The Monroe Girls

Series: Archipelago Books
ISBN: 9781962770552
Pages: 278
Publication Date: March 17, 2026

Navigating this farcical book of the dead, readers may glimpse elements of the dreary dystopia of George Orwell, the black-comic absurdity of Samuel Beckett, and the occult surrealism of Leonora Carrington, but this astonishing novel is a creature unto itself, a fever dream of haunted bureaucracies and the shamanistic psyops of strange political parties. Hilarious, bleak, incantatory, The Monroe Girls is a revelation.
—Julia Elliott

For over twenty-five years now, post-exotic literature has been making its mark on our pre-apocalyptic world. Its most illustrious representative, the only one whose face is known to us, is possibly Antoine Volodine . . . It is a laugh of despair and resistance that runs through this book, a chilling, terrible laugh, but one that is also innocence itself: he bears witness to mankind and never falters, even in the face of the worst indignities . . . In this sense, post-exotic literature is also, perhaps above all and fundamentally, an enormous, masterful joke.
—Eric Chevillard, Le Monde

The Monroe Girls is by turns grimly comic and brightly horrifying, one of the finest entries yet into Antoine Volodine's strange, moonlit, shapeshifting body of work. Like the Hirsch glasses that inaugurate its plot, it allows its readers to "take a look at a street that doesn't exist on any map" and through that vision acknowledges the activities of existence that literature often disavows. In a publishing landscape with too few surprises, thank god for Antoine Volodine, and thank god for Alyson Waters, too.
—Kevin Brockmeier

Antoine Volodine is the most exciting and unique French contemporary writer. His work mixes an unapologetic shamanistic fabulism with a socialist political ethos. The result is an eccentric post-apocalyptic world in which a weirded-out struggle for the Party leaks between the world of the living and that of the dead, with unpredictable but satisfying results. The Monroe Girls is a perfect entry into his vertiginous work.
—Brian Evenson

Built up text by text, year after year, Volodine’s world—instantly recognizable but never quite the same twice—is always a dark delight to revisit. In Alyson Waters’ noirishly poetic translation, the singularly beautiful, achingly sad The Monroe Girls mesmerizes from first page to last.
—Jordan Stump