A close friend and protg of Marguerite Duras, Barbara Molinard (19211986) wrote and wrote feverishly, but only managed to publish one book in her lifetime: the surreal, nightmarish collectionPanics.These thirteen stories beat with a frantic, off-kilter rhythm as Molinard obsesses over sickness, death, and control. A woman becomes transfixed by a boa constrictor at her local zoo, mysterious surgeons dismember their patient, and the author narrates to Duras how she was stopped from sleeping in a cemetery vault, only to be haunted by the pain of sleeping on its stone floor.In the unsettling tradition of Franz Kafka, Djuna Barnes, Leonora Carrington, and more,Panicsrecovers the work of a tormented writer who often destroyed her writing as soon as she produced it, and whose insights into violence, mental illness, and bodily autonomy are simultaneously absurdist and razor-sharp.