The final novel of the famous Claudine series, this book is filled with the luminous insights that mark Colette's later work. Retreat from Love tells of sexuality and love in a variety of forms. Translated and with an Introduction by Margaret Crosland.
Confessions of a Madman personalizes the struggle of a civil war by following the fragmentation and irreversible separation of a single family. Written in alternating flashbacks and descriptions of a man's present, Sebbar delivers what French critics call a modern fable for adults: a tale of familial disorientation, identity, violence, and morality. A young man observes his mother go crazy waiting for her murdered husband to return home. Despite his estrangement with his father, the son vows to avenge his father's death by murdering his father's killers. In delving into his father's past, he ... View More...
Confessions of a Madman personalizes the struggle of a civil war by following the fragmentation and irreversible separation of a single family. Written in alternating flashbacks and descriptions of a man's present, Sebbar delivers what French critics call a modern fable for adults: a tale of familial disorientation, identity, violence, and morality. A young man observes his mother go crazy waiting for her murdered husband to return home. Despite his estrangement with his father, the son vows to avenge his father's death by murdering his father's killers. In delving into his father's past, he ... View More...
The hiring of a new secretary shouldn't be a big deal--just a slight a change in the office environment. But for the protagonist of this novel, it is a declaration of war, a call to arms: "The new secretary has only been here two days," she says, "and I'm already talking about evil, a word I shouldn't even be using--arming myself for battle and choosing my weapons." Her quiet life of sacrifice and service has been rudely disrupted by the new hire, and she is not--despite the advice of her doctor, her neighbors, and her daughter--about to leave it at that. Instead, sabotage, alcohol, and kindne... View More...
The hiring of a new secretary shouldn't be a big deal--just a slight a change in the office environment. But for the protagonist of this novel, it is a declaration of war, a call to arms: "The new secretary has only been here two days," she says, "and I'm already talking about evil, a word I shouldn't even be using--arming myself for battle and choosing my weapons." Her quiet life of sacrifice and service has been rudely disrupted by the new hire, and she is not--despite the advice of her doctor, her neighbors, and her daughter--about to leave it at that. Instead, sabotage, alcohol, and kindne... View More...
In these three short stories, Emile Zola presents characters in search of fulfillment--romantic, religious, and financial. Read together, they give us an extraordinary depiction of sexual mores. When the apparently angelic Therese commits murder, she offers sexual favors to a petty clerk if he will dispose of the body; the pregnant Flavie manipulates a neighbor's interest in her dowry to arrange a shotgun wedding; and churchgoing women find their hunger for Christianity unsatisfied by a vapid priest. These are beautiful and poignant stories unified by the powerful themes of deception and disco... View More...
A story of madness, art, alcohol and creativity...elegantly translated...vivid. --New York Times An exasperated writer obsessed with American cinema embarks on an increasingly bizarre journey in this heady, engrossing novel. A man writes an enormous screenplay on the life of Herman Melville. Not a single producer is interested in it. One day, someone gives him the phone number of the great American filmmaker Michael Cimino, legendary director of The Deer Hunter and Heaven's Gate. A meeting is arranged in New York, and Cimino reads the manuscript. What follows is a series of crazy adventures th... View More...
Garr ta's first novel in a decade follows the mania that descends upon a family when the father finds himself in possession of a concrete mixer. As he seeks to modernize every aspect of their lives, disaster strikes when the younger sibling is subsumed by concrete.
Through puns, wordplay, and dizzying verbal effect, Garr ta reinvents the novel form and blurs the line between spoken and written language in an attempt to confront the elasticity of communication. View More...
At the City Hall in a small town in the South of France, one man starts his campaign to correct the ills that have overtaken his proud nation by lecuring the town's inhabitants on the art of conversation. In the narrator's opinion, "coversation is a specialty that is most eminently French," an art that should be nurtured and practiced, and can help repair France's reputation. Not to mention being a good conversationalist is extremely useful for seducing women, which is how the narrator managed to attract Lucienne, his "superbly lumpish" wife who died two months before giving this lecture. One ... View More...
At the City Hall in a small town in the South of France, one man starts his campaign to correct the ills that have overtaken his proud nation by lecuring the town's inhabitants on the art of conversation. In the narrator's opinion, "coversation is a specialty that is most eminently French," an art that should be nurtured and practiced, and can help repair France's reputation. Not to mention being a good conversationalist is extremely useful for seducing women, which is how the narrator managed to attract Lucienne, his "superbly lumpish" wife who died two months before giving this lecture. One ... View More...
A mesmerizing novel by Nobel Laureate Patrick Modiano, now superbly translated for English-language readers For long standing admirers of Modiano's luminous writing as well as those readers encountering his work for the first time, Little Jewel will be an exciting discovery. Uniquely told by a young female narrator, Little Jewel is the story of a young woman adrift in Paris, imprisoned in an imperfectly remembered past. The city itself is a major character in Modiano's work, and timeless moral ambiguities of the post-Occupation years remain hauntingly unresolved. One day in the corridors of ... View More...
One of Flaubert's earliest writings, but published only after his death, 'Memoirs of a Madman' presents us with a oung man as he reflects - alternating between musings on the present and memories of the past - on the years that have brought him to madness, recalling the innocence of his boyhood, the first stirrings of sexual awakening and his abrupt initiation into the adult world. View More...
Meet Monsieur, your hero, a successful young executive in Paris whose daily life you will follow in precise detail. He is nothing if not unremarkable. Meet his secretary, his nieces, his fiancee and her parents, his neighbor whose scientific reports Monsieur unwittingly types out. What will happen? This and that. Monsieur will attend a party. He will babysit. But most of all, Monsieur will muse, and so will you muse, on everything from the night sky to a Rotring pen. And it will be very funny. Here Toussaint turns the ordinary into the extraordinary, an unremarkable anti-hero into a deadpan wi... View More...
Which came first, words or things? Are your words yours, or someone else's? And what do the Crusades have to do with it? And what do ants have to do with it? Jean Ricardou has been given something of a bad rap: he's widely seen as a difficult writer, or worse yet, as an intensely serious one. However, he easily sheds this weighty reputation in his hilariously playful new novel about the notoriously complex world of literary theory. Supplying his readers with everything they need to know to navigate this world, Ricardou uses his own irreverent interpretation of deconstructive theory to ask ques... View More...
Which came first, words or things? Are your words yours, or someone else's? And what do the Crusades have to do with it? And what do ants have to do with it? Jean Ricardou has been given something of a bad rap: he's widely seen as a difficult writer, or worse yet, as an intensely serious one. However, he easily sheds this weighty reputation in his hilariously playful new novel about the notoriously complex world of literary theory. Supplying his readers with everything they need to know to navigate this world, Ricardou uses his own irreverent interpretation of deconstructive theory to ask ques... View More...
The classic French novel celebrated for its deeply felt depiction of childhood. Neglected by his parents, bullied by his peers, left to wander the streets and woods by himself (that is, when he isn't locked in his room or the cellar for punishment), the little redheaded boy known as "Poil de Carotte" "Carrot Top"] manages to triumph through imagination, cunning, and sheer persistence. An inspiration to writers as diverse as Barthelme, Beckett, and Sartre, Jules Renard's timeless novel-in-stories is at once the lyrical account of a hard-knock provincial childhood and a frighteningly acute psyc... View More...
Ready to Burst follows the lives of two young men and their individual attempts to make sense of the deeply troubled society surrounding them. An informed critique of the "brain drain" prompted by the Duvalier dictatorship, Ready to Burst is, in Frank tienne's words, a portrait of "the extreme bitterness of doom in the face of the blind machinery of power." Widely recognized as Haiti's most important literary figure and an outspoken challenger of political oppression, Frank tienne was a candidate for the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2009. The New York Times has called Frank tienne "the Father... View More...
Nominated for the 2016 PEN Translation PrizeOne of Flavorwire's Top 50 Independent Books of 2015One of Entropy Magazine's Best Fiction Books of 2015One of Bookriot's 100 Must-Read Books Translated From FrenchSphinx is the remarkable debut novel, originally published in 1986, by the incredibly talented and inventive French author Anne Garr ta, one of the few female members of Oulipo, the influential and exclusive French experimental literary group whose mission is to create literature based on mathematical and linguistic restraints, and whose ranks include Georges Perec and Italo Calvino, among... View More...
In a New York as gritty and brutal as Charles Bukowski's Los Angeles--a city of muggings, cockroach-infested apartments, dank hospitals, and casual murders--three characters cross paths and collide. Sweet Tooth is a book of anonymous sexual encounters and of lust that grades into love: a story by one of the most brilliantly uncompromising innovators of gay literature that shocks with candor and builds to an incredible climax. Its last line--"Adventure is dead"--grounds everything that has come before and gives a conclusive, melancholy tone to a book that is much more than shocking. View More...
In a New York as gritty and brutal as Charles Bukowski's Los Angeles--a city of muggings, cockroach-infested apartments, dank hospitals, and casual murders--three characters cross paths and collide. Sweet Tooth is a book of anonymous sexual encounters and of lust that grades into love: a story by one of the most brilliantly uncompromising innovators of gay literature that shocks with candor and builds to an incredible climax. Its last line--"Adventure is dead"--grounds everything that has come before and gives a conclusive, melancholy tone to a book that is much more than shocking. View More...
The amusingly odd protagonist and narrator of Jean-Philippe Toussaint's novel is an academic on sabbatical in Berlin to work on his book about Titian. With his research completed, all he has left to do is sit down and write. Unfortunately, he can't decide how to refer to his subject Titian, le Titien, Vecellio, Titian Vecellio so instead he starts watching TV continuously, until one day he decides to renounce the most addictive of twentieth-century inventions. As he spends his summer still not writing his book, he is haunted by television, from the video surveillance screens in a museum to a m... View More...
The amusingly odd protagonist and narrator of Jean-Philippe Toussaint's novel is an academic on sabbatical in Berlin to work on his book about Titian. With his research completed, all he has left to do is sit down and write. Unfortunately, he can't decide how to refer to his subject Titian, le Titien, Vecellio, Titian Vecellio so instead he starts watching TV continuously, until one day he decides to renounce the most addictive of twentieth-century inventions. As he spends his summer still not writing his book, he is haunted by television, from the video surveillance screens in a museum to a m... View More...
FINALIST FOR THE NATIONAL BOOK AWARD FOR TRANSLATED LITERATUREA moving, unforgettable tribute to a Tutsi woman who did everything to protect her children from the Rwandan genocide, by the daughter who refuses to let her family's story be forgotten. The story of the author's mother, a fierce, loving woman who for years protected her family from the violence encroaching upon them in pre-genocide Rwanda. Recording her memories of their life together in spare, wrenching prose, Mukasonga preserves her mother's voice in a haunting work of art. View More...
This spare, unforgettable novel is Pierre Michon's luminous exploration of the mysteries of desire. A young teacher takes his first job in a sleepy French town. Lost in a succession of rainy days and sleepless nights, he falls under the spell of a town resident, a woman of seductive beauty and singular charm. Yvonne. Yvonne. "Everything about her screamed desire...setting something in motion while settling a fingertip to the counter, turning her head slightly, gold earrings brushing her cheek while she watched you or watched nothing at all; this desire was open, like a wound; and she knew it, ... View More...
A postmodern fairy tale might best describe Jacques Roubaud's delightful book The Princess Hoppy or, The Tale of Labrador. How else to describe a novel that reads like an Arthurian romance as rewritten by Lewis Carroll, with enough math puzzles to keep the game reader busy with a calculator for months? The tale concerns a princess, her faithful dog (who happens to be a wiz at math), four royal uncles always plotting, four royal aunts always potting, a lovesick hedgehog named Bartleby, two camels named North Dakota and South Dakota, four ducks who double as boats (thus called doats), and an amp... View More...
A postmodern fairy tale might best describe Jacques Roubaud's delightful book The Princess Hoppy or, The Tale of Labrador. How else to describe a novel that reads like an Arthurian romance as rewritten by Lewis Carroll, with enough math puzzles to keep the game reader busy with a calculator for months? The tale concerns a princess, her faithful dog (who happens to be a wiz at math), four royal uncles always plotting, four royal aunts always potting, a lovesick hedgehog named Bartleby, two camels named North Dakota and South Dakota, four ducks who double as boats (thus called doats), and an amp... View More...
Moving through a variety of locales and adventures, "The Truth about Marie" revisits the unnamed narrator of Toussaint's acclaimed Running Away, reporting on his now disintegrated relationship with the titular Marie--the story switching deftly between first- and third-person as the narrator continues to drift through life, and Marie does her best to get on with hers. Like all of Toussaint's novels, "The Truth about Marie"'s plot matters far less than its pace and tempo, its chain of images, its sequence of events. From pouring rain in Paris to blazing fires on the island of Elba, from moments ... View More...
Moving through a variety of locales and adventures, "The Truth about Marie" revisits the unnamed narrator of Toussaint's acclaimed Running Away, reporting on his now disintegrated relationship with the titular Marie--the story switching deftly between first- and third-person as the narrator continues to drift through life, and Marie does her best to get on with hers. Like all of Toussaint's novels, "The Truth about Marie"'s plot matters far less than its pace and tempo, its chain of images, its sequence of events. From pouring rain in Paris to blazing fires on the island of Elba, from moments ... View More...
In some kind of institution, maybe a hospital or rehabilitation center, we are introduced to Wert, a disturbed, traumatized man still suffering the horrors of his experience as a soldier fighting in an unidentified conflict. A patient or prisoner, Wert writes down his memories of the war; his impressions of his current, ill-defined treatment; and his reflections on his own psychological well-being. When at last released, Wert undertakes a long journey to the east, and slowly recognizes the events of his life as being reminiscent of episodes from ancient epic narratives--as though his entire st... View More...
In some kind of institution, maybe a hospital or rehabilitation center, we are introduced to Wert, a disturbed, traumatized man still suffering the horrors of his experience as a soldier fighting in an unidentified conflict. A patient or prisoner, Wert writes down his memories of the war; his impressions of his current, ill-defined treatment; and his reflections on his own psychological well-being. When at last released, Wert undertakes a long journey to the east, and slowly recognizes the events of his life as being reminiscent of episodes from ancient epic narratives--as though his entire st... View More...
