Mathilde Lewly—a female painter at the dawn of the twentieth century—has achieved notoriety among the Parisian avant-garde. She and her husband, also a talented young artist, pursue their separate vis
The African is a short autobiographical account of a pivotal moment in Nobel-Prize-winning author J. M. G. Le Clezio's childhood. In 1948, young Le Clezio, with his mother and brother, left behind a s
""Such was the battle that raged between Cousin K and me: good done badly; evil done well." So relates the unnamed narrator of Cousin K as he launches into the sad tale of his childhood. With his fath
The Hockey Sweater, the title story in this 20-story collection, has become an enduring classic: a Quebec boy and Habs fan is shipped a Toronto Maple Leafs sweater by mistake. It encapsulates everythi
For the centennial of Swann's Way: the most complete volume of Proust's poetry ever assembled, in a gorgeous deluxe edition?As a young man, Proust wrote both poetry and prose. Even after he embarked o
On May 16, 2003, fourteen suicide bombers launched a series of attacks throughout Casablanca. It was the deadliest attack in Morocco’s history. The bombers came from the shantytowns of Sidi Moumen, a
As one of the leading proponents of the nouveau roman, Nathalie Sarraute is often remembered for her novels, including The Golden Fruits, which earned her the Prix international de litterature in 1964
Poetic, comic, obsessed with minutiae, My Beautiful Bus is a welcome dose of serious frivolity at the expense of the contemporary novel. Based on an actual bus trip across France taken by Oulipo-membe
Winner of the Prix Medicis, this multifaceted literary novel follows the Jesuit scholar Athanasius Kircher across 17th century Europe and Eleazard von Wogau, a retired French correspondent, through mo
Gisele d’Estoc was the pseudonym of a nineteenth-century French woman writer and, it turns out, artist who, among other things, was accused of being a bomb-planting anarchist, the cross-dressing lover
In the first major study of representations of World War II in French crime fiction, Margaret-Anne Hutton draws on a corpus of over 150 texts spanning 60 years. Filling a gap in the fields of both cri
Silverman (modern French studies, U. of Leeds, UK) uses the term palimpsestic memory to describe a layering of memories-- something like a haunting of the present by past experiences--which he finds i
A comedy of manners that serves as an insightful look at the lives of those in the upper classes.?After two sisters, Laure and Marie, learn of their parents’ plan to sell the family’s summer retreat,
Under the pseudonym Eza Boto, Mongo Beti wrote Ville cruelle (Cruel City) in 1954 before he came to the world's attention with the publication of Le pauvre Christ de Bomba (The Poor Christ of Bomba).
Seyhmus Dagtekin's To the Spring, by Night, is the magical evocation of a childhood spent in a small Kurdish mountain village in Turkey, with no electricity and little literacy, but with a rich tradit
This tale of wild adventure reveals the dashed hopes of Africans living between worlds. When Moki returns to his village from France wearing designer clothes and affecting all the manners of a Frenchm
George Sand is one the most celebrated writers and controversial personalities of nineteenth-century France; she is as famous for her bohemian lifestyle as for her written work. The Last Love of Georg
On a crowded bus at midday, Raymond Queneau observes one man accusing another of jostling him deliberately. When a seat is vacated, the first man appropriates it. Later, in another part of town, Quene
Focusing on Stendhal, Gerard de Nerval, George Sand, Emile Zola, and Marcel Proust, The Subject of Space: Mapping the Self in Nineteenth-Century French Fiction explores the ways that these writers rep
