Praise for The Map and the Territory

Winner of the 2010 Prix Goncourt

"A serious reflection on art, death, and contemporary society, The Map and the Territory is a tour de force."--The Los Angeles Review of Books

"Powerful. . . . [A] singular novel. . . . Archly sarcastic, cheerily pedantic, willfully brutal." --The New York Times Book Review

"An ingenious and engaging composite of künstlerroman and police procedural; a novel of ideas; and an authorial self-reflection." -The Boston Globe

"All novelists everywhere have benefited from [Houellebecq's] audacity. . . . his temerity has recharged the form and reminded people what the novel can do." --The Sunday Times

"Funny, astonishing and authoritative. . . . This is the brilliant and controversial French writer's most intellectually ambitious book.." --The Guardian

"Beautifully, accurately translated . . . . If ever there was a novelist for our globally dysfunctional times it's Michel Houellebecq. . . . Long cast aside as the bad boy of books, [his] latest novel has seen him brought in from the cold, and embraced by the literary establishment for what he's always been - not much short of a genius." --The Mirror

"One of the most important facts about Michel Houellebecq . . . is that he is a first-rate prose stylist. . . . Teasing and entertaining. . . . A page turner." --Literary Review

"Houellebecq's bewitching journey on the river of art to the cave of death and decay is a tale of eviscerating insight, caustic humor, troubling beauty, and haunting provocation." -Booklist

"[Houellebecq is] a trenchant, sharp-tongued social commentator."--Bookforum

"Very likely his best [book] ever, a serious novel about aging and death that also employs its author's trademark lugubrious wit towards some delicious exercises in satire and self-parody. . . . Challenging, mature and highly intelligent." --The Daily Telegraph

"A dark master of invention. . . . In a world of copycatting and fakery, Michel Houellebecq is an exceptional writer and a stand-out original." --Evening Standard

"An astonishing writer. . . . The Map and the Territory is funny, shocking, brutal and unbearably poignant. . . . Sublime." --Scotland on Sunday