“In this medical humanities classic, the vulnerable yet unabashedly confrontational Hervé Guibert dissects the solitary hospital body that he and unknown others have become exam after exam, drug after drug, humiliation after humiliation, scream after scream. The writer’s urgent will to live and poignant desire to invent relations inside and outside the hospital are nothing short of breathtaking.”—João Biehl, author of Vita: Life in a Zone of Social Abandonment and Will to Live: AIDS Therapies and the Politics of Survival

“Like Roland Barthes’s Mourning Diary, Hervé Guibert’s hospitalization diary speaks with moonlit clarity about the threshold between life and death; with this heartbreaking and exemplary book Guibert has earned literary immortality.”—Wayne Koestenbaum, Distinguished Professor of English, CUNY

“To read Guibert’s journal of faltering vision is to teeter at the portal to many worlds. He stands, like Saramago, between light and darkness, right and wrong, life and death. What he sees and hears there—what he learns—is timeless. This book is a gift.”—David France, Director of How to Survive a Plague