The award-winning writer Pascal Quignard (1948-) has published many texts and has collaborated with painters, musicians and filmmakers. Yet despite the popularity and critical recognition of his work, Quignard remains a discreet and fleeting presence in the current cultural landscape, sharing with other contemporary French writers the belief that literature is a form of self-effacement. In this first critical study in English, Lea Vuong offers a comprehensive survey of Quignard's still growing uvre by examining his specific attempts to produce disappearance through and for writing. His texts and collaborations appear as vanishing acts where the writer, like the figure on the Tomb of the Diver found in Paestum, remains suspended between presence and absence."