Take It or Leave It

Take It or Leave It is the author's second novel written in English and published in 1976 by the Fiction Collective. It is a "self-transaction" and extension of his French novel Amer Eldorado, which was published two years earlier. The narrator recounts, secondhand, the adventures of "Frenchy" in the US-American army during the years 1951 to 1954, who has
30 days "to move his ass" across country to board a ship that will take him to fight in Korea. This present new edition of the novel represents the original typewritten and designed version of the text and has been faithfully redesigned in digital form using a non-proportional typeface. With an after-worded foreword by Larry McCaffery.

Take It or Leave It is the first-and still the definitive-poststructuralist novel written in English. Federman's crazed journey to chaos and erasure ranks, along with Kerouac's On the Road, and Wright's Going Native, as the greatest of all American road novels.

- Larry McCaffery


RAYMOND FEDERMAN (1928-2009) were many persons: Holocaust survivor and WWII orphan, farm worker, paratrooper in the US Army, Korean War veteran, interpreter in Tokyo, sporting ace (swimming, tennis, golf), jazz musician, black marketeer, gambler, bon vivant, inventor of surfiction, bilingual author, translator, teacher, renowned Samuel Beckett scholar, Distinguished Professor, and father. Federman was born in Paris, France, in 1928. When he was fourteen years old, his parents and two sisters were arrested during the 1942 roundup by the Nazis and sent to the Auschwitz concentration camp for extermination. The boy survived because his mother had pushed him into a closet for hiding. In different versions, and both in English and in French, Federman again and again told various parts of the life story of a man called "Federman," trying to decipher the gesture of his mother that saved his life. He received the American Book Award, and his books have been translated into 14 languages.

Invisible Starfall Books' RAYMOND FEDERMAN EDITION is a series of republications of the author's books in their definitive version, spiced up with first editions of unpublished and uncollected texts. Carefully proofread and with a new design, each book was produced in close cooperation with Simone Federman, the daughter and literary executor of Raymond Federman.