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Here, in one volume, are two remarkable novels by the chief spokesman of the so-called “new novel” which has caused such discussion and aroused such controversy “Jealousy,” said the New York Times Book Review “is a technical masterpiece, impeccably contrived.” “It is an exhilarating challenge,” said the San Francisco Chronicle.

Mathias, a timorous, ineffectual traveling salesman, returns to the island of his birth after a long absence Two days later, a thirteen-year-old girl is found drowned and mutilated With eerie precision, Robbe-Grillet puts us at the scene of the crime and takes us inside Mathias’s mind, artfully enlisting us as detective hot on the trail of a homocidal maniac. A triumphant display of the techniques of the “new novel,” The Voyeur achieves the impossible feat of keeping us utterly engrossed in the mystery of the child’s murder while systematically raising doubts about whether it really occurred.

Alain Robbe-Grillet is internationally hailed as the chief spokesman for the noveau roman and one of the great novelists of the twentieth century. The Erasers, his first novel, reads like a detective story but is primarily concerned with weaving and then probing a complete mixture of fact and fantasy. The narrative spans the twenty-four-hour period following a series of eight murders in eight days, presumably the work of a terrorist group. After the ninth murder, the investigation is turned over to a police agent, who may in fact be the assassin.

Both an engrossing mystery and a sinister deconstruction of reality, The Erasers intrigues and unnerves with equal force as it pull us along to its ominous conclusion.

These two novellas demonstrate why Alain Robbe-Grillet, the leading practitioner and theorist of the noveau roman, is one of the most discussed and controversial writers of the post-war era. In La Maison de Rendez-vous, the master of the "new novel" creates a world of crime, intrigue, and passion dominated by Lady Ava's mysterious Blue Villa. Set in Hong Kong, the novella unfolds over the course of one evening, but the events of that night recur repeatedly, from the perspectives of different characters. Robbe-Grillet creates an unsettling work that challenges ideas about subjectivity and objectivity, fiction and fact, and the entire process of storytelling. A haunting, disorienting, and brilliantly constructed novel, Djinn is the story of a young man who joins a clandestine organization under the command of an alluring, androgynous American girl named Djinn. His search for the meaning of his mission and for possible clues to the identity of the mysterious Djinn, becomes a quest for his own identity in an ever-shifting time-space continuum.