Louis-Ferdinand Céline Books

Louis-Ferdinand Céline's 1932 first novel, which follows one man from the First World War through colonial Africa and industrial America to the Paris slums.

Céline's shrieking, hilarious portrait of a Belle Époque Paris childhood in the Paris arcades — poverty as opera.

Louis-Ferdinand Céline's 1944 novel — a wounded French veteran drops into a London underworld of pimps, prostitutes, musicians and eccentrics.

Louis-Ferdinand Céline's unfinished 1949 novel — an eighteen-year-old cavalry volunteer's first terrible night at the barracks.

Louis-Ferdinand Céline's 1952 novel — the first volume of his postwar Féerie sequence, a feverish mixture of prison, memory and grievance.

Louis-Ferdinand Céline's 1954 novel — the second volume of the Féerie sequence, a single night of Allied bombing over Montmartre.

Louis-Ferdinand Céline's 1957 novel — the first of the German trilogy — about the last months of the Vichy government-in-exile at Sigmaringen.

Louis-Ferdinand Céline's 1960 novel — the second of the German trilogy — about his 1944 flight into a collapsing Germany.

Louis-Ferdinand Céline's posthumous 1964 novel — Guignol's Band II picks up in wartime London with gas-mask experiments, a fourteen-year-old niece, and the criminal past that will not release Ferdinand.

Louis-Ferdinand Céline's posthumous 1969 novel — the final volume of the German trilogy, and the escape at last completed.

Louis-Ferdinand Céline's ~905-page preliminary manuscript of Féerie pour une autre fois — memories of Montmartre before the flight from Paris, and the bombing that reorganises the narrative into escape.

Louis-Ferdinand Céline's recovered 2022 novel — a young Ferdinand comes to on a battlefield, survives a military hospital, and starts moving toward London.

Louis-Ferdinand Céline's recovered 2022 novel Londres, arriving in English as London on 13 October 2026 in Charlotte Mandell's New Directions translation — a French criminal underworld in wartime London destroys itself around Ferdinand.

Louis-Ferdinand Céline's recovered 2023 legendary novel — an imaginary Middle Ages of kings, troubadours, murder and personified Death, drawn from two overlapping manuscripts he never completed.

Louis-Ferdinand Céline's recovered short story, published in La Nouvelle Revue française in 2023 — a humiliated elderly woman in Pontabon carries her private mythology of a dead captain to his grave and walks away.

Louis-Ferdinand Céline's 1933 play in five acts — Doctor Bardamu moves through colonial Africa, New York, the League of Nations and the Paris suburbs, everywhere finding institutions absorbed by hierarchy, money and paperwork instead of the people they claim to serve.

Louis-Ferdinand Céline's 1959 collection of five ballet scenarios — witches, sirens, gods and dockworkers, all speaking through movement rather than music.

Louis-Ferdinand Céline's early play — a bourgeois drawing-room comedy that slides through infidelity, a Paris house of assignation and Heaven, where God turns a telescope on the earthly spectacle.

Louis-Ferdinand Céline's Oriental fairy tale, written around 1923 for his young daughter and illustrated by his first wife — a wandering child who is repeatedly offered safety and repeatedly leaves.

Louis-Ferdinand Céline's ten Copenhagen prison notebooks — February to October 1946 — first published in complete scholarly form in 2019, and the workshop in which the postwar novels began.

The 1924 philosophical opening Louis Destouches wrote for La Vie, Pasteur, Semmelweis et la Mort — cut by La Presse médicale, lost to the League of Nations archive in Geneva, and rediscovered in 2014.

Louis-Ferdinand Céline's 1924 medical thesis — a literary account of the Hungarian physician who discovered that doctors were killing their own patients.

Louis-Ferdinand Céline's 1933 speech at Médan — instead of praising Émile Zola, he asks what has happened to the reality naturalism tried to describe, and predicts that literature committed to it will not be tolerated for long.

Louis-Ferdinand Céline's 1933 article in Candide — his first concentrated public explanation of what his writing is trying to do, six months after Journey to the End of the Night.

Louis-Ferdinand Céline's 1936 political and philosophical pamphlet — a short, disillusioned report from the Soviet Union that quickly widens into an argument against political utopianism.

Louis-Ferdinand Céline's 1937 political pamphlet — a hybrid work in which fictional dialogue, three ballet scenarios and an extended racial and political monologue interrupt one another.

Louis-Ferdinand Céline's 1938 political pamphlet — a short grotesque opening beside the Seine gives way to a sustained argument against another war with Germany.

Dr. Louis Destouches's medical essay on the Ford factories in Detroit — a physician's report on what mass production does to the human body and what factory medicine is actually for.

Louis-Ferdinand Céline's 1941 political pamphlet — written after the fall of France, its later sections turn from defeat toward a social programme built around leisure, family and the arts.

Louis-Ferdinand Céline's preface to Albert Serouille's 1944 history of Bezons — the neglected Paris suburb where Dr. Louis Destouches spent the war working the municipal dispensary.

Louis-Ferdinand Céline's ten-page defence memorandum, written from the Copenhagen prison on 6 November 1946 — the primary source for how he answered the treason charges the French judiciary was building against him.

Louis-Ferdinand Céline's short 1948 attack on Jean-Paul Sartre — a defence against a specific accusation that turns into a comic literary confrontation about who owns postwar French letters.

Louis-Ferdinand Céline's 1955 fictional interview and aesthetic manifesto — a staged conversation about his own style that turns into a comic walk across Paris.

Louis-Ferdinand Céline's 1957 argument for a broad postwar amnesty — nineteen handwritten pages that widen his own case into a general demand for reconciliation.

Gallimard's Cahiers Céline 3 — the collected medical corpus of Dr. Louis Destouches, before he became Céline: the 1924 Semmelweis thesis and the public-health and factory-medicine writings that surrounded it.

Louis-Ferdinand Céline's two songs — the sailor's chant À nœud coulant and the underworld revenge ballad Règlement, both recorded in his own voice in 1956 and collected as a book in 1981.