The Voice in the Closet is at the very center of the work of the work of Raymond Federman, a writer whose worldwide importance is unquestioned. The Voice in the Closet is a 20-page single-sentence text which simulaneously tells and refuses to allow a simple telling of the author's most formative experience: how, as a 14 year-old boy, when the French police came to his family's parents' apartment to initiate their deportation to the death camps, Federman's mother pushed him into a closet where he was able to escape detection and thus lived while his parents and two sisters were put to death.

"The Voice in the Closet astonishes . . . nothing in his previous work prepares us for the obsessive immediacy of this."
- Peter Quartermain.

Reprinted from the long out-of-print Coda Press edition of 1979, Starcherone Books's edition also includes reproductions of two collage paintings by artist Terri Katz Kasimov, from her Federman Series, as well as an introduction by Gerard Bucher and a note on the text by Starcherone founder and director, Ted Pelton.

Born in France in 1928, Federman emigrated to the U.S. in 1947. He holds a Ph.D. in French Literature from U.C.L.A. His many books include Among the Beasts (1967), Double or Nothing (Swallow Press, 1971, winner of the Frances Steloff Fiction Prize and The Panache Experimental Fiction Prize), Take It or Leave It (Fiction Collective, 1976), The Voice in the Closet (Coda Press, 1979), The Twofold Vibration (Indiana University Press & Harvester Press Ltd., 1982), Smiles on Washington Square (Thunder's Mouth Press, 1985, winner of The American Book Award), To Whom It May Concern (The Fiction Collective Two, 1990), Aunt Rachel's Fur (FC2, 2001), and My Body in Nine Parts (Starcherone, 2005). His novels have been translated into German, Italian, French, Hungarian, Polish, Serbian, Rumanian, Hebrew, Dutch, Greek, Japanese, and Chinese. Federman has been the recepient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Fulbright Fellowship, a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship in Fiction, and a New York State Foundation for the Arts Fellowship for Fiction. In France, Germany, Romania, and elsewhere, he is considered to be among the world's greatest living novelists.

Read an excerpt from
The Voice in the Closet