Written in Invisible Ink

Selected Stories

by Hervé Guibert

Translated by Jeffrey Zuckerman

$17.95 Paperback
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272 pp., 5 x 8 in,

Paperback
9781635901191
Published: May 19, 2020
Publisher: Semiotext(e)

$17.95

eBook
9781635901214
Published: May 19, 2020
Publisher: Semiotext(e)

$17.99

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Stories that map the writer's artistic development, written with candor, detachment, and passion.

Hervé Guibert published twenty-five books before dying of AIDS in 1991 at age 36. An originator of French "autofiction" of the 1990s, Guibert wrote with aggressive candor, detachment, and passion, mixing diary writing, memoir, and fiction. Best known for the series of books he wrote during the last years of his life, chronicling his coexistence with illness, he has been a powerful influence on many contemporary writers.

Written in Invisible Ink maps the writer's artistic development, from his earliest texts—fragmented stories of queer desire—to the unnervingly photorealistic descriptions in Vice and the autobiographical sojourns of Singular Adventures. Propaganda Death, his harsh, visceral debut, is included in its entirety. The volume concludes with a series of short, jewel-like stories composed at the end of his life. These anarchic and lyrical pieces are translated into English for the first time by Jeffrey Zuckerman.

From midnight encounters with strangers to tormented relationships with friends, from a blistering sequence written for Roland Barthes to a tender summoning of Michel Foucault upon his death, these texts lay bare Guibert's relentless obsessions in miniature.

Hervé Guibert (1955–1991) was a writer, a photography critic for Le Monde, a photographer, and a filmmaker. In 1984 he and Patrice Chereau were awarded a César for best screenplay for L'Homme Blessé. Shortly before his death from AIDS, he completed La Pudeur ou L'impudeur, a video work that chronicles the last days of his life.

To read Herve Guibert is to be love-stung, pricked, turned on, turned mad, haunted, beguiled. Guibert comes to us 'disguised as lover, standing halfway between declamation and secret' - a precarious, transitory, place, - deceptive, erotic, and true all at once. The range on display in this selection is astonishing.
Justin Torres, Author of We the Animals

Anonymity comes for us all soon enough, but it has encroached with mystifying speed upon the French writer Hervé Guibert, who died at 36 in 1991. His work has been strangely neglected in the Anglophone world, never mind its innovation and historical importance, its breathtaking indiscretion, tenderness and gore. How can an artist so original, so thrillingly indifferent to convention and the tyranny of good taste — let alone one so prescient — remain untranslated and unread?
Parul Sehgal
New York Times Book Review

Read the New York Times Book Review of 'Written in Invisible Ink,' a Book of the Times.