Posthumous Correspondence (Volume 1)

Nicolas-Edmé Restif de la Bretonne (1734-1806) produced over 180 books, totaling some 57,000 pages, many of them printed by his own hand, on almost every conceivable subject. Praised in Germany, he was mostly forgotten in France until being rediscovered by the Surrealists in the early 20th century. Two of his most important seminal works are being presented here for the first time in English in a four-volume edition. Restif gave free rein to his imagination in Posthumous Correspondence (first written in 1787-89; augmented in 1796, and finally published in 1802), presented as a sequence of letters between Monsieur de Fontlhète and his beloved wife Hortense. In this first volume, Fontlhète makes contact with Yfflasie and Clarendon, two discorporated souls and learns of their adventures in the afterlife; later, he acquires artificial wings, uses his new-found power to oppose evil and fight crime, taking on tyrants and warmongers, then gains the ability of exchanging identities by taking over other people’s bodies with his own soul.