The Flounder

First UK edition. Thick 8vo. Pp. xi-[xii], 547. Brown cloth boards, lettered and ruled in gilt to spine. Translator's Note. Jacket illustration by Günter Grass (priced £5.95 to front flap). Red print on the jacket spine faded as usual, minuscule closed tear to upper front panel, else Fine.

Translated by Ralph Manheim from the 1977 German publication, Der Butt, by Hermann Luchterhand Verlag, Darmstadt. An excerpt originally appeared in the December 1978 issue of Playboy magazine. A signed illustrated edition limited to 1000 three-volume sets, and bound in grey cloth with eelskin spines, was issued by the Limited Editions Club, New York, in 1985.

Loosely based on the Grimm Brothers' fairy tale "The Fisherman and His Wife," these parallel tales of the battle of the sexes through the ages are interweaved with the irreverent story of an immortal Stone Age talking fish. By the winner of the 1999 Nobel Prize in Literature.