After his first novel A Strange Solitude (1958), hailed by François Mauriac and Louis Aragon, Sollers began, with The Park (1961) the experiments in narrative form that would lead to Event (Drame, 1965) and Nombres (1968). Jacques Derrida analyzes these novels in his book Dissemination. Sollers then appears to have attempted to counter the high seriousness of Nombres by producing in Lois (1972) a greater linguistic vitality through, for instance, the use of wordplay and a less formal style. The direction taken by Lois was developed through the heightened rhythmic intensity of the unpunctuated texts such as Paradis (1981). Sollers's other novels include Women (1983), Portrait du joueur (1984), Le coeur absolu (1986), Watteau in Venice (1991), Studio (1997), Passion fixe (2000), L'étoile des amants (2002), which have all introduced a degree of realism to his fiction to the extent that they make more recognizable use of plot, character and thematic development. They offer a fictional study of society by reinterpreting among other things the role of politics, media, sex, religion, and the arts.

In all these novels Sollers's interest in Chinese civilization plays an important part. From the late 1960s, he studied Chinese and employed ideograms increasingly in his writings. He especially exemplifies this view in the subtitle of Lois, a Chinese ideogram representing both "France" and "Law." The positions adopted by Sollers and Kristeva towards Mao's Cultural Revolution in China are discussed critically by the author Richard Wolin in his 2010 study of French intellectuals and the Cultural Revolution.

Vocalisation or his preference for the spoken word has always been a priority for Sollers in his writing. The combination of music, voice and theater is especially found in opera. The kind of opera associated with Sollers should properly be called opera bouffe because of that sense of humour and love of irony. In many ways Sollers is doing the work of the opera bouffe or drama giocoso with his novels since Women (1983). Since Lois, there are many references to music. In Women already: "Whoever understands nothing about music, understands nothing about metaphysics."

The focus on the spoken language also draws Sollers toward James Joyce. Sollers is fascinated by Joyce's style and he and Stephen Heath have collaborated to translate Joyce's Finnegans Wake into French. In January 1975, Sollers gave a lecture to an international symposium on Joyce claiming Finnegans Wake as "the most formidable anti-fascist book produced between the two wars". Both educated by Jesuits, Joyce and Sollers have strong ties to Catholicism. As Sollers indicated in Paradis, Joycean Christianity like Sollers' Catholicism, participates in the comic and the pathetic.

The novel Paradis has a particular flavour because the narrator is similar to a troubadour singing the story of postmodern times. The self appears to disappear as word games, puns, neologisms and misspellings create a text that is hallucinatory and humorous in its juxtaposition of seemingly incongruous words and phrases. There are constant references to orchestration and symphony, thus suggesting that there is an innate structure to what appears, at first glance, to be a chaotic text.

His novels Femmes (1983) and Portrait de joueur (1984) have achieved a certain popularity. The first was translated into English as Women by Barbara Bray and published by Columbia University Press (1990). Philip Roth's comment on the cover of Women says that Sollers is a "master of good-natured malice, a kind of happy, lively, benign Céline."

In 2000, Sollers published Passion fixe, a love story.

In 2006, he published Une vie divine. The narrator, a professor of philosophy, was entrusted with the task of reflecting upon a world philosophy that would not exclude the religious dimension of humanity. Throughout his research and discussions with the two women in his life (one intellectual and the other frivolous), he discovers that only one thinker is strong enough to found a project of world philosophy: Nietzsche. In this novel, Philippe Sollers rises against contemporary nihilism — literature in deadlock, misfortune and melancholy — to which he contrasts promises of life and happiness.

Sollers also sees himself and his novels in an eighteenth-century lineage with philosophes like Diderot and Voltaire; so his break with tradition is not all-encompassing.

Essays

• "Vers le Paradis" (DVD) - Desclée de Brouwer 2010
• "Discours Parfait" - Gallimard 2010
• "Guerres secrètes" - Carnets nord 2007
• "Fleurs" - Hermann éditions 2006
• Dictionnaire amoureux de Venise, 2004
• "Mystérieux Mozart" - Plon 2001
• "Éloge de l'Infini" - Gallimard, 2001
• "Francis Ponge" - Seghers éditions, 2001
• "Francesca Woodman" - Scalo Publishers 1998
• "Casanova l'admirable" - Plon 1998
• "La Guerre du Goût" - Gallimard, 1994
• "Liberté du XVIIIème" (Extract from La Guerre du Goût) - Gallimard, 2002
• "Picasso, le héros" - Le cercle d'art 1996
• "Les passions de Francis Bacon" - Gallimard 1996
• "Sade contre l'Être suprême" - Gallimard 1996
• "Improvisations" - Gallimard, 1991
• "De Kooning, vite" - La différence 1988
• "Théorie des Exceptions" - Gallimard, 1985
• "Sur le Matérialisme" - Seuil, 1974
• "L'Écriture et l'Expérience des Limites" - Seuil, 1968
• Writing and the Experience of Limits - Columbia University Press, 1982
• "Logiques" - Seuil, 1968
• "L'Intermédiaire" - Seuil, 1963

Novels

• Trésor d'amour - Gallimard, 2011
• Les Voyageurs du temps - Gallimard, 2009
• Un vrai roman, Mémoires - Plon 2007
• Une Vie Divine - Gallimard, 2006
• L'Étoile des Amants - Gallimard, 2002
• Passion Fixe - Gallimard, 2000
• Un amour américain - Mille et une nuits, 1999
• Studio - Gallimard, 1997
• Le cavalier du Louvre, Vivant Denon - Plon 1995
• Le Secret - Gallimard, 1993
• La Fête à Venise - Gallimard, 1991
• Watteau in Venice - Scribner's, 1994
• Le Lys d'Or - Gallimard, 1989
• Les Folies Françaises - Gallimard, 1988
• Le C?ur Absolu - Gallimard, 1987
• Paradis 2 - Gallimard, 1986
• Portrait du Joueur - Gallimard, 1984
• Femmes - Gallimard, 1983
• Women - Columbia UP, 1990
• Paradis - Seuil, 1981
• H - Seuil, 1973
• Lois - Seuil, 1972
• Nombres - Seuil, 1966
• Drame - Seuil, 1965
• Event - Red Dust, 1987
• Le Parc - Seuil, 1961
• The Park - Calder & Boyars, 1968
• Une Curieuse Solitude - Seuil, 1958
• A Strange Solitude - Grove Press 1959

Interviews

• L'évangile de Nietzsche - Cherche Midi 2006
• Poker (interviews with Ligne de risque)- Gallimard, 2005
• Voir écrire (with Christian de Portzamparc - Calmann-Levy, 2003
• La Divine Comédie - Desclée de Brouwer, 2000
• Le Rire de Rome - Gallimard, 1992
• Vision à New York - Grasset, 1981
• Interviews with Francis Ponge - Seuil 1970
• Jean-Louis de Rambures, interview with Ph. Sollers (in French) in: "Comment travaillent les écrivains", Paris 1978

Available in English

• Mysterious Mozart - University Of Illinois Press, 2010
• Writing and Seeing Architecture (with Christian de Portzamparc) - University Of Minnesota Press, 2008
• Watteau in Venice - Scribner's, 1994
• Women - Columbia University Press, 1990
• Event - Red Dust, 1987
• The Park - Calder & Boyars, 1968
• Writing and the Experience of Limits - Columbia University Press, 1982
• A Strange Solitude - Grove Press 1959