Jean-Philippe Toussaint

First published in France in 1985, The Bathroom was Jean-Philippe Toussaint’s debut novel, and it heralded a new generation of innovative French literature. In this playful and perplexing book, we meet a young Parisian researcher who lives inside his bathroom. As he sits in his tub meditating on existence (and …

The amusingly odd protagonist and narrator of Jean-Philippe Toussaint's novel is an academic on sabbatical in Berlin to work on his book about Titian. With his research completed, all he has left to do is sit down and write. Unfortunately, he can't decide how to refer to his subject Titian, le Titien, Vecellio, Titian …

An immediate bestseller in France, Making Love is an original and daring retelling of a classic theme: the end of an affair. As much an exploration of setting and place as it is of the affair that comes apart in them, Making Love follows a couple’s final days together in Japan. Toussaint writes with an economy and …

From the author of Camera, a 2008 New York Times Editor s Choice, comes a novel of love and dislocation.

In this improbable love story, Toussaint creates a character who is obsessed with himself: how he does things and all the ways he might have done them, how he thinks, why he thinks the way that he thinks, how he might do or think otherwise. What happens? He takes driving lessons, goes grocery shopping, spends endless …