This page contains both the 1988 and 1998 prefaces to "188 Tales to Settle".
Stormy, his life was erratic, both private and material, not to mention his uneven career: forty published books have not assured him the status of a successful author. He is said to be unclassifiable, undoubtedly because he was never limited to a single literary label. He could have remained a novelist, a playwright, a film screenwriter, or a pamphleteer columnist. But in reality he had, above all, a passion for short texts that will never leave him. This earned him his most demanding readers and recognition in a certain number of literary circles as being among Maupassant, Poe, Kafka, Gogol, Mérimée... Strange associations...
***
I have always hated prefaces or forewords. They often hide the real point and the prefaced texts always say more.
But this book in particular justifies, if not an explanation, at least an attempt to take stock of my career, the twists and turns of which risk leaving you perplexed - perplexity which can go as far as incomprehension or amazement in an enlightened science fiction lover, in fact, my first two S.-F. books date back to the beginnings of the Presence of the Future collection nos. 15 and 21, and we find myself thirty years later with these 188 tales under the number 474, and it is in vain that one would look for my name in the catalog of the collection according to the years between, during which I have only published two books elsewhere worthy of officially receiving the SCIENCE-FICTION stamp and visa.
This means that for the early S.F. cricles, at the beginning of the 1950s, I was an estimable earlycomer who had become a deserter, a traitor, a failure and, even more, an embittered person having sometimes disowned the dear cocoon S.F. he saw hatch. This is looking at things with a touching naivety. They didn't happen that simply, and they didn't happen with that infantile logic. My career, so to speak, has been much more tumultuous than this schema for intellectual comics; which proves that most of these admirers or detractors of my first steps in space subsequently lost sight of me, have never read my other books, believe me to have been drifting for years and have limited themselves to psychoanalyze through my columns in the Literary Magazine, often quite fierce, especially very casual, because I have always practiced the art of saying things without weighing my judgments to the quarter of a gram, having never taken up literary criticism very seriously.
That aside, it would be absurd to believe that I came to S.F. as a teenager still steeped in Jules Verne - barely out of the cozy nest of a literature degree and shyly surveying the abysses of literary creation. Stereotypical vision, but very far from the truth. A recognized dunce, useless in all school subjects, I never managed to pass my baccalaureate and I did not have to wonder whether or not I was going to have to stall in schooling since, in 1941, the war settled my case, the very banal one of a Jew destined to be hunted down who survived, by a series of miracles, from camps to escapes, from prison to the maquis, from desertion to escapes that saved by chance.
I came out of there unscathed, but very little predisposed to enter into science fiction as others are to becoming priests and monks. I had already been writing since I was seventeen, convulsively, oscillating anarchically between sentimentality and derision, the prose poem and the diary. From 1945, I passed without transition from the versatility of permanent risk to the banality of everyday life. At twenty-three years old, I was already a father and relegated to the depths of stupid and underpaid jobs. But that suited me, I felt drunk at having remained alive, I only thought about writing, any other work seemed stupid to me and I wanted to refuse any social responsibility, a principle that I have always applied throughout everything. From 1945 to 1953, I wrote hundreds of tales of black humor or fantasy, always very brief - two pages maximum - and at the same time five novels written in automatic writing at the rate of ten pages per day, always too long, haggard, feverish, tramplers, both realistic and full of surrealist visions, which, even if they were remade several times and if they were hated, admired, discussed by all the readers of the Nouvelle Revue Française, all returned to me in the end with the same response: REFUSED.
After seven years of this convict regime of odd jobs and free literature, the most accomplished of these almost unreadable novels, Le Délit, particularly Kafkanivorous, was published in an avant-garde collection by Plon*1, and at the same time Eric Losfeld published La Géométrie dans l'impossible, my fantastic, linear and morbid tales, which had several times almost been published by Gallimard. The first fight was over, the other was about to begin, the same one in fact because, published or not, I was never really accepted by a publisher.
All this to prove that in 1953 when I entered S.F circles, welcomed by Valérie Schmidt at the Presence of the Future, I was free from any galactic obsession, from any space speculation and, by approaching science fiction, I hardly had the feeling of returning to my homeland.
A poor reader since my earliest childhood - golden and surrounded by beautiful books, a great viewer of images, swallower of little burlesque films and cartoons, I had discovered, from 1945, that my true land of predilections was humor, terror, the absurd, lucid madness, derision, especially that of humorous cartoonists. Chas Addams, Tex Avery, Virgil Partch, the craziest of all, and many others were not only points of attention, but dazzling, brothers far more important in my eyes than any text by an admired writer. In any case, on the whole literature seemed to me the most important bastion of seriousness and I have only very exceptionally tolerated a book without unusualness, without humor, without a trace of revolt or contempt. Science fiction did not always escape seriousness and convoluted writing, but it nevertheless made ample use of modern absurdity, black humor, and aggressive fury. And above all, it was more striking in short form, which suited me perfectly. It therefore seemed to me an ideal springboard for the attack with armed words on what has always inspired me with the most disgust: man and his murderous enterprises, civilization and its deadly traps, the planet in general and a such sadistic nature, this universe of mass graves linked to cemeteries.
The magazine Fiction was only in its 4th edition in 1954 when I made my entry as a mini S.F star. in french, which wasn't very difficult since I was practically the only one. Furthermore, La Géométrie dans l'impossible had not been distributed in bookstores, but Alain Dorémieux had given it an enthusiastic welcome which served as an invisible launch for me.
My path from there is clear, even if it is more marginal than royal. I became the most regularly published author by Fiction, most surely hated by the part of the public who were haunted by S.F. pure and simple. Two years later, the collection Presence of the Future launches my first SF novel, La sortie est au fond de l'espace, which enjoyed considerable critical success. And my second collection of short stories Entre deux mondes incertains was greeted with even greater praise. No need to doubt it, I could have become a S.F. pro, it just let me go with the wind, all sails set, by taking advantage of my imaginative impulses which were undoubtedly to their peak. But precisely, these impulses are too strong and make me dizzy; the science fiction label seems to me restrictive, the constraints of a specialized world scare me. And above all, on the one hand, if space is infinite, my spatial imagination is not; on the other hand, my ideas end up going in circles, risk becoming tics, and the daily delusions of reality attract me more than those of space.
It is therefore in complete honesty with myself that I abandoned a genre where I found an audience to branch off towards uncertain genres, because they are unclassifiable, which for this reason caused me quite a few shipwrecks and very few improvements.
How to talk about this chaotic route, often led in the shadows with almost general incomprehension, this journey of multiple perils which took the dangerous turn in 1958 to end in 1986 with my personal Dictionary (Dictionnaire des idées reçues), a real cross-section of thirty-five years of literature, fantasies, bitterness, revolts, fear, passions and a spirit of derision? How to get the most out of it in a few pages? Perhaps, quite simply, in passing, in chronological order, from one significant event to another, by coldly summarizing things with the necessary hindsight.
1958
Carried away in a single trance which made me switch into a state of second-degree clairvoyance, I wrote the three hundred pages of The Employee with a joy in the invention never known, never broken down. With also, at the end of the journey, the certainty of having cobbled together a dynamite book never before imagined, a sort of literary bomb which should create an explosive breach in the highly pasteurized world of publishing. Yet, it was only the refusals from all publishers, from the Nouvelle Revue Française up to the Seuil, which exploded in my face. After my minor ascent in the literary galaxy thanks to Présence du Futur, I find myself rejected everywhere, pushed back to square one of the years 1946-1953. But, on condition of amputating a good half of it and reworking it word for word, Jérome Lindon agrees to publish L'Employé with Editions de Minuit and, apart from a few ecstatic reviews, this text, decidedly too insane for the French academic mindset, leaves critics silent, stunned, or bewildered.
1961
One of the great derailments of my career that I thought was assured for a long time: Jérome Lindon - or Robbe-Grillet who had already despised L'Employé - refuses Un jour ouvrable, a slow sour-fuzzy nightmare that my uncompromising admirers consider to be my finest book. Others generally deem it too oppressive to read. Stunned and disgusted, I gave it to Eric Losfeld, which amounts to indolent suicide, since he is recovering from bankruptcy and no longer has the slightest credit with booksellers or critics. As expected, the book finds neither reviews - with four exceptions, nor more than three hundred readers. But, out of gratitude, I would stay for a long time with Losfeld, a daring, intransigent publisher, operating only on admiration, but a deplorable businessman, which almost always goes hand in hand on this increasingly promotion-driven planet.
Almost at the same time, however, thanks to Christian Bourgois, Julliard published La Banlieue, a very elaborate text dating from 1950, refused by the Nouvelle Revue Française on the peremptory advice of Albert Camus, who was very allergic to my personal absurdity.
Paired with L'Employé, La Banlieue won the 1961 Black Humor prize at the same time as Topor and Bunuel. A nice trifecta, it must be said, but there was something broken in me after my dismissal from Editions de Minuit that took me many years to recover from. Not only did I feel that I would no longer write from then on, with my intoxication of tumbling from delirium to wandering down the paths of macabre humor, but I no longer felt the urgency to throw myself onto paper to complete a novel in a few months. My difficult entry into publishing hasn't changed my life at all, condemned to forced labor to survive from day to day. I languish as a mail and advertising text clerk in a miserable book club.
I find myself thinking that I only had a true readership when I was publishing under the science fiction label. But these regrets are not remorse: I know I distanced myself from that world due to a lack of inspiration, and I also know that with L'Employé and Un jour ouvrable, I created books that no one else could have written, whereas in the realm of sci-fi, a certain number of American authors probably beat me to the punch.
1965
I hadn't written anything in years because, for a change, my daily and material life had changed. I finally left the penitentiary offices and became the literary director of the Planète Anthologies, I gave columns to a number of newspapers, I went out a lot, I consumed a lot of whiskey even though I had never drank. I had become superficial, light, cynical, versatile, as if washed clean of the exacerbated life of a cursed writer, exclusively haunted by a single woman, frantic writing, scraping by day-to-day, and the absurd practical work of a tamed beaver. It was on commission that I wrote Toi, ma nuit, an authentic science fiction without a label which was also refused by Claude Tchou because it contained too much derision, then by Julliard because it was considered too pornographic, before being caught in flight by Eric Losfeld who proved that he had more flair because he made it one of the greatest successes of his entire catalog. This book, which only received a few reviews, was a muted legend, since it has still sold twenty years later, after being published in the 10/18 and Folio paperback collections. And in 1966, at Alain Resnais's request, I wrote the hundreds of pages of dialogue for Je t'aime, je t'aime, convinced I had a simple and strikingly impactful subject, set against an equally simple sci-fi backdrop: a one-minute trip into the past that derails, breaks down, and disrupts the character's life. It could have changed my life as a writer, put me in the shoes of a sought-after screenwriter, but the film fell in the midst of the excitement of May 68 and it went largely unnoticed, especially since it was scuttled at the Festival de Cannes.
In 1968, I practically stopped writing for myself, but I reached my financial peak by landing a regular humor column in France-Soir, overpaid for two typed pages every Saturday. Still with Planète, and as a literary advisor at Plexus, I earned so much that I voluntarily gave up my column at RTL and abandoned a monthly humor show on A2 because it bored me. I would lose everything at once in 1971.
1971
And curiously, having lost all my para-literary positions, which were more profitable than creative, I returned to literature, revisiting one of my lost universes: that of science fiction. This happened thanks to Gérard Klein, with Futures Without a Future in the Ailleurs et Demain collection. Klein selected my most striking short stories from the 50s and early 60s, but the currents and despair of my literary cross-country journey had sharpened my lucidity, refined my humor, and darkened the tragic: my unpublished story, End of the Century, which covers over a hundred pages, might be my best sci-fi text. Two years later, I put together an edition of 270 short stories, the complete edition, including unpublished works, of all my fantastic or black humor tales for Marabout, Icy Tales, in a classics collection directed by Jean-Baptiste Baronian. Short stories have a bad reputation in literary circles, but it seems that my brief texts have clandestinely won over more readers than my novels, as these two collections, although sold at a high price, will achieve a certain success by selling out their print runs in a very reasonable time frame.
1974
A year that will matter: I stopped writing with the help of Johnny Walker, as I had been doing for a few years, and I found in Francis Esménard at Albin Michel a publisher who would provide me with modest monthly payments to write. It was the first time I was considered a full-fledged writer, given a chance to finally live off my craft without chasing freelance gigs in newspapers or small practical jobs elsewhere. This new status achieved in my fifties also drastically changed my lifestyle. The aggressive Parisian intellectual – the kind I despise the most – gradually became a semi-homeless sailor. My love for sailing, rekindled in Arcachon, became an insidious obsession when I discovered in Trouville, with a very seaworthy dinghy, the fluctuating enchantments of an open sea. But it was in Villers that Francine, who dreamed of living by the sea before old age, found a quaint furnished apartment facing the waves at a very low price. The trap closed: I came to prefer this place, both grim and comforting, to the ordinary one where I had always written and lived in Paris. With the assurance of a salary, I reduced my expenses and raised the sails for six months a year, sometimes even more. I abandoned all journalistic activities.
Freed from my urban worries, with only a dinghy, a Solex, and a typewriter as my possessions, I found an exhilaration in writing mixed with a peculiar physical vitality as I turned fifty. In eight years, I wrote ten books there, which eventually overburdened my publisher, the critics, the booksellers, and the potential customer to the point that I ultimately found myself stranded on the very sand I had sought.
1975
I started with Albin Michel with a pamphlet which haunted me, repressed because not requested, for years. A Open letter to Earthlings where the child lost in a game of an adult that he never understood and that he always found sordid, expressed his anger, his contempt, his panic in the face of the absurd civilization of the Earthling. This racist essay – targeting Homo sapiens, preferably white – was only moderately liked in a collection reserved for authors generally better brought up in the dull indignation of the reactions.
But I was about to pull off an unexpected coup a year later. I had never succeeded in delivering a novel that would burst forth in a concert of praise from the press, radio, television, and the public. It had been almost ten years since I had thought about writing a novel when I decided, with the utmost coldness, to turn a rejected film script into a novel because I had no other ideas in mind and Francis Esménard was asking for a novel. Sophie, la Mer, la Nuit, unanimously taken as a 'heart-wrenching' love story, was in reality a pure science fiction novel on the most classic theme: the detailed description of a gentle and fascinating creature from elsewhere. But the words "space", "elsewhere", "other world", "extraterrestrial" were never mentioned, and this book would have been a true bestseller, surpassing fifty thousand copies if the commercial department hadn't made a beginner's blunder: miscalculating their move, they found themselves completely out of stock the day before four TV shows in one week, including an Apostrophes, of course. The books didn't arrive at the bookstores until fifteen days later, which might as well have been in the 21st century. A harsh lesson: I had only managed to convince the press and readers with my most traditional book, the one I had written without passion and without even really believing in it.
1976
And indeed, I regained my intoxication with writing on the brink of a trance-like state, and from there, things simplified, gently sloping towards failure. The Albin Michel label suited an almost classic novel like Sophie, the Sea, and the Night, but it was much less fitting for the books I wrote in the following years: Le Navigateur, Agathe et Béatrice, Suite pour Eveline, all nearly as delirious as L'Employé, oscillating between the burlesque and eroticism, derision and fantasy, unclassifiable and disheveled texts that gradually took me from 30,000 copies to 6,000. And, in a twist of fate, I marked my most obvious failure by trying to write a tailored bestseller, L'Anonyme, which only found 4,000 readers.
I paid dearly for this failure; it cost me the rejection of my Dictionary of Reviewed Ideas and the irreplaceable loss of a friendly editor who had loved and helped me for nine years, a unique event in my personal annals.
1984
For the first time in my career, which has been rich with nosedives, I find myself truly stunned, knocked out. I have forty books behind me, and far from the waves that wash everything away, I recover on the pavement with this Personal Dictionary, a monumental contraption conceived like the Petit Larousse*2, made of scraps written over the years since 1947. It was rejected by several publishers eager for profitable hits, all frightened by the cost of this risky venture in terms of return but very clearly ruinous in terms of production.
And to avoid sinking into desperate discouragement, I tirelessly go over my definitions, honing them, reducing them, sometimes rewriting them four or five times, and I worked on them with the same stubbornness—drowned in whisky—until the day this book went into production. One day, it fascinated Yves-Marie Maquet, deputy to Pierre Marchand at Gallimard; he mentioned it to Gérard Bourgadier, director of Éditions Denoël, who felt the same passion and decided to undertake this difficult and costly venture.
1987
The dictionary has been published for two years and it is certain that this adventure left me exhausted, breathless. I no longer felt the slightest desire to tackle a novel, I no longer even thought about finding a subject. I had written too much, especially too many confessional, neurotic, immodest novels which came out of my subconscious with such obviousness, with the intoxication of letting off steam.
It has been two years since I stopped drinking, and I had already quit smoking six months before that. This left me incapable, for months, of looking at a blank page or a typewriter. I had never written a line without having a cigarette or a cigarillo within reach. I slowed down, lying in wait, not asleep fortunately. And without alcohol — which tied me to the frivolity of reality — I regained that gray, atonal lucidity, that feeling of coming from nowhere and understanding nothing of the world's foolish madness.
Ideally, I would have wanted to keep tinkering with my dictionary, with modest monthly payments and the guarantee of a future edition whenever I desired. That's why I was happy to publish my Pensées, darker than ever, with Cherche-Midi, a publisher exclusively haunted by humor in a world where this vital commodity is becoming so rare that one day it will end up being prohibited by law.
And it is obviously for the same reasons, with the same perspective, that one day I thought of retracing my steps, back to the Presence of the Future*3 collection which had been home to my thirty-five year old self, where I proposed a challenge to Jacques Chambon: a collection of more than a hundred short stories, each two or three pages at most. Dark, cold, absurd tales, but haunted by what, over the years, has increasingly occupied my mind: my nausea of death, my horror at what humans are doing to their planet and their technocretinized*4 civilization, my ever-growing sense of the ridiculous, my hatred of the promotional neurosis that has so changed life since the 70s, my contempt for trivial ambitions, and my certainty of the futility of everything, whether in success or failure. This mindset, sharpened by my professional experience and my refusal to write in an unrestrained manner, gave me a real need to write these vengeful tales and nothing else. Some were born from brief notes jotted down over the years; most were imagined over the course of recent years and are almost all unpublished. I hoped to write at least a hundred; I was more inspired than expected because I wrote more than two hundred and kept 188. The title "Contes à régler" had always seemed obvious to me, as clear as my obsessions.
And it is perhaps to Topor that we must leave the final word, by reporting the words of my old accomplice who wanted to personally illustrate this book, an extremely rare event in a pocket collection: “I have always wondered why you were so keen to fight on the terrain of the novel where you have hundreds of rivals more skillful than you, whereas on the course of the brief text, you are without competitors."
Was Topor right or wrong? This is what we will perhaps learn from the pages which follow, and justify this finally completed preface.
— JACQUES STERNBERG
*1 - [Editor's Note: A small French publisher.]
*2 - [Editor's Note: A well-known french dictionary, though Sternberg's writing of a "personal dictionary" are more reminiscent of Flaubert, who wrote the first Dictionary of Received Ideas.]
- [Editor's Note: A yearly science fiction collective of which Sternberg occasionally participated. Sternberg would contribute this book, 188 Contes, to the collection in his first addition in thirty years.]
- [Editor's Note: "Technocretinized", a word seemingly invented by Sternberg combining "technocratized" with "cretin". Original french: "technocrétinisée".]
***
These "188 tales to settle" remain to me a shocking book in my fluctuating personal journey, a landmark one as well. An exhilarating story in 1988, sadly tinged with tragedy in 1998. The first drafts of the book go back a few years when, in 1984, my personal dictionary was refused by Albin Michel*1 that I had always been working on, over the years, following my ideas. I found myself really stunned for the first time in my career, although it was full of brutal descents, especially since Francis Esménard*2 believed in me and had paid me monthly for my novels, which were all published, which gave me a living, between my dinghy and my old typewriter, the best years of my life.
Supported by Gallimard, the dictionary was published by Denoël*3. But this adventure left me exhausted, breathless. I no longer felt the slightest desire to tackle a novel, I no longer even thought about finding a subject. I had written too much, especially too many confessional, neurotic, immodest novels which came out of my subconscious with such obviousness, with the intoxication of letting off steam.
Having stopped drinking and smoking almost at the same time, I was left for many months unable to look at a sheet of paper or a typewriter. In fact, I had never written a line without having a cigarillo within reach. I felt slowed down, hidden inside myself, on the back burner, yet fortunately not asleep. And above all, little by little, I was deprived of alcohol - which had prior helped link me to the futility of reality, to fly from the macabre. I found this gray, atonal lucidity, nourished by fear and sarcasm, a sensation of coming from nowhere and to have never understood anything about the idiotic madness of the world or, moreover, the aberrations of my everyday life. It was in this somewhat somnambulistic state that I thought of retracing my lost steps, towards the “Presence of the Future”*4 collection which had been home to my thirty-five year old self, where I'd suffered the inaugural inconveniences in 1957 - between Brown, Sheckley and Matheson, my idols - a science fiction devoid of any scientism, any deep reflection and exclusively nourished by macabre humor, fantasy, terror, absurdity and derision. Which did not spare “real” science fiction.
While I was hated by a lot of hard-core science-fiction fanatics, Jacques Chambon, who ruled "Presence of the Future" with an iron fist, appreciated my acerbic vision of things, especially when it was expressed in brief journeys. As if struck by a brutally obvious fact, I went to see him and I proposed to him, without asking for any advance, a challenge: to cobble together a collection of more than a hundred short tales, of one or two pages maximum. I wrote more than two hundred, we removed barely fifteen and the whole thing delighted Chambon, who was rarely easy to convince.
But these tales marked my return to the ultra-brief, my true homeland, after an absence of twenty-five years which had pushed me to devote myself exclusively to the novel, a more commercial genre - it seems - where I easily lose my mind, hampered by my allergy to the common practice of cutting, reworking my text, chiseling it and garnishing it with all the classic ingredients - psychology especially - which seduce the "cultured" reader. This is how my tales were written in the rediscovered anger, long repressed, devoid of any additives, which gave me on the seaside out of season*5 a frenzy to let myself drift into my darkest fantasies, coldly written, reduced to the harshly concentrated essentials: my nausea of death, my horror of what humans do to their planet and their technocretinized*6 civilization, my predilection for sidereal slippages and galactic excursions that go wrong, my hatred of the promotional neurosis which has perverted everything since the 80s, my certainty of the fatal uselessness of everything, whether in success or failure, and so on... The publication in 1988 of "188 tales to settle" had the effect of finding myself, of going back to when my craziest ideas were jostling at the gate, implacable, obvious, easy to express with maximum efficiency in very few words. And Roland Topor, to whom I had unreserved friendship and admiration for thirty-eight years - I had discovered him in fact from his first drawings - took pleasure in illustrating this book even though he had already executed many virulent compositions for my Frozen Tales published in 1974 by Marabout and my Dictionary of Reviewed Ideas*1 picked up by Denoël in 1985. I have remained a Denoël author and have only published collections of tales, always with superb covers signed Topor. At least one of which, Sleeping Stories Without You*7, had such striking power and poetic indecency that it must have convinced at least 60% of readers to buy this book. And Topor never spoke to me about copyright.
He wanted to point out the fact that he was doing this because he liked stories in general and mine in particular. The proof: he never asked to design the cover of one of my novels: he liked them less.
And now, ten years after the 1988 edition, these Tales to be Settled are reproduced in the Folio*8, the only real consecration in my eyes - and this happy information coincides within a few days of the most frightening news: the brutal death of Roland Topor which I learned of by a few words by telephone, when I had had lunch with him that day. I had seen him a week before, talkative, very fit and never, in any case, could I have imagined a man of this caliber suddenly removed from this world, he who had such creative force, such obvious genius, such bulimia to live and wade in an imagination to which he was the only one to possess the magic keys.
I could possibly whine and tell myself that the illustrations of Roland Topor of 1988 are a modest tribute that I can offer to his admirers. But that's not the case. Seeing the illustrations posthumously makes me puke. There are in the world - because Topor has been exhibited almost everywhere and often sold more abroad than in France - thousands of drawings by Topor which will fascinate or shock art lovers, but he will no longer be there, forever absent, a frightening counterpoint to the exceptional presence he had during his lifetime.
On this point, as among other more futile ones, we shared an obsessive fear: how could we console ourselves for having talent and fame, love and money when we lived with the awareness that we should have everything abandoned one day, inevitably? I knew Roland when he was only twenty years old, when he was still unknown, poor, and anxious, and he never changed one iota when he became famous, rich, and always anxious. He knew he was brilliant, but took no consolation from it. Because above all he felt fragile. Mortal. Topor was an exemplary mortal: frighteningly aware of the horror of an unavoidable end and triumphantly, insolently alive in an overflow of vitality to forget this loathsome condition as best as possible. So, as not to derail into an equally useless metaphysics, I let myself daydream and see Roland again, delighted to give me the drawings of the Tales to sort out and to say to me, both tenderly and mockingly: “I have always wondered why you were so keen to fight on the terrain of the novel where you have hundreds of rivals more skillful than you, whereas in the medium of the brief text, you are without competitors."
Because you, Roland, were much smarter than me.
I couldn't have answered you anything else.
— J. S.
*1 - [Editor's Note: This section refers to Sternberg's novel "Dictionnaire des idées reçues" ("Dictionary of Reviewed Ideas", no relation to his 1973 book "The Devil's Dictionary") being turned down by the publisher Albin Michel.]
*2 - [Editor's Note: Francis Esménard was chairman of the board at Albin Michel.]
*3 - [Editor's Note: Gallimard, a leading french publisher, owns the smaller publisher Denoël, which specializes in fiction.]
*4 - [Editor's Note: A yearly science fiction collective of which Sternberg occasionally participated. Sternberg would contribute this book, 188 Contes, to the collection in his first addition in thirty years.]
*5 - [Editor's Note: "On the seaside out of season" refers the beach during the fall, which is much less crowded then in the summer, offering solace for writing. Sternberg, a lover of yachting, wrote frequently about the sea, notably in "Sophie, la mer et la nuit".]
*6 - [Editor's Note: "Technocretinized", a word seemingly invented by Sternberg combining "technocratized" with "cretin". Original french: "technocrétinisée".]
*7 - [Editor's Note: "Histoires a dormir sans vous", found here. The stories in that book will be translated and posted soon! - 7-16-2024 ([[[) ]
*8 - [Editor's Note: A catalog produced by Gallimard recognizing literature and authors considered "exceptional" by the publisher.]