Николя Матьё0.0 August 1992. Fourteen-year-old Anthony and his cousin decide to steal a canoe to fight their all-consuming boredom on a lazy summer afternoon. Their simple act of defiance will lead to Anthony's first love and his first real summer — that one summer that comes to define everything that follows.
Over four sultry summers in the 1990s, Anthony and his friends grow up in a France trapped between nostalgia and decline, decency and ra
Zahia Rahmani0.0 Muslim: A Novel is a genre-bending, poetic reflection on what it means to be Muslim from one of France's leading writers. In this novel, the second in a trilogy, Rahmani's narrator contemplates the loss of her native language and her imprisonment and exile for being Muslim, woven together in an exploration of the political and personal relationship of language within the fraught history of Islam. Drawing inspiration from the oral histories of her native Berber language, the Koran, and French children's tales, Rahmani combines fiction and lyric essay in to tell an important story, both powerful and visionary, of identity, persecution, and violence.
Негар Джавади4.2 Si nous étions en Iran, cette salle d’attente d’hôpital ressemblerait à un caravansérail, songe Kimiâ. Un joyeux foutoir où s’enchaîneraient bavardages, confidences et anecdotes en cascade. Née à Téhéran, exilée à Paris depuis ses dix ans, Kimiâ a toujours essayé de tenir à distance son pays, sa culture, sa famille. Mais les djinns échappés du passé la rattrapent pour faire défiler l’étourdissant diaporama de l’histoire des Sadr sur trois générations : les tribulations des ancêtres, une décennie de révolution politique, les chemins de traverse de l’adolescence, l’ivresse du rock, le sourire voyou d’une bassiste blonde…
Une fresque flamboyante sur la mémoire et l’identité ; un grand roman sur l’Iran d’hier et la France d’aujourd’hui.
Анн Гаррета0.0 Not One Day begins with a maxim: “Not one day without a woman.” What follows is an intimate, erotic, and sometimes bitter recounting of loves and lovers past, breathtakingly written, exploring the interplay between memory, fantasy, and desire.
“For life is too short to submit to reading poorly written books and sleeping with women one does not love.”
Anne Garréta, author of the groundbreaking novel Sphinx (Deep Vellum, 2015), is a member of the renowned Oulipo literary group. Not One Day won the Prix Médicis in 2002, recognizing Garréta as an author “whose fame does not yet match their talent.”
Антуан Володин4.0 One of Volodine's funniest books, Bardo or Not Bardo takes place in his universe of failed revolutions, radical shamanism, and off-kilter nomenclature.
In each of these seven vignettes, someone dies and has to make his way through the Tibetan afterlife, also known as the Bardo. In the Bardo, souls wander for forty-nine days before being reborn, helped along on their journey by the teachings of the Book of the Dead.
Unfortunately, Volodine's characters bungle their chances at enlightenment, with the recently dead choosing to waste away their afterlife sleeping, or choosing to be reborn as an insignificant spider. The still-living aren't much better off, making a mess of things in their own ways, such as erroneously reciting a Tibetan cookbook to a lost comrade instead of the holy book.
Once again, Volodine has demonstrated his range and ambition, crafting a moving, hysterical work about transformations and the power of the book.
Antoine Volodine is the primary pseudonym of a French writer who has published twenty books under this name, several of which are available in English translation, such as Minor Angels, and Writers. He also publishes under the names Lutz Bassmann and Manuela Draeger.
J. T. Mahany is a graduate of the Master of Arts in Literary Translation Studies program at the University of Rochester and is currently studying for his MFA at the University of Arkansas.
