French List – serie

After the failed revolutions of 1848, Galicia has been brought under the rule of the Habsburg Empire, and the Zemka family find themselves embroiled in the struggle for Polish independence. This is a history of Eastern Europe told in miniature through the tumultuous saga of one family as they try to reclaim their estate in the decades of violence and political confusion that follow. In this extraordinary novel, Diane Meur calls upon an unusual narrator: the ancestral house itself-the House of Shadows of the title-which, from behind its unmoving facade, watches the comings and goings of generations of inhabitants. The house is everywhere in the story, hearing and observing everything; it encompasses all the shadows of a past that it knows better than its occupants do. But it envies the mobility of those who reside there, and though the years pass, nothing changes for the house. Like the house, the Zemka women-mothers and daughters, aunts and nieces-are condemned to a certain immobility. At home, they wait for love, passion, and stories of the calamitous events on the horizon.On the threshold of the twentieth century, only one young woman manages to escape from beneath the weight of her family's house and the historical conflagrations to come.

As the aftershocks of the latest economic meltdown reverberate throughout the world, and people organize to physically occupy the major financial centers of the West, few experts and even fewer governments have dared to consider a world without the powerful markets that brought on the crash. Yet, as Francois Morin explains in "A World Without Wall Street?", this is the very step that needs to be taken as quickly as possible to avoid a perpetual future of dehumanizing working conditions, devastated ecosystems, and the submission of public policies to private interests. In this insightful and radical take on global finance, Morin recommends nothing less than a revolutionary reconstruction of the international monetary system. More, he recommends that the laws of societies be reformed so that the power of management may be shared among all of the actors involved in production, not concentrated in the hands of the few. This shift, argues Morin, will transform the monetary system into a common good for all of humanity, rich or poor.With Wall Street at the center of the very power structure that needs to be dismantled, Morin takes broad aim at the purely speculative financial games and arcane instruments by which the global economy and its citizens are held captive. In this very timely and provocative book, Morin bravely offers a way forward - instead of simply triaging a hemorrhaging system, he persuasively asks us to consider a subversive reinvention.

In his well-known work of art criticism Art of the Modern Age, Jean-Marie Schaeffer offered a lucid and powerful critique of what he identified as the historically dominant thinking about art and aesthetics from the Jena Romantics to Nietzsche, Heidegger, Adorno, and beyond, which he termed "the speculative theory of art." In Beyond Speculation, Schaeffer builds from this significant work, rejecting not only the identification of the aesthetic with the work of art, but also the Kantian association of the aesthetic with subjectively universal judgment. In his analysis of aesthetic relations, he opens up a space for a theory of art that is free of historicism and capable of engaging with noncanonical and non-Western arts. By engaging with the ideas of Arthur Danto, Gerard Genette, Nelson Goodman, George Dickie, and Rainer Rochlitz, and evoking a range of aesthetic experience from Proust to King Kong to Japanese temple design, Beyond Speculation makes an original and engaging contribution to the development of the philosophy of culture.

From the publication of his first book in 1953, Yves Bonnefoy has been considered the most important and influential French poet since World War II. A prolific writer, critic, and translator, Bonnefoy continues to compose groundbreaking new work sixty years later, constantly offering his readers what Paul Auster has called "the highest level of artistic excellence." In The Present Hour, Bonnefoy's latest collection, a personal narrative surfaces in splinters and shards. Every word from Bonnefoy is multifaceted, like the fragmented figures seen from different angles in cubist painting-as befits a poet who has written extensively about artists such as Goya, Picasso, Braque, and Gris. Throughout this moving collection, Bonnefoy's poems echo each other, returning to and elaborating upon key images, thoughts, feelings, and people. Intriguing and enigmatic, this mixture of sonnet sequences and prose poems - or, as Bonnefoy sees them, "dream texts" - moves from his meditations on friendship and friends like Jorge Luis Borges to a long, discursive work in free verse that is a reflection on his thought and process.These poems are the ultimate condensation of Bonnefoy's life in writing, and they will be a valuable addition to the canon of his writings available in English.

Heralded as one of France's greatest poets, Yves Bonnefoy has been dazzling readers since the publication of his first book in 1953. He remains influential and relevant, continuing to compose groundbreaking new work. Though Bonnefoy recently celebrated his ninetieth birthday, many are calling these past two decades his most impressive yet. His latest book of poetry and prose, The Digamma, fits wonderfully into his impressive oeuvre, offering his signature style of simplistic but powerful language with fresh new grace. A key passage of the title piece of the book depicts the figures of Nicolas Poussin's The Shepherds of Arcadia, which Bonnefoy has identified as crucial to the artist's evolution. The sustained reference to Poussin's iconography serves to ground the text in the lost civilizations of antiquity. Subtly, it brings out the underlying theme of the entire collection-in the ambivalent world we inhabit, being and nonbeing is fundamentally one.As a leading translator of Shakespeare in France, Bonnefoy's fascination with the master playwright is displayed in "God in Hamlet" and "For a Staging of Othello," two poems in prose which belong to an ongoing series of meditations on the plays. The collection also includes haunting reflections on children, nature, the origins of art, and vanished cultures.

Roland Barthes, whose centenary falls in 2015, 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 College de France, where he chose to style himself as professor of literary semiology until his death in 1980. The greater part of Barthes's published writings have been available to a French audience since 2002, but here, translator Chris Turner presents a collection of essays, interviews, prefaces, book reviews, and other journalistic material for the first time in English.Divided into five themed volumes, readers are presented in volume one, 'A Very Fine Gift' and Other Writings on Theory, with Barthes's attempts to frame his lifelong curiosities in theoretical form, from his early musings on the sociology of literature through his high period of structuralism to his later reflections on Derrida.

Praised by Paul Auster as "one of the rare poets in the history of literature to have sustained the highest level of artistic excellence throughout an entire lifetime," Yves Bonnefoy is widely considered the foremost French poet of his generation. Proving that his prose is just as lyrical, Rue Traversiere, written in 1977, is one of his most harmonious works. Each of the fifteen discrete or linked texts, whose lengths range from brief notations to long, intense, self-questioning pages, is a work of art in its own right: brief and richly suggestive as haiku, or long and intricately wrought in syntax and thought; and all are as rewarding in their sounds and rhythms, and their lightning flashes of insight, as any sonnet. "I can write all I like; I am also the person who looks at the map of the city of his childhood, and doesn't understand," says the section that gives the book its title, as he revisits childhood cityscapes and explores the tricks memory plays on us.A mixture of genres - the prose poem, the personal essay, quasi-philosophical reflections on time, memory, and art - this is a book of both epigrammatic concision and dreamlike narratives that meander with the poet's thought as he struggles to understand and express some of the undercurrents of human life. The book's layered texts echo and elaborate on one another, as well as on aspects of Bonnefoy's own poetics and thought.

Should you find yourself strolling along the coastal heights of Douarnenez, a Brittany town near the westernmost point of continental France, you would do well to look out for a signpost marked, "Georges Perros (1923-1978) 'Dazzled by the sea.'" Perros, who famously made that remark and settled there in 1959, was initially an actor but is now best known for his literary output, which was marked by stylistic freshness and frank criticism. Perros lived anonymously in the fishing port of Douarnenez, scraping by as a freelance author and manuscript reader who taught and published a few books, but mostly corresponded with fellow writers or rode his motorcycle along the country roads. Indeed, Perros is known for his fame-shunning habits and for choosing to take up residence far from the sophistication of the capital city. But behind the folksy, sometimes sighing, sometimes bitter, sometimes sardonic, sometimes even resigned voice lurks an intensely sensitive, highly cultivated ruminator on the human condition.He is best remembered for the autobiographical poems collected in Blue Poems and An Ordinary Life, as well as for Paper Collage, his compendium of maxims, vignettes, short prose narratives, occasional diary-like notations, critical remarks, and personal essays. Making this essential work available for the first time in English, this book presents a selection of these touching and thought-provoking short texts alongside numerous maxims, a genre in which Perros excelled. With typical modesty, the author called himself a journalier des pensees, a day labourer who tills thoughts. As readers, we can do no better than to read the tilled thoughts of Georges Perros.

When Anna discovers a long letter that her mother, Marie, wrote, Marie has been dead for some time, and Anna is shocked to learn that her mother disappeared with a secret. The letter is addressed to Marie's first great love, a much older teacher who she describes as a great dinosaur. In this gripping novel by Florence Noiville, we follow along with Anna as she tries to unravel the mystery of her deceased mother's past. She takes her questions to her family and to her mother's friends: Did Marie send the letter? Was it received? Who was this man, and is he still alive? In a desperate search, she tries to piece together the clues. Attachment explores the obsessive relationship of love, observing both mother and daughter under its magnifying glass. Readers ultimately find Anna and Marie both seeking answers to the same question: What is there inside of us that makes us become so attached to someone we never should have approached? The novel also questions the link between love and writing, the stories that love inspires, and the way in which we construct and own the story of our lives. Praise for the French edition.

Roland Barthes, whose centenary falls in 2015, 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 College de France, where he chose to style himself as professor of literary semiology until his death in 1980. The greater part of Barthes's published writings have been available to a French audience since 2002, but here, translator Chris Turner presents a collection of essays, interviews, prefaces, book reviews, and other journalistic material for the first time in English. Divided into five themed volumes, readers are presented in volume two, 'The "Scandal" of Marxism' and Other Writings on Politics, with a wide range of Barthes's more overtly political writings, with an emphasis on his early work and the serious national turbulence in the French 1950s.

Roland Barthes, whose centenary falls in 2015, 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 College de France, where he chose to style himself as professor of literary semiology until his death in 1980. The greater part of Barthes's published writings have been available to a French audience since 2002, but here, translator Chris Turner presents a collection of essays, interviews, prefaces, book reviews, and other journalistic material for the first time in English. Divided into five themed volumes, readers are presented in volume five, 'Simply a Particular Contemporary': Interviews, with four interviews Barthes conducted between 1970 and 1979, varying widely in style and content.

Last season, Seagull Books published the first three volumes in a new series collecting essays and interviews by the late French thinker Roland Barthes. This season they’ll bring the five-volume set to completion with the publication of “Masculine, Feminine, Neuter” and Signs and Images.“Masculine, Feminine, Neuter,” consists of Barthes’s writing on literature, covering his peers and influences, writers in French and other languages, contemporary and historical writers, and world literature. This volume comprises Barthes critical articles and interviews previously unavailable in English.Taken together, the five volumes in this series are a gift to Barthes’ many fans, helping to round out our understanding of this restless, protean thinker and his legacy.

As he leaves the cinema where he has just watched Casablanca, one of his favorite films, Julien is approached by a mysterious young woman, Claire. Unbeknownst to Julien, Claire has been following him for several days. Outside the cinema she relays a cryptic message: "Someone's trying to find you." She insists that as a practitioner of the little-known science of narrative psychology she is acting as the anonymous individual's intermediary Slowly, Julien allows himself to be sucked into Claire's investigation, and a strange odyssey through his past ensues. In this novel by Marc Auge, a master of ethnofiction, the two meet up in Paris cafes to discuss the events of their lives - Occupation and Liberation, the Algerian War, and 1968- and Julien puzzles over who in his past could be searching for him. His ex-wife? An enigmatic lover from a seedy corner of Berlin? Soon, Julien realizes he is in the midst of a mysterious game of confession with a woman he knows nothing about. In a quick reversal, he shines the spotlight on Claire. Who is she, and why are her questions so intense? Why does she seem focused on one particular year - 1968?As the story unravels, we begin to understand that the puzzling nature of Claire's quest proves to be a metaphor for other enigmas, including the mysteries of the heart. Beautifully written, Someone's Trying to Find You is a haunting addition to Seagull's French List, and it should not be missed.

Pascal Quignard is an enigmatic author whose writings rove with great poise across the worlds of literary and artistic endeavour, classical and modern, across folk tale, myth and legend, and yet encapsulate moments of intense present experience, evoking with just a word or a phrase the sense of each moment's suffusion by an enormous cosmic past. Quignard's human beings are troubled, questing souls, fascinated always by the mystery of what preceded them and conceived them - in both the broadest and the narrowest possible senses. Abysses is part of Quignard's 'Last Kingdom' series, which the author himself has described as something 'strange'. It consists, he says, 'neither of philosophical argumentation, nor short learned essays, nor novelistic narration', but comes, rather, from a phase of his work in which the very concept of genre has been dropped or, perhaps more accurately, allowed to fall away. The aim is for an overarching form of thinking - 'an entirely modern vision of the world, an entirely secular vision of the world, an entirely abnormal vision of the world.'As in the previous volumes in this series published by Seagull, Roving Shadows and The Silent Crossing, the text is a rich mix of anecdote and reflection, of aphorism and quotation, of enigmatic glimpses of the present and confident, pointed borrowings from the past - particularly the European classical past in which the author is so much at home. But when Quignard raids the murkier corners of the human record, he does so not as a historian but as an antiquarian. He is not someone interested in the world for its prim and proper historical narratives (after all, as he points out, 'In the USSR, for example, in the middle of last century, the past was completely unpredictable. For fifty years what had happened in the past changed from one day to the next.'). He is in pursuit, rather, of those stories which repeat and echo across time, stories which, if not literally timeless, dance to a rhythm that we do not ordinarily contemplate, a rhythm that channels a force which seems at times to exceed our everyday conceptions of the transcendent by many orders of magnitude.

Widely considered the foremost French poet of his generation, Yves Bonnefoy has wowed the literary world for decades with his diffuse volumes. First published in France in 2008, The Anchor's Long Chain is an indispensable addition to his oeuvre. Enriching Bonnefoy's earlier work, the volume, translated by Beverley Bie Brahic, also innovates, including an unprecedented sequence of nineteen sonnets. These sonnets combine the strictness of the form with the freedom to vary line length and create evocative fragments. Compressed, emotionally powerful, and allusive, the poems are also autobiographical-but only in glimpses. Throughout, Bonnefoy conjures up life's eternal questions with each new poem. Longer, discursive pieces, including the title poem's meditation on a prehistoric stone circle and a legend about a ship, are also part of this volume, as are a number of poetic prose pieces in which Bonnefoy, like several of his great French predecessors, excels. Long-time fans will find much to praise here, while newer readers will quickly find themselves under the spell of Bonnefoy's powerful, discursive poetry.Praise for Bonnefoy "Few exceptions of contemporary French letters deserve the attention of the reading public in America more than Bonnefoy...His writings are an important lighthouse on the contemporary cultural coastline."-Hudson Review "Bonnefoy's poems, prose, texts, and penetrating essays have never ceased to stimulate both the writing of French poetry and the discussion of what its deepest purpose should be...He is one of the rare contemporary authors for whom writing does not-or should not-conclude in utter despair, but rather in the tendering of hope."- France Magazine

One of the foremost poets of the French Resistance, Rene Char has been hailed by Donald Revell as "the conscience of modern French poetry." Translated by Mark Hutchinson, The Inventors is a companion volume to Char's critically acclaimed Hypnos. It gathers more than forty poems that represent a cross-section of Char's mature work, spanning from 1936 to 1988. All three genres of Char's work are represented here: verse poems, prose poems, and the abrupt, lapidary propositions for which he is best known. These maxima sententia combine the terseness of La Rochefoucauld with the probing and sometimes riddling character of the fragments of Heraclitus. The Inventors includes a brief introduction to Char's life and work, as well as a series of notes on the backstories of the works, which explain allusions that may not be immediately familiar to the English-speaking reader. These new translations stay true to the originals, while at the same time conveying much of the music and beauty of the French poems. Praise for Rene Char "Char, I believe, is a poet who will tower over twentieth-century French poetry."-George Steiner

A controversial figure of the postwar French literary and cultural scene, Marguerite Duras has exerted a powerful hold on readers around the world. This volume of interviews—hailed on its French publication as Duras’s “secret confession”—offers readers a rich vein of new insight into her work, opinions, life, and relationships.The interviews that make up the book were conducted in 1987, when Italian journalist Leopoldina Pallotta della Torre met the seventy-three-year-old Duras at her Paris flat and convinced her to sit for a series of conversations. The resulting book was published in Italian in 1989, but it somehow failed to attract a French publisher, and it was quickly forgotten. Nearly a quarter of a century later, however, the book was rediscovered and translated into French, and, it has now become a sensation. In its revealing pages, Duras speaks with extraordinary freedom about her life as a writer, her relationship to cinema, her friendship with Mitterand , her love of Chekhov and football, and, perhaps most significantly, her childhood in pre-war Vietnam, the experiences that propelled her most famous novel, The Lover.A true literary event, finally available in English, The Suspended Passion is a remarkable document of an extraordinary literary life.

Now in paperback, The Crime of Jean Genet is a powerful personal account of the influence of one writer on another and one of the most penetrating explorations yet of Genet’s work and achievement.Dominique Eddé met novelist and playwright Jean Genet in the 1970s. And she never forgot him. “His presence,” she writes, “gave me the sensation of icy fire. Like his words, his gestures were full, calculated, and precise. . . . Genet’s movements mimicked the movement of time, accumulating rather than passing.”This book is Eddé’s account of that meeting and its ripples through her years of engaging with Genet’s life and work. Rooted in personal reminiscences, it is nonetheless much broader, offering a subtle analysis of Genet’s work and teasing out largely unconsidered themes, like the absence of the father, which becomes a metaphor for Genet’s perpetual attack on the law. Tying Genet to Dostoevsky through their shared fascination with crime, Eddé helps us more clearly understand Genet’s relationship to France and Palestine, Judaism, Christianity, Islam, the theater, and even death.  A powerful personal account of the influence of one writer on another, The Crime of Jean Genet is also one of the most penetrating explorations yet of Genet’s work and achievement.

In The Red Sofa, we meet Anne, a young woman setting off on the Trans-Siberian Railway in order to find her former lover, Gyl, who left twenty years before. As the train moves across post-Soviet Russia and its devastated landscapes, Anne reflects on her past with Gyl and their patriotic struggles, as well as on the neighbor she has just left behind, Clemence Barrot. Rocked by the train's movements Anne is moved by her memory of Clemence, who is old and whose memory is failing, but who has not lost her taste for life and adventure. Ensconced on her red sofa at home, Clemence loves to tell Anne her life story, mourning lost loved ones and celebrating the lives of brave, rebellious women who went before her. Eventually, Anne's train trip returns her home having not found Gyl, but having found something much more meaningful herself. "A luminous novel about desire, a clear text about the joy of living." Prix Pierre Mac Orlan 2007

Yves Bonnefoy is one of the greatest living voices of contemporary French poetry. In this, his sixth book published by Seagull Books, he explores in profound new ways the mysteries of human consciousness. Readers find snatches of conversations overheard, dropped without any possible conclusion each pregnant with half-hidden, half-visible meaning. Limpid, punctuated with silences, the poems of Ursa Major are like stones picked up, turned over and set back down on the edge of life."Countless voices traverse us; endless, almost, as the meanders of dreams or the starry scintillations of summer nights. Only listen, and a few words rise from the murmur, referring to precise things, making allusions one would like to understand, offering opinions perhaps worth mulling over." With these words Bonnefoy introduces the collection, newly available in English by the master translator Beverly Bie Brahic.This deeply moving sequence of prose poems invites readers to attend to the multitudinous voices that carry on their conversations within us, to trust them "just as on summer nights we would lie down in the grass of the meadow, behind our houses, to go forth among the millions of stars with a feeling of falling."

Laura Wilmote is a television journalist living in Paris. Her life couldn't be better a stimulating job, a loving boyfriend, interesting friends until her phone rings in the middle of one night. It is C., an old school friend whom Laura recently helped find a job at the same television station: "My phone rang. I knew right away it was you." Thus begins the story of C.'s unrelenting, obsessive, incurable love/hatred of Laura. She is convinced that Laura shares her love, but cannot or will not admit it. C. begins to dress as Laura, to make her friends and family her own, and even succeeds in working alongside Laura on the unique program that is Laura's signature achievement. The obsession escalates, yet is artfully hidden. It is Laura who is perceived as the aggressor at work, Laura who appears unwell, Laura who is losing it. Even Laura's adoring boyfriend begins to question her. Laura seeks the counsel of a psychiatrist who diagnoses C. with De Clerambault syndrome she is convinced that Laura is in love with her. And worse, the syndrome can only end in one of two ways: the death of the patient, or that of the object of the obsession.ACage in Search of a Bird is the gripping story of two women caught in the vise of a terrible delusion. Florence Noiville brilliantly narrates this story of obsession and one woman's attempts to escape the irrational love of another an inescapable, never-ending love, a love that can only end badly.

The international community of letters mourns the recent death of Yves Bonnefoy, universally acclaimed as one of France's greatest poets of the last half-century. A prolific author, he was often considered a candidate for the Nobel Prize and published a dozen major collections of poetry in verse and prose, several books of dream-like tales, and numerous studies of literature and art. His oeuvre has been translated into scores of languages, and he himself was a celebrated translator of Shakespeare, Yeats, Keats, and Leopardi.Together Still is his final poetic work, composed just months before his death. The book is nothing short of a literary testament, addressed to his wife, his daughter, his friends, and his readers throughout the world. In these pages, he ruminates on his legacy to future generations, his insistence on living in the present, his belief in the triumphant lessons of beauty, and, above all, his courageous identification of poetry with hope.

The Aftermath of War brings together essays written in Sartre's most creative period, just after World War II. Sartre's extraordinary range of engagement is manifest, with writings on post-war America, the social impact of war in Europe, contemporary philosophy, race, and avant garde art. Carefully structured into sections, the essays range across Sartre's reflections on collaboration, resistance and liberation in post-war Europe, his thoughts and observations after his extended trip to the USA in 1945, an examination of the failings of philosophical materialism, his analysis of the new revolutionary poetry of 'negritude', and his meditations on the visual arts, with essays on the work of Giacometti and Calder, both of whom Sartre knew well.

Critical Essays (Situations I) contains essays on literature and philosophy from a highly formative period of French philosopher and leading existentialist Jean-Paul Sartre's life, the years between 1938 and 1946. This period is particularly interesting because it is before Sartre published the magnum opus that would solidify his name as a philosopher, Being and Nothingness. Instead, during this time Sartre was emerging as one of France's most promising young novelists and playwrights he had already published Nausea, The Age of Reason, The Flies, and No Exit. Not content, however, he was meanwhile consciously attempting to revive the form of the essay via detailed examinations of writers who were to become central to European cultural life in the immediate aftermath of World War II. Collected here are Sartre's experiments in reimagining the idea and structure of the essay. Among the distinguished writers he analyzes are Francis Ponge, Georges Bataille, Vladimir Nabokov, Maurice Blanchot, and, of course, Albert Camus, whose novel The Stranger Sartre endeavours to explain in these pages.Critical Essays (Situations I) also contains a famous attack on the Catholic novelist Francois Mauriac, studies of the great American literary iconoclasts Faulkner and Dos Passos, and brief but insightful essays on aspects of the philosophical writings of Husserl and Descartes.This new translation by Chris Turner reinvigorates the original skill and voice of Sartre's work and will be essential reading for fans of Sartre and the many writers and works he explores. For my generation he has always been one of the great intellectual heroes of the twentieth century, a man whose insight and intellectual gifts were at the service of nearly every progressive cause of our time. Edward Said

Musician Ann Hidden suspects her partner, Thomas, isn't telling her everything. So one dark night, she secretly follows him to an unfamiliar house in the Paris suburbs, where he disappears inside with an unknown woman. But before she can even begin to process what looks like a betrayal, she gets another surprise an old schoolmate, Georges Roehlinger, appears, berating her for spying the from the bushes. With Georges's help, Ann takes radical action: while Thomas is away, she resolves to secretly sell their shared house and get rid of all the physical manifestations of their sixteen years together. Thomas returns to find her gone, the locks changed, and his few possessions packed up and sent to his office. Ann, meanwhile, has fled the country and started a new, hidden life. But our past is never that easy to escape, and Ann's secrets eventually seek her out.

The Dancing Other takes readers to France and Martinique to reveal the struggles of people who belong both places, but never quite feel at home in either. Suzanne Dracius tells the story of Rehvana, a woman who feels she is too black to fit in when living in mainland France, yet at the same time not dark-skinned enough to feel truly accepted in the Caribbean. Her sense of dislocation manifests itself at first in a turn to a mythical idea of Mother Africa; later, she moves to Martinique with a new boyfriend and thinks she may have finally found her place but instead she is soon pregnant, isolated, and lonely. Soon her only reliable companion is her neighbor, Ma Cidalise, who regales her in Creole with supernatural tales of wizards. Rehvana, meanwhile, watches her dream of belonging fade, as she continues to refuse to accept her multicultural heritage.

This powerful novel presents the early days of the transatlantic slave trade from a new perspective: that of the sub-Saharan population that became its first victims. Cameroonian novelist Leonora Miano presents a world on the brink of disappearing a pre-colonial civilization with roots that stretch back for centuries. One day, a group of villagers find twelve of their people missing. Where have they gone? Who is responsible? A collective dream, troubling a group of mothers in a communal dwelling, may have some of the answers, as the women's missing sons call to them in terror; at the same time, a thick shadow settles over the huts, blocking out the light of day. It is the shadow of slavery, which will soon grow to blight the whole world. Miano renders this brutal story in deliberately strange, dreamlike prose, befitting a situation that is, on its face, all but impossible for the villagers to believe.

London between the wars was a place of anxiety and uncertainty. After the postwar boom of the 1920s, the aftereffects of the stock market crash hit London, and, even as the fortunes of the aristocracy went into decline, there was hunger and a rising tide of virulent fascism. It is in this setting that Max, a French journalist looking for his next story, and Lena, an American singer, find themselves in Hedi Kaddour's Little Grey Lies. Once lovers, but now friends, Max and Lena travel with Lena's new man, Thibault, and with Max's barely masked jealousy. Then they meet the striking Colonel Strether, the epitome of military decorum and bearing. An aging war hero, Strether seems to Max to be his best chance at a story, but as the two men talk, it seems Stether may not be who he says he is and the old soldier's past begins to trouble Max and Lena as they crash forward through memories and truths not theirs. As in his other work, internationally renowned poet and novelist Hedi Kaddour offers shifting time-frames and kaleidoscopic viewpoints in a mannered metafictional thriller that bears comparison to both Robert Coover and John Le Carre.Little Grey Lies is historical suspense at its best.

“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 Épaves, 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.