Journey to the End of the Night

Louis-Ferdinand Céline

Céline's masterpiece - colloquial, polemic, hyper realistic - boils over with bitter humor and revulsion at society's idiocy and hypocrisy:  Journey to the End of the Night  is a literary symphony of cruelty and violence that hurtles through the improbable travels of the petit bourgeois (and largely autobiographical) antihero, Bardamu: from the trenches of WWI, to the African jungle, to New York, to the Ford Factory in Detroit, and finally to life in Paris as a failed doctor. Ralph Manheim's pitch-perfect translation captures Céline's savage energy, and a dynamic afterword by William T. Vollmann presents a fresh, furiously alive take on this astonishing novel.