the narrowness of materialism and his principal characters are mainly vagrants, thieves or dandies that subvert the order of an unfair society. His novels often feature auto-biographical characters, like Teymour, the hero of the novel Un complot de saltimbanques, a young man who forges a diploma in chemical engineering after a life of enjoyment and lust abroad instead of study and gets back to his home town and enters into an unexpected intringue against the authorities with his dandy friends. He is considered by some to be the last genuine "anarchist" or free thinking writer of western culture by his humorous and provocative although lucid and profound view of human relations and society. His writing style does not submit to an academic or experimental approach which makes him a vivid, catchy storyteller, without the boredom nor artificial ambiguity of some classical (which he is) or avantgarde writers. The sageness of his works are monuments to the freedom of being and thought against materialism, the contemporary obsession with consumption and productivity, the arrogance and abuse of authority, the vanity of social formalities and the injustice of the wealthy towards the poor. In 1990 Cossery was awarded the Grand prix de la francophonie of the Académie française and in 2005 the Grand Prix Poncetton de la SGDL. The first of his books translated in English are Men God Forgot (first translated by Harold Edwards of Faruk University, Alexandria, Egypt, not by Henry Miller, whose note on Cossery appeared on a later 1963 City Lights Books edition, and published in the United States in 1946 by George Leite's Circle Editions of Berkeley), The House of Certain Death (New Directions, 1949), The Lazy Ones (New Directions, 1952), and Proud Beggars (Black Sparrow Press, 1981). Three more of Cossery's novels have since been published in English translation: Anna Moschovakis' The Jokers (NYRB Classics) and Alyson Waters' A Splendid Conspiracy and The Colors of Infamy (New Directions). As of 2014, Une ambition dans le désert remains untranslated into English. Works Les Hommes oubliés de Dieu (1940) Men God Forgot, translation by Harold Edwards (Circle Edition, 1946) La Maison de la mort certaine (1944) The House of Certain Death, translation by Stuart B. Kaiser (New Directions Publishing, 1949) Les Fainéants dans la vallée fertile (1948) Laziness in the Fertile Valley, translation by William Goyen (New Directions Publishing, 1953) Mendiants et Orgueilleux (1955) Proud Beggars, translation by Thomas