Like author Linda Le, the young woman who narrates this novel is from Vietnam and is a writer, a "dirty foreigner writing in French." The narrator has distanced herself not only from Vietnamese society but also from her family. Her story is an exercise in clear-eyed fury revealing three generations of a cursed family. The grandfather was a lunatic the family locked away and declared dead to avoid shame; the father is a failed artist and humiliated cuckold; the mother is a simpering beauty consumed with lust; the uncle is declared insane because of his incestuous love for his sister, who...

A work of understated elegance and cumulative power, this novel eases readers into a drama unfolding within a Catholic family in Italy on the eve of World War II. As scenes only dimly understood by the child Lorenza are revisited by the woman she becomes, what seemed a family affair-a romance involving Lorenza's mother, her father's Jewish friend Arturo, and her aunt Margot in Switzerland-begins to reveal the broader outlines of the drama of history, in particular the tragedy of Italy's Jews during the Holocaust. Limning the interplay of past and present, of memory and presence, this haunting...

In La funcion delta (1981), the second novel of the best-selling Spanish author Rosa Montero, the real world is as unmapped and treacherous as ever for her countrywomen, but more universal concerns impinge. Translated into English by Kari Easton and Yolanda Molina Gavilan, The Delta Function explores a woman's fears of being abandoned, of being alone, and of dying. A unique double narrative structure throws into relief time's effect on her self-identity, sexuality, and relations with others. Readers will be inspired to confront and rethink their own version of the world around them. Kari...

The Forbidden Woman tells the story of Sultana, an Algerian woman doctor who, after years spent living in France, returns to her native village in order to attend the funeral of a former lover. The clash between her origins and the Westernized life she now leads is explored in telling detail against the backdrop of current events in Algeria. A work that combines insight into both political and personal matters, The Forbidden Woman develops a complex portrait of a country torn between progress and prejudice, secular life and Islamic fundamentalism. In this passionate book, Malika Mokeddem...

Juxtaposing reality and fantasy, nightmares and dark laughter, Nadirs is a collection of largely autobiographical stories based on Herta Muller s childhood in the Romanian countryside. The individual tales reveal a child s often nightmarish impressions of life in her village. Seamlessly mixing reality with dream-like images, they brilliantly convey the inner, troubled life of a child and, at the same time, capture the violence and corruption of life under an oppressive state."

In an autumnal love story of erotic obsession, possessiveness, remembrance, oblivion, and time, an elderly woman dwells upon a failed love affair of some time past, when she was no longer young but not yet old. The narrator relives meeting her lover, Franz, at the natural history museum, when, for the first time in her life, she experiences all-consuming love and absolute happiness. Ultimately the affair founders because of her inability to believe that Franz will actually leave his wife. After he disappears from her life, she withdraws from the world, waiting for his return and revisiting...

Set in the German Democratic Republic of the early 1970s, The Life and Adventures of Trobadora Beatrice-a landmark novel now translated into English for the first time-is a highly entertaining adventure story as well as a feminist critique of GDR socialism, science, history, and aesthetic theory. In May 1968, after an eight-hundred-year sleep, Beatrice awakens in her Provence chateau. Looking for work, she makes her way to Paris in the aftermath of the student uprisings, then to the GDR (recommended to her as the "promised land for women"), where she meets Laura Salman, socialist trolley...

When Celeste Mogador's memoirs were first published in 1854 and again in 1858, they were immediately seized and condemned as immoral and unsuitable for public consumption. For a reader in our more forgiving times, this extraordinary document offers not only a portrait of the early life of an intelligent, courageous, and infinitely intriguing Frenchwoman but also an exceedingly rare inside look at the world of the courtesans and prostitutes of nineteenth-century France. Writing to conciliate judges and creditors, Mogador (born Celeste Venard in 1824) explains how with tenacity, wit, and...

When pregnant Rosie Carpe, her fatherless five-year-old son in tow, arrives in Guadeloupe looking for her elusive brother, Lazare, the world already seems a plenty confusing place. Could the man who comes to meet her, an elegant black man calling himself Lagrand, actually be her disheveled white brother? Are her parents, who abandoned her in Paris, rediscovering themselves in an outrageous second youth of outlandish affairs, or have they simply lost their minds? And does Rosie have a hope of slipping the sticky grasp of her former employer and seducer, who moonlights as a video pornographer?...

Bordeaux, a shrewd and moving portrayal of life in contemporary Europe, is the first novel to appear in English by Soledad Puertolas, one of the most acclaimed writers in Spain today. A novel that subtly takes the measure of our time, Bordeaux traces the fates of three people: Pauline Duvivier, an elderly woman who lives a solitary life in a tranquil suburb of Bordeaux; Rene Dufour, a Frenchman involved in unfulfilling relationships with several women; and Lilly Skalnick, a young American woman traveling in Europe. Their stories, which take place in France and elsewhere throughout Europe and...