How, this novel asks, can you imagine the worst when you are young and life is sunny? The answer lies in the telling of The Living, in which a young mother, with her teenage brother, takes her two small children to a deserted quarry on a hot summer afternoon. Seen through the eyes of the brother, Benoit, the drama plays out with all the power and seeming inevitability of classical tragedy, made all the more intense by the blistering heat of the day. On that blazing hot summer day Benoit, to entertain his nephews, seats them in a gondola and sends them down a cableway to the pylon on the other...

The Human Family is the first complete translation of the cycle of ten novellas that Lou Andreas-Salome (1861-1937) wrote between 1895 and 1898. This collection contributes to the rediscovery of Andreas-Salome's significance as a thinker and writer, above all with regard to her literary contribution to modern feminism and the principles of women's emancipation. Born in St. Petersburg to a German diplomat and his wife, Andreas-Salome has always been a figure of interest because of her close relationships to influential thinkers such as Friedrich Nietzsche, Rainer Maria Rilke, and Sigmund...

How do you live in Algeria when you grow up speaking French, with a French mother? How do you live in France when you ve spent your childhood in Algeria with an Algerian father? Tomboy is the story of a girl whose father calls her Brio, whose alter ego is Amine, and whose mother is a blue-eyed blond. But who is she? Born five years after Algerian independence in 1967, she navigates the cultural, emotional, and linguistic boundaries of identity living in a world that doesn t seem to recognize her.In this semiautobiographical novel, the young French Algerian author Nina Bouraoui...

Winner of the Prix Goncourt in 1998, this book is the work of one of France's most celebrated and interesting novelists writing at the height of her powers. It is fiction that leads readers through fascinating chambers of life where autobiography is constantly reimagined. A darkly comic novel about four women aging less-than-gracefully, Trading Secrets takes us to an academic conference in Kansas where, in an encounter between Aurore, a French woman, and her American counterpart, Gloria, the differences between their two cultures become sharply apparent. The result is a bitingly funny...

The letters between a young Dutch woman and a Swiss soldier.

After answering a classified ad placed by an import-export company looking for energetic young men willing to take on responsibilities for its African branches no diploma required Victor finds himself on The Will of God, a dilapidated boat heading into the heart of darkness as even Conrad couldn t have imagined. With the piquant mixture of hilarity and painful disenchantment characterizing Paule Constant s vision of the colonial novel, White Spirit follows three innocents Victor; Lola, a mulatto prostitute; and Alexis, who does not know he s a monkey as they negotiate the...

Patrick Modiano, winner of the 2014 Nobel Prize in Literature, is the author of more than thirty books and one of France's most admired contemporary novelists. Out of the Dark is a moody, expertly rendered tale of a love affair between two drifters. The narrator, writing in 1995, looks back thirty years to a time when, having abandoned his studies and selling off old art books to get by, he comes to know Gerard Van Bever and Jacqueline, a young, enigmatic couple who seem to live off roulette winnings. He falls in love with Jacqueline; they run off to England together, where they share a few...

What first appears as a tiny moving shadow, no bigger than a fly, on the dazzling horizon slowly reveals itself as the grim shape of violence and death; in the destruction left behind the mother s broken body, the hidden child, the crying infant begins the story of wandering and loss, of exile and desolation that sounds all the sad echoes of disappearing Bedouin life. Set in the first half of the twentieth century, Malika Mokeddem s Century of Locusts combines the magic of exquisitely wrought desert landscapes, the intrigue of Bedouin tales of madmen and poets, and the personal pain of...

In its moment of great splendor the novel was held as a mirror of society: Merce Rodoreda shatters that mirror in this, her most ambitious novel, which tells its story in brilliant fragments, a vision reflected and refracted and finally coming together in a richly articulated mosaic of life. Through this Broken Mirror, the reader sees events and characters spanning three generations and composing a kaleidoscopic family history ranging over six decades and turning upon events both intimate and historic most notably the Spanish Civil War.

Opening with Teresa Goday, the lovely young...

Patrick Modiano, winner of the 2014 Nobel Prize in Literature, is the author of more than thirty books and one of France's most admired contemporary novelists. Out of the Dark is a moody, expertly rendered tale of a love affair between two drifters. The narrator, writing in 1995, looks back thirty years to a time when, having abandoned his studies and selling off old art books to get by, he comes to know Gerard Van Bever and Jacqueline, a young, enigmatic couple who seem to live off roulette winnings. He falls in love with Jacqueline; they run off to England together, where they share a few...