One of the undisputed classics of contemporary letters.

Walter Benjamin said that every great work creates a genre or ends it: these Tiny Lives seem to fulfill both movements in one. Through his eight chapters, Michon embodies the figure of the biographed biographer, constructing an autobiography based on the reconstruction of the lives of others: tiny lives of his grandparents, his classmates at a boarding school in the French province; of that orphaned boy who, like a "failed Rimbaud", goes to Africa in search of a chimerical fortune.

A wise and unrepeatable mix of genres that creates a new genre, the discerning reader will appreciate how an entire area of today's French literature comes out of this small volume: the way in which Michon mixes exact doses of Flaubert, Rimbaud, Faulkner, Proust and Jean Genet to find a new tone, tender and dry at the same time, an extremely precise style made of meticulous combinations of information and invention, of memory and rewriting of memory. One of the undisputed classics of contemporary letters.

«He knows that the objective is not to defeat pain, but to defeat oblivion. His books credit the triumph of writing over a life that found in literature the redemption of all failures »(Rafael Narbona, El Cultural).

«The lives of these characters are not exceptional: they are modest experiences, which combine illusion and heartbreak. But they have the poetic tone of truth. That is why they are a moving testimony of the mixture that occurs in life of vulgarity and mystery, cruelty and madness, illusion and beauty, hope and broken dreams" (J. L. Martín Nogales, El Diario Vasco).

«One of those unclassifiable, beautiful and disturbing books, which claim their own space and consecrate their authors» (Robert Saladrigas, La Vanguardia).