Museum Visits

“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

“Éric Chevillard is a virtuoso of the short form . . . [whose] favored medium is the subversively illuminating anecdote. . . . In this kaleidoscope of absurdities, indulgent glimpses of others’ foibles come perilously close to reflections of our own inner lives.”—Tess Lewis, Arts Fuse

“[A] work of beautifully ren­dered miniature pieces. . . . [Chevillard’s] astonishing word­play and absurdist fantasies are really stand-ins for the inner torments of his soul.”—Elaine Margolin, World Literature Today

“Fun . . . well-crafted . . . engaging. . . . Museum Visits is an enjoyable collection.”—M. A.Orthofer, Complete Review

“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