Celine's revulsion at what he considered the idiocy and hypocrisy of society bursts from nearly every page of this novel. Written in urgent and explosive language, Journey to the End of the Night is a literary symphony of violence and cruelty. The story of the improbable travels of the petit-bourgeois (and largely autobiographical) antihero, Bardamu-from the trenches of World War I, to the African jungle, to New York and the Ford factory in Detroit, and finally to life in Paris as a failed doctor-takes the reader by the scruff as it hurtles toward the novel's inescapable conclusion. Ralph Manheim's translation captures the savage energy of Celine's original French, while a dramatic afterword by William T. Vollmann echoes Celine's volatile writing style and gives the reader a dynamic, contemporary perspective on the fury of this astonishing novel. Louis-Ferdinand Celine's (1894-1961) novels include Death on the Installment Plan and Guignol's Band, both published by New Directions. William T. Vollmann is the author of Europe Central, which won the National Book Award for fiction in 2005, The Atlas (winner of the 1997 PEN Center West Award), and Seven Dreams: A Book of North American Landscapes. (from the publisher)