Return to Manure

Return to Manure is Federman's ninth novel written in English. On the road in Southern France and in the parallel movement of the novel, the displaced narrator "Federman" is in search of his past on a farm where he spent three years as an adolescent agricultural laborer during the German Occupation after Word War II. Both hilarious and bitter, this dialogical and self-reflexive road novel (narrative present) and coming-of-age novel (narrative past) fuses French and English; memory and imagination; narrator, author, and reader; and is brimming with shit and manure as well as death and fornication. The present new and definitive edition of the novel includes Federman's "Reflections on the Future of The Farm" and photos taken during the search for the farm in France.

"Wry, cantankerous and darkly hilarious . . . a lively exploration of the way memory both stimulates and frustrates the storytelling urge . . . merciless and deeply moving." -- Publishers Weekly

RAYMOND FEDERMAN (1928-2009) were many persons: Holocaust survivor and WWII orphan, farm worker, paratrooper in the US Army, Korean War veteran, interpreter in Tokyo, sporting ace (swimming, tennis, golf), jazz musician, black marketeer, gambler, bon vivant, inventor of surfiction, bilingual author, translator, teacher, renowned Samuel Beckett scholar, Distinguished Professor, and father. Federman was born in Paris, France, in 1928. When he was fourteen years old, his parents and two sisters were arrested during the 1942 roundup by the Nazis and sent to the Auschwitz concentration camp for extermination. The boy survived because his mother had pushed him into a closet for hiding. In different versions, and both in English and in French, Federman again and again told various parts of the life story of a man called "Federman," trying to decipher the gesture of his mother that saved his life. He received the American Book Award, and his books have been translated into 14 languages.

Invisible Starfall Books' RAYMOND FEDERMAN EDITION is a series of republications of the author's books in their definitive version, spiced up with first editions of unpublished and uncollected texts. Carefully proofread and with a new design, each book was produced in close cooperation with Simone Federman, the daughter and literary executor of Raymond Federman.