Museum Visits

Éric Chevillard (b. 1964) is an award-winning French writer. His many books include The Valiant Little Tailor, Prehistoric Times, and Palafox. Daniel Levin Becker is the author of Many Subtle Channels and What’s Good and a member of the Parisian literary collective OULIPO. Daniel Medin is professor of comparative literature and English at the American University of Paris and a director of its Center for Writers and Translators.

“In Museum Visits, Chevillard is at his best, spewing anxious observations of the everyday in shortform. . . . While deliriously funny, Chevillard’s short prose also palpitates from one anxious cogitation to another. . . . In his fluid translation, Daniel Levin Becker matches the minute tonal shifts. . . . The reader is elevated, planted in Chevillard’s unordinary perspective and given access to an inside joke told by an author of extraordinary wit.”—Bridget Peak, Asymptote“A spellbinding essay collection that is as funny as it is unclassifiable. The brief pieces offer winking, curmudgeonly commentary. . . . Chevillard’s humor is a mix of Seinfeldian observation and Monty Python–esque zaniness. . . . These beguiling and genre-defying pieces elucidate the strangeness of the everyday.”—Publishers Weekly“Museum Visits is a book of sheer exuberance, a delicious ten-course meal whipped up out of Chevillard’s fizzing, capacious, elegantly controlled delight in the world.”—Lauren Groff, author of The Vaster Wilds“These improbable, oblique, razor-sharp and often hilarious miniatures seem to be about nothing very much. Don’t be taken in by appearances. Chevillard’s gem-like pieces, superbly translated by Daniel Levin Becker, bring to life a whole world, and its gently squinting observer.”—David Bellos, author of Is that a Fish in Your Ear? Translation and the Meaning of Everything“Daniel Levin Becker is a magician, an innovator, an engineer: a virtuoso translator. I am in awe of what he has achieved here.”—Kate Briggs, author of This Little Art