“Reading <i>Frail Riffs</i>, appearing in English nearly fifty years after its initial French publication, I realize how much our attraction to autobiography owes to Leiris . . . a quiet virtuoso of French prose.”—Alice Kaplan, <i>New York Review of Books</i><br /><br />“This is a brilliant translation of the final chapter in Leiris’s astonishing autobiography. Page after page of this work of unique self-documentation contains observations and revelations, especially about Leiris’s reactions to the violence and chaos of World War II. I couldn’t put it down.”—Marjorie Perloff, author of <i>Infrathin: An Experiment in Micropoetics</i><br /><br />“‘Divination, alibi, purification rite’: In the fourth and final volume of his incantatory self-exploration, <i>The Rules of the Game</i>, Michel Leiris shuffles the tarot cards of his life in the light of his approaching death. Tracking the surges, feints, and elaborations of this Surrealist quest romance, Sieburth has created a monument of English prose.”—Rosanna Warren, author of <i>Max Jacob: A Life in Art and Letters</i><br /><br />“The indispensable legacy of a man who believed that a poet has to pay with his own unhappiness for the blessings of his gift.”—Alberto Manguel, director, Center for Research into the History of Reading<br /><br />“<i>Frail Riffs</i> is a radical experiment in self-knowledge. Michel Leiris subverts virtually all the expectations built into the autobiographical genre in his performative making and unmaking of a self. The work’s lucid awareness of historical contingency, captured in Richard Sieburth’s nimble translation, speaks to our present uncertainty about where we are going, separately and together.”—James Clifford, author of <i>The Predicament of Culture</i><br /><br />