Books in the French List series

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.

An engrossing novel about love and grief that introduces an important francophone author to English-speaking readers. Rome, 2014, late summer. While he is reading on his sun-drenched terrace, Giangiacomo‿s heart stops. A quick, painless death‿something he had always hoped for, his daughter, Elvira, remembers. A few days later, Elvira comes across an unfinished manuscript in her father‿s flat. In it, she discovers a love story between Giangiacomo‿Gigi, to his loved ones‿and a Belgian journalist, Clara, which had been going on for over four years. Gigi‿s manuscript tells of how their “mature love,â€? an expression that became code between Gigi and Clara, blossomed unexpectedly and of the happiness of their meetings, the abandon of their bodies, their laughter, the films they watched and rewatched together. As she struggles to cope with the loss of Gigi, Clara writes her own version of their story. Her “journal of absenceâ€? is first addressed to Gigi, then, gradually, to Elvira. She confides in the young woman on the threshold of adult life, with discretion and tenderness, describing the fullness of the hidden love she shared with her father.

A play that recounts the tragic death of Patrice Lumumba, the first prime minister of the Congo Republic and an African nationalist hero.

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

"Baudelaire is indeed the greatest exemplar in modern poetry in any language," said T. S. Eliot. We experience Baudelaire in myriad ways through his multifaceted writing. His sensuous poems--dreams of escape to an impossible, preferably tropical, elsewhere--draw us in with their descriptive and perceptual richness. There is also the bitter, compassionate, and desolate Baudelaire. Ultimately, Baudelaire's true genius might reside in his expressive force and in the tension between his passions and intellect. The latter is most evident in his control of rhetoric and poetic form, and--given the poems' density of language, thought, and feeling--his astonishing clarity. This new English rendition of Baudelaire by award-winning translator Beverley Bie Brahic includes poems from his celebrated volumes: Les Fleurs du mal, Les âEpaves, Le Spleen de Paris, and Paradis artificiels. It also includes several of his prose poems, as well as an excerpt from his famous essay on wine and hashish. The poems in verse have Baudelaire's French originals on facing pages; the prose poems, unaccompanied by their originals, are printed near the poems in verse with which they resonate. Complete with the translator's illuminating introduction and notes, this beautifully crafted volume is an important addition to Baudelaire's work in English translation. -- provided by publisher