Hallucinating Foucault

The love between a writer and a reader is never celebrated. It cannot be proven to exist.

Hallucinating Foucault is a love story, a mystery and a quest. It is a gripping tale of a mad writer, the glamorous, scandalous Paul Michel, enfant terrible of French letters and the reader who sets out to find him. The search begins in the archives of university libraries, enters the forbidden spaces of a French asylum, moves onwards into the storms of late summer in Provence and ever deeper into the labyrinth of memory. Passionate and controversial, Hallucinating Foucault crosses the frontiers of gender and sexuality, explores the limits of madness and desire and affirms the boundless loyalty of a reader's love - it is a remarkable book that goes to the very heart of the creative act.

An intricate and self-reflective novel about that most delicate of relationships--meaning the one between writers and readers. The narrator, an anonymous graduate student, sets off on the trail of a French novelist named Paul Michel, who is currently confined to an asylum. Engineering his hero's release, the narrator finds himself enmeshed in bizarre love triangle, of which the three vertices are himself, the novelist, and the late Michel Foucault. Sex, it seems, can be made safe, but the oddball intimacy of reading cannot.