“While in part an ode to the obsessive absorption unrequited love can impose on one’s psyche, The Origin of the World more importantly stands as a meditation on love, life, sex, and death, and the hidden violence that lies in wait at the intersections of each. With poetic concision, Pierre Michon has created a story that is simultaneously a fabulistic, archetypal, and concrete expression of physical and emotional survival, steeped in need, the imaginary, and blood’s life force.”—Tom Bowden, Education Digest“Michon’s The Origin of the World is an astonishingly rich, mythic new direction in modern French narrative.”—Guy Davenport