Pierre Michon’s writing has received great acclaim in his native France; his work has been translated into a dozen languages. He was winner of the Prix France Culture in 1984 for his first book, Small Lives; the 1996 Prix de la Ville de Paris for his body of work; and the Grand Prix du Roman de l’Académie française. His works include Masters and Sons, The Origin of the World, and Rimbaud’s Son.Ann Jefferson teaches French at the University of Oxford. She has translated works by Gérard Macé and Pascal Quignard.

“Michon demonstrates the independence of voice that marks a true writer. . . . His supple prose, dappled with chiaroscuro effects, is used in straightforward chronicles. But his writing can at any time lift or lower into semi-hallucinatory effects that recall Arthur Rimbaud’s assaults on conventional perception.”—Roger Shattuck, New York Review of Books“Excellent news on the Michon translation front: an exceptional translator has, at last, appeared. . . . There is the velocity, the precision, the music, the compression, the singularity, the power. . . . [Michon’s] vision . . . appears with all its French force in Ann Jefferson’s exceptional transplantation.”—Wyatt Mason, New York Review of BooksLonglisted for the 2015 Best Translated Book Award, fiction category, organized by Three Percent, a resource for international literature based at the University of RochesterSelected as a finalist of the French-American Foundation Translation Prize“[Michon] has become a member of that family known as the authors I admire, I trust, I want to read.”—Richard Howard“An astonishingly rich, mythic new direction in modern French narrative.”—Guy Davenport

Pierre Michon’s writing has received great acclaim in his native France; his work has been translated into a dozen languages. He was winner of the Prix France Culture in 1984 for his first book, Small Lives; the 1996 Prix de la Ville de Paris for his body of work; and the Grand Prix du Roman de l’Académie française. His works include Masters and Sons, The Origin of the World, and Rimbaud’s Son.Ann Jefferson teaches French at the University of Oxford. She has translated works by Gérard Macé and Pascal Quignard.

“Michon demonstrates the independence of voice that marks a true writer. . . . His supple prose, dappled with chiaroscuro effects, is used in straightforward chronicles. But his writing can at any time lift or lower into semi-hallucinatory effects that recall Arthur Rimbaud’s assaults on conventional perception.”—Roger Shattuck, New York Review of Books“Excellent news on the Michon translation front: an exceptional translator has, at last, appeared. . . . There is the velocity, the precision, the music, the compression, the singularity, the power. . . . [Michon’s] vision . . . appears with all its French force in Ann Jefferson’s exceptional transplantation.”—Wyatt Mason, New York Review of BooksLonglisted for the 2015 Best Translated Book Award, fiction category, organized by Three Percent, a resource for international literature based at the University of RochesterSelected as a finalist of the French-American Foundation Translation Prize“[Michon] has become a member of that family known as the authors I admire, I trust, I want to read.”—Richard Howard“An astonishingly rich, mythic new direction in modern French narrative.”—Guy Davenport

Pierre Michon’s writing has received great acclaim in his native France; his work has been translated into a dozen languages. He was winner of the Prix France Culture in 1984 for his first book, Small Lives; the 1996 Prix de la Ville de Paris for his body of work; and the Grand Prix du Roman de l’Académie française. His works include Masters and Sons, The Origin of the World, and Rimbaud’s Son.Ann Jefferson teaches French at the University of Oxford. She has translated works by Gérard Macé and Pascal Quignard.

“Michon demonstrates the independence of voice that marks a true writer. . . . His supple prose, dappled with chiaroscuro effects, is used in straightforward chronicles. But his writing can at any time lift or lower into semi-hallucinatory effects that recall Arthur Rimbaud’s assaults on conventional perception.”—Roger Shattuck, New York Review of Books“Excellent news on the Michon translation front: an exceptional translator has, at last, appeared. . . . There is the velocity, the precision, the music, the compression, the singularity, the power. . . . [Michon’s] vision . . . appears with all its French force in Ann Jefferson’s exceptional transplantation.”—Wyatt Mason, New York Review of BooksLonglisted for the 2015 Best Translated Book Award, fiction category, organized by Three Percent, a resource for international literature based at the University of RochesterSelected as a finalist of the French-American Foundation Translation Prize“[Michon] has become a member of that family known as the authors I admire, I trust, I want to read.”—Richard Howard“An astonishingly rich, mythic new direction in modern French narrative.”—Guy Davenport