I Spit on Your Graves

Book excerpt: Fiction. "In the tradition of Karl May and Franz Kafka, Boris Vian imagines an American even more amazing that the land he has never visited. "I Spit on Your Graves" is the first novel to put the quotation marks around the "hardboiled" thriller -- a vivid and startling performance" (J. Hoberman). The book is Boris Vian's (1920-1959) sex-and-violence-filled homage to American noir. Originally published in France as J'rai Cracher Sur Vos Tombes -- after allegedly being censored in the U.S. and "translated" into French -- the novel was no best seller, establishing Vian as one of the most famous writers of the mid-twentieth century.