Eric Chevilard (b. 1964) is certainly one of the most interesting and original French writers of recent decades. A brilliant stylist, whose texts are permeated with characteristic ironic humor, he is the heir - despite the outward entertaining nature of many of his texts - of the “philosophizing” tradition of French prose. The two books published in this edition - “The Crab is a Visible Nebula” and “The Phantom” - represent a paradoxical description of life - appearance, habits, fate, actions - of a certain bizarre creature, the long-suffering Crab. Written in an almost aphoristic manner and consisting of a series of short chapters, they represent an amazing mixture of absurdity and hopelessness with irony and benevolent humor. At the same time, the publicly available pseudo-Chaplin burlesque is naturally combined in them with a masterly “deconstruction” of generally accepted linguistic conventions. Evidence of the author’s success was the Fénéon Prize awarded to Chevillard for “The Crab in a Visible Nebula” in 1993.