Round about close to midnight: The jazz writings of Boris Vian

Through combining liberty of syntax with a snappy 'American' style, Boris Vian invented modern French journalism as represented by such successful publications as the daily newspaper Liberation and the slick monthly magazine Actuel. He was at the centre of the Existentialist scene after the Second World War and played comet a la Bix Beiderbecke in the caves of St. Germain des Pres. Such novels as his Autumn in Peking and Froth on the Daydream are still available and read by today's youth. More than any other critic, Vian translated the joy and swing of jazz into prose in his passionate columns in Jazz Hot and Combat in the 1940s and 1950s. Since Vian's French is impossible to translate literally, and since many of his pieces were written for their time and place, this anthology is a selective and adapted collection: the best of Boris Vian.