Les Fugitives – förlag

PRIX CELESTE 2001"Marcel Proust passed away on the 18th of November. It was 1922. One day, I could no longer resist: I went in search of him. "I prowled about, I visited the rooms where he had lived, I caught glimpses of abandoned chateaus and haunted places, I walked in his footsteps. I wanted to see what his eyes had seen. I looked at his photographs, I uncovered relics and little treasures. I tried to find out who he had been in life, what he had really been like. I interrogated those among the dead who could still reply: his friends, his confidants, those who had crossed paths with him. "Who was he? The dandy who set out for salons as though on a foreign expedition? Or the invisible man who flinched from the light, the character in a thriller? The brilliant writer was concealing a doppelganger, and I pursued him as though tracking down a missing relative." - Jerome Prieur

Friendship has its own distinctive seasons, constantly changing and evolving, just as the years revolve. Cooking for a friend, you can show your affection in a direct, practical way. Composing a menu to suit or intrigue a particular beloved person, you are demonstrating how well you understand and appreciate them.This book is divided into three overlapping seasons, following the 1929 classic La bonne cuisine by Madame Saint-Ange. In each section you will find dishes and suggestions appropriate to the season as well as ideas for particular seasonal moments, such as sardine baguettes à la Colette, designed to be packed into bicycle baskets for picnics. The recipes are designed to be straightforward to follow so you can concentrate on your guest rather than dashing between stove and table.This is a book to stimulate your appetite to invite a dear friend round as soon as possible and cook for them.

In her final year of a degree in psychology, and struggling to relate to the world around her and find her place within it, a young woman drifts from lectures on gifts, vision, the history of global warming, and study groups discussing babies manipulating objects. Yet nothing seems to bring her closer to the great insight she's been promised - except, perhaps, for her budding interest in a fellow student named Luke, a postgraduate in computer sciences, with whom a series of seemingly mundane encounters provides her with a hint of what she might be looking for - a hidden meaning to all that surrounds her. But a chasm between them that grows and shrinks unexpectedly calls into question whether he might be as incomprehensible as the world around her. She yearns, and continues to endeavour to shape her experiences and environment - a Louise Bourgeois exhibition, the underwhelming men she meets on Tinder, a Mitski song, the dreams she has of Luke's ex-girlfriend - she narrates all as she grapples with questions of embodiment and subjectivity.Set in an unnamed campus in England in the early 2020s, To Rest Our Minds and Bodies queries the nature of one's experience, mapping the disintegration of a young woman's sense of self and her struggle to keep a grip on reality. From a voice as unique as it is relatable, and in prose that is keenly observant, delightfully wry, and utterly despairing, the anonymous narrator of this unconventional coming-of-age novel is as brave as she is unforgettable.'A work of art. Armstrong's prose has that meticulous and urgent quality reminiscent of Beckett and Duras, achieving the same uncanny shared consciousness that keeps you hooked from the first sentence... It charts some deep and dark territories we all know but barely acknowledge. It cuts through the platitudes of love and life in a way most writers wouldn't dare.' - Luke Kennard, author of Notes on the Sonnets'There is great skill and craft involved in the construction of a voice which feels simultaneously as alive and deliberate... Harriet Armstrong is unafraid to look honestly at sex, love and humiliation and consequently has written a book which is somehow both confronting and warm.'-Rachel Connolly, author of Lazy City'An assertive and captivating novel, To Rest Our Minds and Bodies is a poignant portrait of the uncertain state of being alive.' - Rebecca Watson, author of I Will Crash'The rarest debut... a must read, a new immediate classic, a heart-wrenching work of fiction that for once tells the real truth about being young, ravenous, desperate, too big for the container of the body of youth.... This novel is written in gold - every line is marvellous and perfect. I can't believe this novel exists.' - Luke Goebel, author of Fourteen Stories, None of Them Are Yours'A novel of humiliations and revelations where heartbreak gets logged in a spreadsheet. Harriet Armstrong has a singular voice, writing girlhood like a field study - obsessive, precise, and unexpectedly tender.'- Madeline Cash, author of Earth Angel'There is something so beautifully gentle, humane and optimistic about the writing, that is uplifting despite the sadness of the plot. There is a real sense of freedom in the prose - an openness, a plasticity, a suppleness. This is ultimately unflinching and brave prose.' - SJ Naude, author of The Alphabet of Birds'A devastating page-turner of an impossible love story, with insight and surprise on every page. Reading this felt like being given pure, clean glasses after wearing really stressfully and depressingly dirty glasses for many years.'- Adelaide Faith, author of Happiness Forever'An astonishingly poised, absorbing debut. It combines conceptual erudition with an attention to the body, sexuality and the cadences of everyday life in a voice that is both sophisticated and winningly uncynical.'- Alice Blackhurst, author of Luxury, Sensation and the Moving Image

A Best Debut Novel of the Year (Daily Mail) - "Raw and compelling"Incontemporary and Edwardian London, two women are grieving the loss of a lovedone. Stella, turning thirty, is increasingly isolated after her mother died ofcancer; Julia, surrounded by friends, is longing for solitude as she mourns herdaughter, a young photographer who died after her return from an expedition inthe jungle of Sri Lanka. Mysteriouslyconnected across time and space by a haunting image, each explores, in her ownvoice, the complexities of the mother-daughter bond and family estrangement.From the banks of the Thames in present-day south-east London to the coast ofEast Devon and the Sri Lankan rainforest a hundred years earlier, CharlotteBeeston's delicate debut novel moves with aching lucidity between tendernessand raw emotion. Charting the ebb and flow of the grieving process, The White Flower captures the impact of loneliness on the femalepsyche, and the permanence of love, art and friendship.

She is famous throughout the world, but how many know her name? You can admire her figure in Washington, Paris, London, New York, Dresden or Copenhagen but where is her grave? She danced as a 'petit rat' at the Paris Opera. She was also a model, she posed for painters and sculptors - among them Edgar Degas. Taking us through the underbelly of the Belle Epoque, Laurens casts a light on those who have traditionally been overlooked in the study of art, and opens a space for essential questions. She paints a compelling portrait of Marie van Goethem and the world she inhabited, in the 1880s; a time when art unsettled the hypocrisy of society.

On 8 March 2008 the Italian performance artist Pippa Bacca set out to hitchhike from Milan to Jerusalem in a wedding dress, documented with a video camera. On 31 March her body was found in woods on the outskirts of Istanbul.In telling the young woman's story, which overwhelms her and inexorably draws her in, Leger recounts the different stages of her research and the writing of the book. She strikes upon something fundamental within Bacca's performance: the desire to remedy the unfathomable nature of violence and war. Ultimately, she must face up to the failure of the young woman's endeavour.As she surveys the terrain of performance art and continues her examination of portrayals of the female condition, as in her earlier books, Leger explores the existential mystery and harsh truths expressed in Bacca's work, and that of other performance artists.The White Dress closes what is now regarded as a trilogy that begins with Exposition and is followed by Suite for Barbara Loden.

A love letter to Paris written in iPhone notes and in the troubling intimacy of public transport post-Charlie Hebdo attacks, Lauren Elkin's diary of a year on a Parisian bus pays homage to Georges Perec and Annie Ernaux. In this chronicle of the ordinary makings of a city and its people, the author's own body is a threatened vessel; that of the author as a woman as an author as a pregnant woman on the bus.

A French woman haunted by her encounter with an American-German pianist-composer who is obsessed with Arnold Schoenberg's portrait, flies home with her lively sister and a volume of Adorno's letters to Thomas Mann. While the impossible heroine unpicks her social failures the pianist reaches towards a musical self-portrait with all the resonance of Schoenberg's passionate, chilling blue. A novel of angst and high farce, Blue Self-Portrait unfolds among Berlin's cultural institutions but is more truly located in the mid-air flux between contrary impulses to remember and to ignore. Noemi Lefebvre shows how music continues to work on and through us, addressing past trauma while reaching for possible futures.

I was trying not to think about looking for work, which is immoral, I wasn't hoping to earn a living, which is pretty unusual, I couldn't have cared less about the cash, which is reckless in these times of very grave threats, but I was scraping a living already, which was repugnant, on the miniscule royalties from a thickwit novel, which is scandalous, which I'd created from the stories of a brilliant and brittle grand dame of theatre, survivor of a romance full of stereotypes, which makes you think though I don't know what about.' Sparring with the spectre of an over-bearing father, torn between the push to find a job and the pull to write, the narrator wanders into a larger debate, one in which the troubling lights of Kafka, Kraus, and Klemperer shine bright. Set against the backdrop of police brutality and rising nationalism that marked the state of emergency following the 2015 terrorist attacks in Paris, Poetics of Work takes a jab at the values of late capitalism. Hence these ten 'lessons to today's young poets' - a blistering treatise of survival skills for the wilfully idle

Rural Iraq, during the war against the so-called Islamic State. A pregnancy out of wedlock. The young woman knows her fate is sealed. In crystalline prose May the Tigris Grieve for You enters the minds of all protagonists, before and after death; fragments of the legend of Gilgamesh, the Mesopotamian hero who carries along the memory of the country and its people, punctuate the family members' short monologues, spaced with the mythical voice of the Tigris River, who has seen it all.; Inspired by her experience of Iraq's complex reality and brutal wars, Malfatto delivers an uncompromising yet compassionate insight into a rigid society ruled by fathers and sons, a world in which life matters less than honour. Winner of the Prix Goncourt du Premier Roman 2021.

First published in France in 2012 to critical and popular acclaim, this is the first book about the remarkable American actress and filmmaker Barbara Loden. Loden's 1970 film Wanda is a masterpiece of early cinéma vérité, an anti-Bonnie-and-Clyde road movie about a young woman, adrift in rust-belt Pennsylvania in the early 1960s, who embarks on a crime spree with a small-time crook. How to paint a life, describe a personality? Inspired by the film, a researcher seeks to piece together a portrait of its creator. In her soul-searching homage to the former pin-up girl famously married to Hollywood giant Elia Kazan, the biographer's evocative powers are put to the test. New insights into Loden's sketchy biography remain scarce and the words of Marguerite Duras, Georges Perec, Jean-Luc Godard, Sylvia Plath, Kate Chopin, Herman Melville, Samuel Beckett and W.G. Sebald come to the narrator's rescue. As remembered scenes from Wanda alternate with the droll journal of a flailing research project, personal memories surface, and with them, uncomfortable insights into the inner life of a singular woman who is also, somehow, every woman.

'"One day we wake up and the future hasdisappeared." So begins adult life in Troumaron, a run-down area of Port-Louis,in Mauritius. But Devi's young protagonists resist this erasure; boldest amongthem is Eve, one of the most compelling fictional characters I've everencountered - she's up there with Ferrante's Lila. And fans of Ferrante'sNeapolitan novels will also recognise in Devi's account of marginalised urbanlives a similar commitment to the truth of how the dispossessed struggle. Anextraordinary novel, beautifully translated by Jeffrey Zuckerman.'- NatashaSoobramanienTwogirls: Eve, whose body is her only weapon and source of power; Savita, Eve'sbest friend and the only one who loves her selflessly, planning to leave, butnot without Eve.Twoboys: Saadiq, gifted would-be poet, deeply in love with Eve; Clelio, theneighbourhood tough, waiting without hope for his brother to send for him fromFrance.All aredesperate to escape the cycle of fear and violence in which they are trapped.

Progressing by image and word associations, Fremon evokes Bourgeois's history and inner life, bringing a sense of fascinating and moving proximity to the internationally renowned artist... The art world's grande dame and its shameless old lady, who spun personal history into works of profound strangeness, speaks out with her characteristic insolence and wit, and comes to vibrant life again through the words of a most discrete, masterful writer. From her childhood in France to her exile and life in America, to her death; her relationships to her family and her young assistant, her views on landmark male artists, the genesis of her own work... through the moods, barbs, resentments, reservations and back, at full speed - this is a phosphorescent account of Bourgeois's life, as could only be captured by the imagination of one artist regarding another.

In a large country house, shut off from the world within a gated garden, three young women responsible for the education of a group of little boys are hanging paper lanterns for a party. Their desires, however, lie elsewhere... Meet The Governesses: wild or drifting about in a melancholy calm, spied upon by Monsieur Austeur, fascinated by the ever more mysterious unfolding of events, like the charms and spells of a midsummer night's dream...

A slim, emotionally and thematically rich book of poetry, a grammar of the world is Les Fugitives' first poetry publication and Jeanne Benameur's second book published in English, offering a new and more personal look into her own history and writing practice. For Jeanne Benameur, the Egyptian goddess Isis is a sister who advances with her along the seashore. Like her, poetry responds to life's call where the blue of the sky mingles with the blue of the sea. She is unity rediscovered.Drawing on subjects as diverse as the author's childhood traumatic flight from the Algerian War of Independence in the late 1950s, the modern migrant crisis, the transformative power of writing, the freedom of second-language literacy, and the long history of the Mediterranean, a grammar of the world is brought into harmony by the central mythological figure, who personifies a careful reknitting of the world and repairing of ancient wounds through the act of writing

'It all started with a letter to my father. It had been about ten years since his death, and I suddenly felt like writing to him about the silence, his silence, the silence between us. It started in 2020, as a necessity. The silence, then, was striking. It resonated with other erased voices, other voids, other emotions. I thought I would not be able to stop. Neither diary, nor essay, nor short story, Blackout is a weaving, a braid made of these lines of silence, and tells, in fragments, the story of a dispossession, of an entry into darkness.' - Yann Chateigne Tytelman

Present-day Minneapolis. Dr Ana Jovanovic, oncologist, goes against the advice of her hospital's tumour board and schedules her patient Jonathanfor exploratory surgery. She is proved right when the surgery reveals that he has cancer. But when tragedy strikes,Ana is sent into a tailspin. She takes an unplanned sabbatical, hoping to rediscover herself outside her dual, devouring roles of doctor and mother to fifteen-year-old Maggie. Now sharply aware of her own mortality, the doctor is confronted with decisions about quality of lifeand quality of death.

To satisfy his father's request that he rescue his drifting cousin, Emil - a young Creole from a wealthy background - sets aside his medical studies to move in with his working-class relatives in the unfamiliar city of Stadmutter - the mother city. Among his indifferent kin Emil is first disquieted by days of aimlessness and then diverted by his sexual and intellectual encounters with Bolling, a rich, Haitian-German autodidact with preternatural charisma. Emil begins an ambiguous relationship with Tamsin, a graduate student obsessed with Sigmund Freud's theories and with her place in a society marked by shifting cultural hierarchies..Beneath its veneer of indolence, Stadmutter seethes. Through his relationships with Bolling and Tamsin, Emil is pulled into the orbit of Braeem Shaka - the leader of a Creole movement that is threatening the country's fragile racial progress with its demands for reparations - and ever further from the possibility of a return to his earlier life as a promising neurosurgeon.

Banyuls-sur-Mer, French Catalonia: one hot summer in the 1970s, the lives of three generations of women converge in the long tropical garden hidden behind the Villa Wintrebert, named after the biologist wholived there with his wife. As in her debut After Nora (2024), Penelope Curtis deftly weaves fact and fiction in this moving story of childhood and of adult complicity. Harmony beween la belle Eugenie and the young Monique is disrupted when a well-intentioned commission to the renowned local sculptor, Aristide Maillol, shines a light on the fundamental fragility of the women's relationship, on whichthe villa and its garden had depended. Decades later, Monique invites Eva and her two little girls into the villa, where traces of the past imprint themselves on the present.

Available in English for the first time, these letters are taken from the several hundred letters anthologised by French art historian Germain Viatte, published in 2014 by Le bruit du temps. As well as an intriguing investigation of one of the great 20th-century painters, these are also the letters of a writer. From his adolescence onwards, Nicolas de Staël developed an incisive style of his own, capturing – as in his paintings – the reality of what he saw with the intensity of pure simplicity.'Nicolas de Staël’s letters are imbued with that mixture of absolute certitude and profound doubt which is the mark of a great artist. His belief in his destiny – which arises from faith – places the bar so high that it will always be impossible to clear. … He had the premonition that the path would be long and winding before it ever broke onto a clearing. Staël is not, like Raphaël, Géricault or Seurat, a precocious genius. If he must be compared to one of his predecessors, it is impossible not to think of Van Gogh.’ – Jean Frémon‘This selection of letters begins in 1926 when de Staël was 12 years old and ends with the last letter he wrote on the day he died. De Staël wrote thousands of letters – to his adoptive parents, his wives and lovers, his children, gallery owners and dealers, poets, fellow painters and those who bought his work. They describe the course of his life from young man eagerly awaiting a cheque from a family member at a post office in Cadiz so he can buy his daily kilo of tomatoes, his wine, his newspaper, paints, canvases and sketchbooks, to the final months, when black gulls began to gather on his canvasses, bringing a darker, inky sense of foreboding to work that until then had been characterised by a boundless sense of colour and light. The letters also show the evolution of his understanding of painting, of what painting actually is, of the human cost – what part of the self must be sacrificed to it. And always he is aware of the complementary roles of language and painting. De Staël’s work, though it bears traces of figuration, is never illustrative; the writing is his illustrative tool, and his own words provide a dazzling commentary on the paintings.’ – Helen Stevenson

An enduring delight for readers and cooks alike.' - Nigella Lawson'So manymicro feasts, and every one of them nourishment for body and soul.' - RachelCooke, author of Kitchen PersonWhether cooking for one on a daily or an occasional basis, cooking well foryourself means cherishing yourself and your appetites, joyously giving yourselfpleasure, opening yourself to new experiences. This book will encourage you todo all that. - M. R.A unique work of literary and culinary joie de vivre, part food memoir,part recipe book, French Cooking for One is Michele Roberts' firstcookbook, and a personal and quirky take on Edouard de Pomiane's ten-minutecooking classic. Once a food writer for the New Statesman, Roberts wasborn in 1949 and raised in a bilingual French-English household, learning tocook from her French grandparents in Normandy. Her love of food and cookery hasalways shone through in her novels and short stories.French cuisine, classic though it is, stillholds delicious surprises. From quick bites for busy days to sumptuous maincourses for those who enjoy spending more time in the kitchen, the focusthroughout is on dishes that are simple and fun to prepare, and results thatare mouthwatering to contemplate and, of course, to eat.With over 160 delicious recipes, the majorityof which are vegetarian, combined with piquant storytelling and feminist wit,French Cooking for One is a working cook's book with French flair, burstingwith life and illustrated with the author's original ink drawings, full ofcharm and humour.More than a handbook of classic Frenchdishes, French Cooking for One does something that few, if any,cookbooks do: it bears testimony to a singular literary life.Gorgeouslywritten vignettes of Roberts' childhood in Normandy and of her years living inPays de la Loire are peppered with anecdotes about intellectual and artisticluminaries: an omelette prepared by Gertrude Stein's cook for Picasso; a simplepasta dish calling to mind the French philosopher Julia Kristeva and theScottish poet Alison Fell's images of female orgasm; and Emma Bovary'sextraordinary wedding cake, among others.

In this mosaic portrait of a singular everywoman, an undutiful daughter details her mother's immutable rituals and her irrepressible anarchy. We Still Have the Telephone also describes a life laid out in detail, quietly registering the fuzziness of the line between eccentricity and madness. Erica Van Horn's quirky, literary assemblage of fragments from the past and present evokes that of her fellow American writer and artist Joe Brainard.

A woman addresses letters to an absent loved one while in the apartment opposite hers, a mysterious female figure keeps on appearing under a landscape painter’s brush. Directing her reader and characters with a deftness reminiscent of Alfred Hitchcock’s Rear Window, Lucie Paye dramatizes the power of unconditional love and the role of the unconscious in artistic creation. From Paris to Naples, Mauritius and London Absence traces a poignant search for redemption and truth, among the lies that destroy lives.; ‘In this remarkable debut, the story of a painter fixated with a ghostly female figure becomes entwined with the story of a woman seeking to connect with a long-lost son. A delicate tale of artistic obsession and creation, and a moving meditation on longing and loss.’ — Ángel Gurría-Quintana, Financial Times

Through a subtly crafted chorus of female voices from Edith Wharton to bell hooks, to Schulmann's contemporaries, Clara Schulmann blurs the boundaries between body and art; personal and political. As she tries to collect them for an essay she is planning to write, other women's words begin interfering in Clara Schulmann's life - heard on the radio, in podcasts, songs, and films; words of novelists, feminist intellectuals, friends or strangers overheard in the street. Like weeds, like bad seeds, these wayward words invade her psyche, reshaping the essay that she once had in mind into a picaresque adventure. Sinuous, evocative and timely, CHICANES reveals Clara Schulmann as an author whose own voice is going to hold weight in years to come. In a further fine-tuning of Clara Schulmann's experiment, her work comes into English through the work of eight female translators.

'Portrait Tales offers a compelling series of behind-the-scenes stories about both well-known and little-known masterly portraits from world art history and, therefore, about the famous or unduly forgotten or neglected artists who painted them. Jean Fremon enables us to look both behind and, not least, into the 'magic mirrors', as he phrases it in his French title, with which artists paint their own self-portraits. To tell his tales, he uses a colourful palette of phenomena related to how portraits are made and to how people pose for them; he highlights not only the painterly but also the psychological, sociological and political backgrounds informing the artist and the model.' (John Taylor, from the preface)

Ari, Eleni and Hesper meet one summer at Golden Apples Farm in rural California, where the charismatic Lee, an apple farmer and cook, runs an alternative therapy programme for young women suffering from eating disorders. A year later, they reunite to testify at his trial. Their individual and collective stories build into a multifaceted picture of trauma and survival in this psychological thriller infused with magic realism. In sensuous, hypnotic prose, Wilder captures the magnetic pull of forbidden fruit.

In the late 1850s, Celina, aged fifteen, born into poverty, takes up work as a chambermaid for the Victor Hugo family living in exile in Guernsey. There she encounters the delicate balance between the professional and the personal, and the obligations placed upon her as her livelihood is at stake. Inspired by Hugo's cryptic diary notes and by letters from his wife, Catherine Axelrad restores to life the girl whose untimely death shook the Hugo family, capturing the changing time in which she lived as well as life in the Channel Islands. In doing so, Axelrad sheds light on the complexity of Hugo's private persona and cuts le grand homme down to size. Intimately involved with him, Celina remains at the margins of the poet's creative life; she recounts her relationship both with the artist who is writing his Miserables by day and with the man who joins her at night. First published by Editions Gallimard in 1997, this novella offers a singular perspective on matters of sexual consent and class dynamics: one which makes us take stock of social progress, but also wonder how far we have really come today.

Studded with five gouache drawings by Louise Bourgeois, this erudite, witty fable by the acclaimed author of Now, Now, Louison (2018) considers the ambiguous figure of the baby Jesus and its representation in the artistic canon.' 'One day in 2007,' recalls Jean Fremon about a visit to artist Louise Bourgeois's studio, 'I discovered an entirely new series of drawings.... silhouettes of women with embryos in their wombs, drawn with a brush full of water and red gouache. These drawings were, for me, the most poignant of her long career.'

From the brilliant, sui generis Anne Serre - author of the celebrated Governesses - come three bewitching, thoroughly out-of-the-way tales. 'To make a pact with the thing that threatens you is arguably the smartest trick of all.' 'The Fool' may have stepped out of a tarot pack - to walk a mountain trail or worm his way into a writer's mind. 'The Narrator' proposes his mirror image, a storyteller in sheep's clothing, who has a bone to pick with language. In 'The Wishing Table', the orgiastic antics of an incestuous family are recounted by one of three daughters. A dream logic rules each of these unpredictable, sensual and surreal stories: romps no doubt, yet deeply moral, and entirely unforgettable ones.