Pierre Michon is an author of high acclaim in France and Europe. He was winner of the Prix France Culture in 1984 for his first book, Small Lives, and of the 1996 Prix de la Ville de Paris for his body of work. He lives in France. Wyatt Mason, a contributing writer for the New York Times Magazine and a contributing editor at Harper’s, has translated writing by Pierre Michon, Eric Chevillard, Michel de Montaigne, and Arthur Rimbaud. He teaches at Bard College.

“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