Exiles, Outcasts, Strangers explores how nine different "outsider" authors treat the theme of alienation in one of their major works. All the novels under review were written in a limited time span (1942 to 1987, approximately 50 years), and all are structured around a hero or heroine who remains culturally, ethically or aesthetically distant from his/her narrative counterparts. Works discussed: Albert Camus' L'Etranger; Richard Wright's The Outsider; André Langevin's Poussière sur la ville; Ernesto Sábato's El túnel; V.S. Naipaul's Guerrillas; Elie Wiesel's Le Cinquième fils; Norbert Zongo's Le Parachutage; Gisèle Pineau's L'Exil selon Julia, and Jean Genet's Querelle de Brest.

Mary Jo Muratore holds the Catherine Paine Middlebush Chair of the Humanities at the University of Missouri, USA. She is the author of four books, including Mimesis and Metatextuality in the Neo-Classical Text (1994), which was nominated for the Aldo and Jeanne Scaglione Prize in French Studies, sponsored by the Modern Language Association of America.