chaucer, Rabelais, and Hawthorne.

Gabriel David Josipovici was born on 8 October 1940, in Nice, France. His father, Jean, was of Rumanian-Jewish descent, and...