Born in 1924 in Paris, Michel Tournier studied philosophy and then became a journalist and a writer. He is the author of several novels, including Friday, The Four Wise Men, Gemini, and The Golden Droplet. Friday is also available in paperback from Johns Hopkins.

Engrossing, poetic, and profoundly eventful. Washington Post Book World The Ogre... is, quite simply, a great novel... [It] bears patently the marks of greatness. It relentlessly pushes individual idiosyncrasy to-and even beyond-the point of universality. It covers simultaneously the events inside one head and one continent. It uses documentary knowledge-minute and encyclopedic knowledge of photography, history, zoology, anthropometry, weaponry-to illustrate the otherwise undocumentable progress of a human obsession. New Yorker Barbara Bray's translation does justice to the original... Abel Tiffauges is as complex and dangerous in English as he is in French; his themes are eternal and disturbing. To follow his dark path is a magnificent experience. New York Times Book Review The Ogre is a very clever book in its belletristic way, and the translation reads very well... Tiffauges's obsessions-a cornucopia of the ocular, the cloacal, of celibacy, heraldry, therapies, wounds, beats, boys, and twins-are conveyed in an alliterative rhetoric of rare words and allusions. New York Review of Books 1972 Tournier's achievement rests in his remarkable blend of myth with realism. Newsweek