Defying Gravity is a major reassessment of the work of Jean Paulhan within the context of his own times, as well as in the light of contemporary debates in literary theory. Best known for his long-serving editorship of the influential Parisian literary review, La Nouvelle Revue Française, Paulhan is now widely acknowledged as one of the most central yet least understood figures of twentieth-century French intellectual and literary history. Syrotinski's study admirably performs the dual purpose of introducing a genuinely innovative and distinctive writer to a general anglophone readership, while engaging critically with his texts and their reception. Syrotinski's readings of Paulhan are both original and provocative, and firmly establish him as an unavoidable point of reference for twentieth-century French literary history and theory.

Michael Syrotinski is Assistant Professor in French at the University of Aberdeen, Scotland. He has published a translation of The Necessity of the Mind (La Nécessité d'esprit) by Roger Caillois, and has co-translated (with Christine Laennec) Progress in Love on the Slow Side: Récits by Jean Paulhan, with an essay by Maurice Blanchot.