Books in the French List series

A lyrical novel with a poetic narrative about an overlooked individual in Arab African history. For two days the rabbi rides on a donkey to find the ideal fiancée. Legs and arms shaved, hands dyed with henna, a girl to be married must shine like a mirror. Every girl hopes to be the chosen one and ride off on a donkey to live in the city. The desert is the domain of men; they believe they see oases and palm trees sagging with fruit, while women see only sand on top of sand. A rapid look-around at the girls in the circle was enough for the traveling rabbi to find the right one. He chooses Yudah because of her name, a contraction of Yahuda, and because she lowered her eyes when he looked at her. The Fiancée Rode In on a Donkey tells Yudah's story. Instead of experiencing her dream of being chosen and riding off on a donkey to live in a palace, she finds herself in an encampment of tents swaying in the wind. She also doesn't find the Emir, who is battling on other fronts and soon surrenders. Yudah and the rest of his followers are exiled to Ile Sainte-Marguerite, where she pursues a tireless quest for her future husband in France, seeking a man she has never seen. Will the fantastic destiny of the young girl from the desert ever be fulfilled? In lyrical novel after novel, Vénus Khoury-Ghata chooses overlooked individuals from history and brings them back to life on the page. Hauntingly unforgettable, The Fiancée Rode In on a Donkey is yet another poetic narrative from one of the most respected French authors of our times.

A major collection of essays and interviews from an iconic 20th-century philosopher in five volumes, now all available together in paperback.   Roland Barthes 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 Collÿge de France, where he chose to style himself as a professor of literary semiology until his death in 1980.   The greater part of Barthes‿s published writings has been available to a French audience since 2002, but now, translator Chris Turner presents a collection of essays, interviews, prefaces, book reviews, and other journalistic material for the first time in English and divided into five themed volumes. Volume five, Simply a Particular Contemporary includes four interviews Barthes conducted between 1970 and 1979, varying widely in style and content.

A lyrical novel concerning belonging, foreignness, and ethnicity.   Following the path of her late geneticist husband, Laure arrives in the town of Malaterra in the harsh mountains of Abruzzo in Italy, where her husband was studying the close-knit Albanian inhabitants. At first an intruder, she is gradually accepted by the population, which is made up of amusing, eccentric characters. Among them: Helena, who hanged her dishonored daughter from the fig tree in her garden, and who has been waiting for thirty years with her gun for her daughter's rapist to return; the Kosovar, a distrusted bookseller languishing in his dusty shop; Mourad, the baker, who proposes marriage to Laure and every other woman who enters his bakery; and Yussuf, the postman, who makes his rounds even if there is no mail to deliver. We also meet the unfortunate assailant who returns from his exile to reclaim and restore his family home. With humor and compassion, this book brings to life the inhabitants of a small, remote town in the mountains of Abruzzo.

Mingling fact and fiction, The Three Rimbauds imagines how Rimbaud‿s life would have unfolded had he not died at the age of thirty-seven. The myth of Arthur Rimbaud (1854‿1891) focuses on his early years: how the great enfant terrible tore through the nineteenth-century literary scene with reckless abandon, leaving behind him a trail of enemies, the failed marriage of an ex-lover who shot him, and a body of revolutionary poetry that changed French literature forever. He stopped writing poetry at the age of twenty-one when he left Europe to travel the world. He returned only shortly before his death at the age of thirty-seven.    But what if 1891 marked not the year of his death, but the start of a great new beginning: the poet‿s secret return to Paris, which launched the mature phase of his literary career? This slim, experimental volume by Dominique Noguez shows that the imaginary “matureâ€? Rimbaud‿the one who returned from Harar in 1891, married Paul Claudel‿s sister in 1907, converted to Catholicism in 1925, and went on to produce some of the greatest works in twentieth-century French prose‿was already present in the almost forgotten works of his childhood, in style and themes alike. Only by reacquainting ourselves with the three Rimbauds‿child, young adult, and imaginary older adult‿can we truly gauge the range of the complete writer.

Disguised as a passenger, a homeless woman lives in Paris‿s Roissy airport until she meets a man who makes her confront her past. Every day the narrator of this gripping novel hurries from one terminal to another in Charles de Gaulle Roissy airport, Paris, pulling her suitcase behind her, talking to people she meets‿but she never boards an airplane. She becomes an “unnoticeable,â€? a homeless woman disguised as a passenger, protected by her anonymity. When a man who comes to the airport every day to await the Rio-to-Paris flight‿the same route on which a plane crashed into the sea a few years earlier‿attempts to approach her, she flees, terrified. But eventually, she accepts his kindness and understands his loss, and she gives in to the grief they share, forming a bond with him that becomes more than friendship. A magnificent portrait of a woman who rediscovers herself through a chance connection, Roissy is a powerful, polyphonic book, a glimpse at the infinite capacity of the human spirit to be reborn. Â

Introducing a refreshing young French voice to English readers, this slim novel is both a riveting love story and an examination of humanity‿s assault on the natural world. After a seven-day journey on the South Atlantic Ocean aboard a lobster boat servicing Cape Town, Ida arrives on the island of Tristan. In the little island community, a village nestled on the slopes of a volcano whose only limits are the immense sky and the ocean, her bearings are gradually shifted as time slowly begins to expand.   When a cargo ship runs aground near a neighboring island, spilling massive amounts of oil, there is suddenly frantic activity in the town. Ida eagerly joins a team of three men who go to the small island to rescue oil-drenched penguins. One night, one of the men walks her back to the cabin where she is staying. They experience a night of love that continues to grow on the secluded island. For two weeks away from the world‿the sea is rough, no boat can come to pick them up‿the dance of their bodies and their all-consuming love is their only horizon.   Following the rhythm of the ocean and the untamed wind, Clarence Boulay brilliantly gives flesh to a dizzying sensation of sensual abandonment. Tristan raises emotional sails and upends all certainty.

We defy augury. There‿s a special providence in the fall of a sparrow. If it be now, ‿tis not to come ‿ the readiness is all. Under the sign of Hamlet‿s last act, Hélÿne Cixous, in her eightieth year, launched her new book‿and the latest chapter in her Human Comedy, her Search for Lost Time. Surely one of the most delightful, in its exposure of the seams of her extraordinary craft, We Defy Augury finds the reader among familiar faces. In these pages we encounter Eve, the indomitable mother; Jacques Derrida, the faithful friend; children, neighbors; and always the literary forebears: Montaigne, Diderot, Proust, and, in one moving passage, Erich Maria Remarque. We Defy Augury moves easily from Cixous‿s Algerian childhood, to Bacharach in the Rhineland, to, eerily, the Windows on the World restaurant atop the World Trade Center, in the year 2000. In one of the most astonishing passages in this tour-de-force performance of the art of digression, Cixous proclaims: “My books are free in their movements and in their choice of routes [‿] They are the product of many makers, dreamed, dictated, cobbled together.â€? This unique experience, which could only have come from the pen of Cixous, is now available in English, and readers are sure to delight in this latest work by one of France‿s most celebrated writer-philosophers. Â