Heralded as one of France s greatest poets, Yves Bonnefoy has been dazzling readers since the publication of his first book in 1953. He remains influential and relevant, continuing to compose groundbreaking new work. Though Bonnefoy recently celebrated his ninetieth birthday, many are calling these past two decades his most impressive yet.
His latest book of poetry and prose, The Digamma, fits wonderfully into his impressive oeuvre, offering his signature style of simple but powerful language with fresh new grace. A key passage of the title piece of the book depicts the figures of...

We Are the Birds of the Coming Stormis a wild novel that oscillates between fiction and reality. The story centers on two young women: Voltairine, a dancer who no longer dances but whose body is still haunted by the movement of dance, and her soulmate Emile, a young woman recovering from unexpected cardiac arrest. The girls are inseparable, and both their lives have been shattered by the horrors of rape. The opening of the dreamlike novel sets a bleak stage as Voltairine watches Emile lying in a hospital bed, her temperature dropping to dangerous levels. Voltairine is filled with...

When Anna discovers a long letter that her mother Marie wrote, Marie has been dead for some time, and Anna is shocked to learn that her mother disappeared with a secret. The letter is addressed to Marie s first great love, a much older teacher who she describes as a great dinosaur. In this gripping novel by Florence Noiville, we follow along with Anna as she tries to unravel the mystery of her deceased mother s past. She takes her questions to her family and to her mother s friends: Did Marie send the letter? Was it received? Who was this man, and is he still alive? In a desperate search, she...

Praised by Paul Auster as one of the rare poets in the history of literature to have sustained the highest level of artistic excellence throughout an entire lifetime, Yves Bonnefoy is widely considered the foremost French poet of his generation. Proving that his prose is just as lyrical, Rue Traversiere, written in 1977, is one of his most harmonious works. Each of the fifteen discrete or linked texts, whose lengths range from brief notations to long, intense, self-questioning pages, is a work of art in its own right: brief and richly suggestive as haiku, or long and intricately...

Should you find yourself strolling along the coastal heights of Douarnenez, a Brittany town near the westernmost point of continental France, you would do well to look out for a signpost marked, Georges Perros (1923 1978) Dazzled by the sea. Perros, who famously made that remark and settled there in 1959, was initially an actor but is now best known for his literary output, which was marked by stylistic freshness and frank criticism. Perros lived anonymously in the fishing port of Douarnenez, scraping by as a freelance author and manuscript reader who taught and published a few books, but...

As he leaves the cinema where he has just watched "Casablanca," one of his favorite films, Julien is approached by a mysterious young woman, Claire. Unbeknownst to Julien, Claire has been following him for several days. Outside the cinema she relays a cryptic message: Someone s trying to find you. She insists that as a practitioner of the little-known science of narrative psychology she is acting as the anonymous individual s intermediary. Slowly, Julien allows himself to be sucked into Claire s investigation, and a strange odyssey through his past ensues.
In this novel by Marc Auge, a...

Prolific essayist, translator, and critic Pascal Quignard has described his Last Kingdom series as something unique. It consists, he says, neither of philosophical argumentation, nor short learned essays, nor novelistic narration, but comes, rather, from a phase of his work in which the very concept of genre has been allowed to fall away, leaving an entirely modern, secular, and abnormal vision of the world.
In "Abysses," the newest addition to the series, Quignard brings us yet more of his troubling, questing characterssouls who are fascinated by what preceded and conceived them. He...

Roland Barthes, whose centenary falls in 2015, was a restless, protean thinker. A constant innovator, often as a daring smuggler of ideas from one discipline to another, he first gained an audience with his pithy essays on mass culture and then went on to produce some of the most suggestive and stimulating cultural criticism of the late twentieth century, including Empire of Signs, The Pleasure of the Text, and Camera Lucida. In 1976, this one time structuralist outsider was elected to a chair at France s preeminent College de France, where he chose to style himself as...

Roland Barthes, whose centenary falls in 2015, was a restless, protean thinker. A constant innovator, often as a daring smuggler of ideas from one discipline to another, he first gained an audience with his pithy essays on mass culture and then went on to produce some of the most suggestive and stimulating cultural criticism of the late twentieth century, including "Empire of Signs," " The Pleasure of the Text," and" Camera Lucida." In 1976, this one time structuralist outsider was elected to a chair at France s preeminent College de France, where he chose to style himself as professor of...

Roland Barthes, whose centenary falls in 2015, was a restless, protean thinker. A constant innovator, often as a daring smuggler of ideas from one discipline to another, he first gained an audience with his pithy essays on mass culture and then went on to produce some of the most suggestive and stimulating cultural criticism of the late twentieth century, including "Empire of Signs," " The Pleasure of the Text," and" Camera Lucida." In 1976, this one time structuralist outsider was elected to a chair at France s preeminent College de France, where he chose to style himself as professor of...