5 stars, but only as a companion piece or annotated SAMPLE-PLATE. It's pretty easy to get confused about what this book really is, so here goes:1) This book is a big grab-bag of Roussel material. It contains long excerpts from his two big novels, and from his poetry, and so on. There's plenty of annotations.2) It also includes Roussel's essay about his method, wherein he describes how he composed some of his books. That essay is called "How I Wrote Certain of My Books", and the publisher misleadingly chose that as the name of this whole book.3) But it goes beyond being a mere sampler, because some of the pieces have never before appeared in English. Especially the best piece, "Documents to Serve as an Outline", which is fully narrated over 80 pages, and is NOT an outline at all, so don't be scared.If you want to dive in to Roussel with a full-length work, you should find Cunningham's translation of Locus Solus and read that first. It's very hard to come across unless your library has over 25 floors, which mine did.Personally I would have paid the $15 entry price here even if the only thing included was the fantastic "Documents To Serve As An Outline." You cannot find this piece anywhere else in English, unlike the novels, and it's the best part of the "How I Wrote" package. I know the title "Documents To Serve As An Outline" doesn't sound very entertaining, but rest assured that it is fully narrated, not an outline, and that it's incredible. Apparently Roussel would have expanded it if he had lived longer.A lot of the publicity material surrounding Roussel's work is misleading, in that it makes his style sound radical or experimental. The professional review on Amazon.com for example calls it "distorted" and "enigmatic." But years ago when I first read Roussel, he surpassed my wildest hopes and I found none of the pitfalls or turn-offs that I expected from all the hype that I'd seen.The under-rated and over-looked part of Roussel, yet the part that unfolds off the very pages to fill up your bedroom and neighborhood, is the sheer genius of story-telling. Roussel has a dazzling ability to pull endless heroes, villains, conspirators, thieves, secret lovers, bards, misers, emperors, cultists, oracles, shamans, hermits, out of thin air and then explain to you-- richly and convincingly, yet with incredible concision-- their adventures and their tribulations and all the repercussions they have across the generations of his fictional worlds. The total effect is like looking at an unrolled tapestry or quilt that depicts countless essential scenes, each one involving some tremendous or trivial historical anecdote that is intricately linked to the historical scenes on the other patches.These tales (found in "Documents To Serve"; and also in Locus Solus etc) have everything that archetypically great stories have, and more: love, betrayal, tyranny, forgiveness, fantastic magnanimity, loss, disgrace, lust, executions, exonerations, vindication, solitude, comedy, crime. Most of the time at the end of a section I would sit there shaking my head back and forth simply trying to digest what I'd just witnessed, in a kind of disbelief about how intense I found it.Roussel's method will always hog all the attention, but it's the least striking part of his work. You can rest easy: Roussel is not a gimmick writer, and his books are not sequences of wordplay. He's been called "dream-like", but most authors described in that way usually cast a haze over what they write in order to achieve the effect. Roussel on the other hand gives you everything, and hides nothing. He is fully traditional with his voice and with his relationship to the reader: there are no narrative tricks whatsoever, no shifting viewpoints, no "blurring of the lines" between reality and dream, no untrustworthy narration, no nonsense.Mark my words: a living man who had the ability to dash off characters and stories, and stories within stories, off-the-cuff, that approached what Roussel accomplishes in "Documents To Serve As An Outline" would be loved by children at family reunions, and nobody would let him alone for 2 seconds, they would need to hear more.And throughout it all, Roussel remains one of the most concise but vivid writers I've ever read. He strives for and reaches the highest standards of clarity. Some would say eccentrically high. The efficiency and vividness of his prose has a unique power. Read it.Roussel's fame (or notoriety) always rests on everybody's fascination with his mechanical/linguistic process that yielded the starting ingredients for his compositions, rather than what he achieved in terms of raw narration when he expanded those ingredients into a book-length work. These achievements deserve independent and special recognition but it's been overshadowed by the sensation of his method.You can read for yourself Roussel's explanation of his method in this very volume. As he himself documents, and as you can see for yourself, the method only produces a relative handful of words and ideas which then serve as kick-starters for his imagination. In other words, Roussel used the linguistic/mechanical methods only as a treasure chest of ideas, especially to come up with peculiar props and artifacts, but then he did the usual craftsman's work of filling out his 300 page novels with visionary narrative skill. His books are never described in this way simply because his homophonic method is an easier and more spectacular thing for people to talk about.So what's the bad news about this book? WELL: The "Documents to Serve as an Outline" only adds up to about 80 pages-- Roussel died and never finished the project. Don't be scared, though: the so-called "outlines" are not outlines at all, and are free-standing and self-sufficient stories. Nevertheless, the title implies that they're a mere skeleton of what the man ultimately envisioned. So I suppose you'd consider that a let-down if you were a stickler.BONUSES: "How I Wrote Certain Of My Books" also has a comprehensive (and even temperamental?) bibliography, has informative end-notes, includes a mysterious set of illustrations that Roussel himself commissioned (Salvador Dali of all people has sung lavish praises for the commission), and in all honesty the book has a beautiful blue inside-cover (paperback) the likes of which I've never seen.