Books in the French Literature series

Oliver Rohe's first novel is a word-crazed monologue in the mind of a man named Selber flying back to his wartorn native country for the first time in years. Grappling with his fear of flying and increasingly possessed by reminiscences of his long-dead childhood friend Roman, the narrator begins to wonder if any of his thoughts, or the decisions he has made in his life, are truly his own. From meditations upon loss, violence, repetition, and individuality, to explicit homages to the works of Thomas Benhard, Without Origin is a remarkable and incisive debut.

Jean Rolin's Savannah is an elegy of sorts to his close friend British fashion photographer, Kate Barry, retracing the trip they took together through the American South. Rolin's immense descriptive talent, his minute topographical detail, and his poetic, documentary writing come together in a work that looks as much to keep death at a distance as to confront it directly.

Mathilde Lewly-a female painter at the dawn of the twentieth century-has achieved notoriety among the Parisian avant-garde. She and her husband, also a talented young artist, pursue their separate visions side by side in a Clichy atelier, galvanized by the artistic ferment that surrounds them. But the couple are threatened by the shadow of Mathilde's little sister, Eugenie: since the two girls' sudden departure from their native England, Eugenie has been determined to vault the eight years separating her from Mathilde. Now, devoured by envy and haunted by a past she never actually experienced, the "e;little one"e; hurls herself into the artistic and personal life of her elder sister. It is the birth of a fierce rivalry, an emotional tug-of-war, played out against the bohemian riot of the last century's wildest years. But will the First World War's sudden and brutal eruption allow Mathilde to escape this intimate conflict and achieve her destiny?

In this widely acclaimed translation, Dominic DiBernardi expertly captures Celine's trademark style of prose which has served as inspiration to such American writers as Philip Roth, Kurt Vonnegut, William Burroughs, Jack Kerouac, Charles Bukowski, Norman Mailer and Joseph Heller.

A memoir and meditation on the themes of separation and silence, The Summer of the Elder Tree was Marie Chaix's first book to appear in fourteen years, and deals with the reasons for her withdrawal from writing and the events in her life since the death of her mother (as detailed in Silences, or a Woman's Life). With uncompromising sincerity, and in the same beautiful prose for which she is renowned, Marie Chaix here takes stock of her life as a woman and writer, as well as the crises that caused her to give up her work. The Summer of the Elder Tree has its roots in Chaix's previous books while standing alone as a work of immense power: a new beginning.

In a mythical African land, some shipwrecked and uniquely talented passengers stage a grand gala to entertain themselves and their captor, the great chieftain Talou. In performance after bizarre performance-starring, among others, a zither-playing worm, a marksman who can peel an egg at fifty yards, a railway car that rolls on calves' lungs, and fabulous machines that paint, weave, and compose music-Raymond Roussel demonstrates why it is that Andre Breton termed him "e;the greatest mesmerizer of modern times."e; But even more remarkable than the mind-bending events Roussel details-as well as their outlandish, touching, or tawdry backstories-is the principle behind the novel's genesis, a complex system of puns and double-entendres that anticipated (and helped inspire) such movements as Surrealism and Oulipo. Newly translated and with an introduction by Mark Polizzotti, this edition of Impressions of Africa vividly restores the humor, linguistic legerdemain, and conceptual wonder of Raymond Roussel's magnum opus.

In this nominally true story of an epic, transcontinental road trip, Jean Rolin travels to Africa from darkest France, accompanying a battered Audi to its new life as a taxi to be operated by the family of a Congolese security guard. The ghost of Joseph Conrad haunts Rolin's journey, as do memories of his expatriate youth in Kinshasa in the early 1960s-but no less present are W. G. Sebald and Marcel Proust, who are the guiding lights for Rolin's sensual and digressive attack upon history: his own as well as the world's. By turns comic, lyrical, gruesome, and humane, The Explosion of the Radiator Hose is a one-of-a-kind travelogue, and no less an exploration of what it means to be human in a life of perpetual exile and migration.

With an undercurrent of sensual excitement, C line paints an almost unbearably vivid picture of society and the human condition.

Comprised of 150 poems, with a title taken from Charles Baudelaire's "Les Fleurs du Mal", this collection skips from the strict form of the sonnet to the freedom of prose poetry. It contains a variety of forms and tones that work together to describe Paris, its people, its writers, its monumental past, and its unsteady response to change.

-- First paperback edition.-- In this madcap metafictional mystery a 22-year-old philosophy student (Hortense) is kidnapped and a dog is murdered -- the imaginary country of Poldevia is somehow involved. Arranged in the form of a sestina (replete with authorial asides and plenty of puns, jokes and wordplay), this is the second installment in Roubaud's popular and widely acclaimed "Hortense" series.-- A professor of mathematics at the University of Paris X Nanterre and a long time member of Oulipo, the Workshop for Potential Literature, Jacques Roubaud is the author of several novels and works of poetry.-- First published in the U.S. by Dalkey Archive (1989).

The tale is simple, if grim: a disenfranchised teenage boy from the housing projects on the outskirts of Paris rapes and murders the manager of the supermarket where his mother works. But Gerard Gavarry is a writer who knows how literary inventiveness can shed new light on a serious subject, and Hoppla! tells its story three times, in three separate sections, each in a different tone or mode and with different sets of images and vocabularies. The first relies on tropical images and the characters speak in a lexicon borrowed from the coconut industry--as if the Parisian suburbs had been transported to an exotic shore; the second is nautical in nature; the third invokes the mythology of the centaur, and ancient Greece butts up against modern-day France. Gavarry's bloody and poetic narrative takes dead aim at the social, political, and personal roots of violence, and argues for the transformative power of fiction.

Based on the life of Post-Impressionist painter Paul Gauguin, Jacques Jouet's "Savage" compels the reader to ask whether it is the primitive or the civilized man who is savage. At the height of the Belle ?poque, an eccentric young clothing designer searches for inspiration and identity as an artist among the "savage" peoples of France's colonies. Influenced by several exotic lovers, a quirky "vieille" dame, and ?douard Manet himself, Paul's increasingly unconventional designs parallel his increasingly unbalanced state of mind as he struggles to find a market for his work among the haute bourgeoisie. The failure of this venture, coupled with psychosis due to an untreated illness, ultimately leads to his demise.

When French mafioso Oscar Lux saved Clovis Baccara from killing himself, he became the boss and something of a mentor to Clovis. Twenty years later, it is no surprise that Clovis is named best man when Oscar decides to settle down and get out of the business. Fulfilling his role as second-hand man, Clovis is entrusted with the job of guarding Oscar's new bride when Oscar is taken into police custody for embezzlement and racketeering on the day after his wedding. Alone on his boss's honeymoon in Los Angeles with Oscar's incredibly attractive new wife, Clovis tries his hardest to adhere to the one rule he has given himself, the rule which gets harder to heed as each moment passes: do not touch.

Into the sooty mouth of New York walks Luc, a French visitor whose life collides with those of Rasky and Lucy in a series of raw encounters as sensual and sensory as the tastes of the city itself. From his disconcerting arrival at Customs to Navarre's incredible ending, here, every step of Luc's odyssey is recounted with detail.