This book is about Raymond Federman, postmodern theorist, bilingual novelist, self-translator and scholar of Samuel Beckett. Federman's remarkable devotion to Beckett's works, which he maintained in both his fictional and scholarly writings, forms the focus of this study. His novels, which have been described as autofictions, are full of references to Beckett. Raymond Federman was born in Paris, on 15 May 1928, to a poor Jewish family. His immediate family—mother, father and two sisters—all perished at Auschwitz. He was saved by his mother who, as the police were coming up the stairs, pushed him into a closet. The time he spent there waiting, referred to as the closet episode, is recounted in what is considered to be Federman's most important text, The Voice in the Closet/La voix dans le cabinet de débarras. After waiting in the closet until nightfall, he managed to escape occupied Paris and when the war was over migrate to America. He enlisted in the US army, served in Korea and eventually went to university on the GI bill to study French literature. In 1965, he published a monograph based on his PhD dissertation, Journey to Chaos: Samuel Beckett's Early Fiction. Federman went on to become a professor of Comparative Literature and Creative Writing. A Beckett scholar, Federman is primarily known as co-author of two critical bibliographies. He has written several articles on Beckett and coedited the Cahier de l’Herne: Samuel Beckett with Tom Bishop. Journey to Chaos remains his only scholarly monograph. At the time of Beckett's centenary, Federman released a short memoir of his relationship to Beckett, Le livre de Sam ou des pierres àsucer plein les poches. Outside Beckett scholarship, he is known for his contributions to American postmodern theory. There is a clear divide between Federman's more traditional scholarship in Beckett Studies and his ebullient postmodern writing. This divide is breached via intertextual play in Federman's novels, which borrow indifferently from both bodies of scholarship.

I’ve chosen to focus on the first cycle of Federman's novels, from 1971 to 1982. Since he continued writing until his death in October 2009, with his last novel published in 2010, this might seem an unusual choice.