World Writing in French: New Archipelagoes – serie

In this affectionate elegy to his mother, Patrick Chamoiseau weaves together the recurring themes of his many novels, essays, and poems, such as the history of slavery, Africa and its Traces in the Caribbean, Black cultural practices from storytelling to jazz, and the daily life of his family. Chamoiseau adds to this sweeping canvas a meditation on the evolution of the human species and the emergence of consciousness from an encounter with death. Filled with rich descriptions and keen insights, The Matter of Absence is an intimate memoir set against the backdrop of world history. Accounts of his mother’s everyday activities evoke a world redolent with the fragrance of the market and the sounds of the street, while references to major cataclysms in Martinique’s past ground the personal in collective experience. The Matter of Absence challenges generic boundaries, blending poetic fragments with historical narrative, memoir, and philosophical reflections into an unforgettable song of loss.Patrick Chamoiseau, best known for his novel, Texaco, which won the prestigious Prix Goncourt in 1992, has published over thirty works in a wide variety of genres—from novels, memoirs, poems, and essays to screenplays, a children’s book, and even a graphic novel. Chamoiseau invents a language all of his own, combining Martinican Creole and French to recount the lives of memorable protagonists or to describe the cataclysms of history. Born in 1953 in Fort-de-France, Martinique, Chamoiseau has consistently advanced Creole culture, arguing for an appreciation of the phenomenally rich cultural landscape of the Caribbean produced in the wake of enslavement and loss.

In this affectionate elegy to his mother, Patrick Chamoiseau weaves together the recurring themes of his many novels, essays, and poems, such as the history of slavery, Africa and its Traces in the Caribbean, Black cultural practices from storytelling to jazz, and the daily life of his family. Chamoiseau adds to this sweeping canvas a meditation on the evolution of the human species and the emergence of consciousness from an encounter with death. Filled with rich descriptions and keen insights, The Matter of Absence is an intimate memoir set against the backdrop of world history. Accounts of his mother’s everyday activities evoke a world redolent with the fragrance of the market and the sounds of the street, while references to major cataclysms in Martinique’s past ground the personal in collective experience. The Matter of Absence challenges generic boundaries, blending poetic fragments with historical narrative, memoir, and philosophical reflections into an unforgettable song of loss.Patrick Chamoiseau, best known for his novel, Texaco, which won the prestigious Prix Goncourt in 1992, has published over thirty works in a wide variety of genres—from novels, memoirs, poems, and essays to screenplays, a children’s book, and even a graphic novel. Chamoiseau invents a language all of his own, combining Martinican Creole and French to recount the lives of memorable protagonists or to describe the cataclysms of history. Born in 1953 in Fort-de-France, Martinique, Chamoiseau has consistently advanced Creole culture, arguing for an appreciation of the phenomenally rich cultural landscape of the Caribbean produced in the wake of enslavement and loss.

“But when I close my eyes, I first fall as if drowning into the silty waters of the Chari River, which traces the border between Chad and Cameroon, and into which so many men, women and even children were thrown, sometimes still alive, their hands knotted behind their backs, or tied up in a shoulder bag. I sink with them towards the sand and the clay, down amidst the green and the brown, passing purple weeds, shards of pottery, and crocodile scales. My head is heavier than a cannonball and carries me toward the abyss: I dive into a bottomless bag where the letters collide or slip away, call out to or ignore each other, I bathe in an unlimited space free from the constraints of cycles and dates, and I enter into the time of childhood, which indeed has no concept of time. […] all my memories take flight in the wind of the sands, the past flows in the river, plays out in the branches, explodes in the foliage. The past is all around me now - and I laugh when I say ‘the past,’ because none of all this is past.” Michaël FerrierIn 1979, two young boys play Scrabble in a hot, dusty district of N’Djamena, Chad, while around them war rages, apparently destroying all in its path: people, places, and memories. And yet, just as the boys take their letters from the depths of the pouch, so Michaël Ferrier draws from the darkness words and images that he reassembles into a beautiful and moving tribute to the city, its people, and the childhood that seemed to end there in those days of chaos and destruction but which he brings miraculously back to life in a defiant, poetic statement on the power of friendship, family, and memory.

“But when I close my eyes, I first fall as if drowning into the silty waters of the Chari River, which traces the border between Chad and Cameroon, and into which so many men, women and even children were thrown, sometimes still alive, their hands knotted behind their backs, or tied up in a shoulder bag. I sink with them towards the sand and the clay, down amidst the green and the brown, passing purple weeds, shards of pottery, and crocodile scales. My head is heavier than a cannonball and carries me toward the abyss: I dive into a bottomless bag where the letters collide or slip away, call out to or ignore each other, I bathe in an unlimited space free from the constraints of cycles and dates, and I enter into the time of childhood, which indeed has no concept of time. […] all my memories take flight in the wind of the sands, the past flows in the river, plays out in the branches, explodes in the foliage. The past is all around me now - and I laugh when I say ‘the past,’ because none of all this is past.” Michaël FerrierIn 1979, two young boys play Scrabble in a hot, dusty district of N’Djamena, Chad, while around them war rages, apparently destroying all in its path: people, places, and memories. And yet, just as the boys take their letters from the depths of the pouch, so Michaël Ferrier draws from the darkness words and images that he reassembles into a beautiful and moving tribute to the city, its people, and the childhood that seemed to end there in those days of chaos and destruction but which he brings miraculously back to life in a defiant, poetic statement on the power of friendship, family, and memory.

Here is an unexpected Gérard Genette, looking back at his life and time with humour, tenderness and lucidity. ‘Bardadrac’ is the neologism a friend of his once invented to name the jumbled contents of her handbag. A way of saying that one finds a little bit of everything in this book: memories of a suburban childhood, a provincial adolescence and early years in Paris marked by a few political commitments; the evocation of great intellectual figures, like Roland Barthes or Jorge Luis Borges; a taste for cities, rivers, women and music, classical or jazz; contingent epiphanies; good or bad ideas; true and false memories; aesthetic biases; geographical reveries; secret or apocryphal quotations; maxims and characters; asides, quips and digressions; reflections on literature and language, with an ironic take on the medialect, or dialect of the media; and other surprises.At the intersection, for instance, of Flaubert’s Dictionary of Received Ideas, Ambrose Bierce’s Devil’s Dictionary, Renard’s Journal, Roland Barthes’ Roland Barthes and Perec’s I Remember, this whimsical abecedarium invites you to stroll and gather.Gérard Genette (1930-2018) was research director at the École des hautes études en sciences sociales in Paris, and visiting professor at Yale University. Cofounder of the journal Poétique, he published extensively in the fields of literary theory, poetics and aesthetics, including, in English: Narrative Discourse: An Essay in Method (1980), Figures of Literary Discourse (1982), Fiction and Diction (1993), Mimologics (1995), Palimpsests: Literature in the Second Degree (1997), Paratexts: Thresholds of Interpretation (1997), The Work of Art: Immanence and Transcendence (1997), The Aesthetic Relation (1999), Essays in Aesthetics (2005).

Here is an unexpected Gérard Genette, looking back at his life and time with humour, tenderness and lucidity. ‘Bardadrac’ is the neologism a friend of his once invented to name the jumbled contents of her handbag. A way of saying that one finds a little bit of everything in this book: memories of a suburban childhood, a provincial adolescence and early years in Paris marked by a few political commitments; the evocation of great intellectual figures, like Roland Barthes or Jorge Luis Borges; a taste for cities, rivers, women and music, classical or jazz; contingent epiphanies; good or bad ideas; true and false memories; aesthetic biases; geographical reveries; secret or apocryphal quotations; maxims and characters; asides, quips and digressions; reflections on literature and language, with an ironic take on the medialect, or dialect of the media; and other surprises.At the intersection, for instance, of Flaubert’s Dictionary of Received Ideas, Ambrose Bierce’s Devil’s Dictionary, Renard’s Journal, Roland Barthes’ Roland Barthes and Perec’s I Remember, this whimsical abecedarium invites you to stroll and gather.Gérard Genette (1930-2018) was research director at the École des hautes études en sciences sociales in Paris, and visiting professor at Yale University. Cofounder of the journal Poétique, he published extensively in the fields of literary theory, poetics and aesthetics, including, in English: Narrative Discourse: An Essay in Method (1980), Figures of Literary Discourse (1982), Fiction and Diction (1993), Mimologics (1995), Palimpsests: Literature in the Second Degree (1997), Paratexts: Thresholds of Interpretation (1997), The Work of Art: Immanence and Transcendence (1997), The Aesthetic Relation (1999), Essays in Aesthetics (2005).

Clémentine Mélois is a writer, artist, and member of Oulipo. Her first published work, Cent titres (2014), is a cult classic. She has gone on to subvert children’s literature and – more recently – the photo-story genre.Sinon j’oublie (2017) – Otherwise I Forget – is a unique work embroidered around a selection of her collection of ‘found’ shopping lists. After a short foreword – exposing her interest in this universal but throw-away form of writing – we find images of 100 shopping lists accompanied by her imagined insight into the lives and minds of their authors. The result is a delightful panoramic view of contemporary France in the guise of an (autobiographical) novel.This is the first of her works to be translated for an Anglophone readership. More accessible than other of her works, universal in appeal, and full of humanity, Otherwise I Forget is a wonderful and deceptively simple introduction to the work of this highly original writer and artist.

Clémentine Mélois is a writer, artist, and member of Oulipo. Her first published work, Cent titres (2014), is a cult classic. She has gone on to subvert children’s literature and – more recently – the photo-story genre.Sinon j’oublie (2017) – Otherwise I Forget – is a unique work embroidered around a selection of her collection of ‘found’ shopping lists. After a short foreword – exposing her interest in this universal but throw-away form of writing – we find images of 100 shopping lists accompanied by her imagined insight into the lives and minds of their authors. The result is a delightful panoramic view of contemporary France in the guise of an (autobiographical) novel.This is the first of her works to be translated for an Anglophone readership. More accessible than other of her works, universal in appeal, and full of humanity, Otherwise I Forget is a wonderful and deceptively simple introduction to the work of this highly original writer and artist.

“I had a dream that women, all women, will hold their heads high, that women will work, that in their eyes we will no longer see fear or defeat or humiliation. That women will never again be shackled by society, or by circumstance, or by men. Instead we will see in the eyes of every woman a person fully in control of herself, and mistress of her own destiny.”Cairo, 1920. In the cafés and literary salons, the great minds of the Arab renaissance meet and share ideas. Among them is May Ziadeh, pioneer of the Arab feminist movement and the great love of Khalil Gibran’s life. Intense and talented, May is celebrated by the greatest writers and thinkers of Cairo’s literary world, who flock to her famous salon. Yet when a series of personal losses leave her vulnerable to plots against her, she is abandoned by those she believed would protect her. Stripped of her everything and imprisoned against her will, May is left fighting for the most basic right: freedom.In Prisoner of the Levant, Darina Al Joundi offers a moving account of May Ziadeh’s desire for emancipation and enlightenment, and an indictment of a world that does not allow women to be free.

“I had a dream that women, all women, will hold their heads high, that women will work, that in their eyes we will no longer see fear or defeat or humiliation. That women will never again be shackled by society, or by circumstance, or by men. Instead we will see in the eyes of every woman a person fully in control of herself, and mistress of her own destiny.”Cairo, 1920. In the cafés and literary salons, the great minds of the Arab renaissance meet and share ideas. Among them is May Ziadeh, pioneer of the Arab feminist movement and the great love of Khalil Gibran’s life. Intense and talented, May is celebrated by the greatest writers and thinkers of Cairo’s literary world, who flock to her famous salon. Yet when a series of personal losses leave her vulnerable to plots against her, she is abandoned by those she believed would protect her. Stripped of her everything and imprisoned against her will, May is left fighting for the most basic right: freedom.In Prisoner of the Levant, Darina Al Joundi offers a moving account of May Ziadeh’s desire for emancipation and enlightenment, and an indictment of a world that does not allow women to be free.

"It’s probably his age that makes the worrying worse. But he can’t help picking up on every detail that ruins his day, stoking his unease and filling him with fear and shame. After dinner he gathers up the empty wine bottles, shoves them in rubbish bags and drives two kilometres to dump them in a bin. He’s worried about being denounced by that red-haired guy who monitors the parking in his street, the one who’s let his beard grow and calls the girls at the private school bitches and whores. “We should marry them off whether they like it or not, right professor?” Amine does not reply. Amine says nothing." Leïla SlimaniThis collection brings together three short volumes of work by Goncourt-winning author Leïla Slimani. The stories and essays in The Devil is in the Detail approach questions close to Slimani’s heart: Islam and fundamentalism, the importance of literature, and Paris as a symbol of freedom and tolerance. On Writing is an illuminating dialogue in which Slimani discusses her writing approach and techniques, and My Heroine: Simone Veil is a homage to Veil, a feminist pioneer who fought tirelessly for women’s rights. From everyday restrictions to national tragedies, Slimani grapples with important and eternal issues, and is unafraid to face them head on.

"It’s probably his age that makes the worrying worse. But he can’t help picking up on every detail that ruins his day, stoking his unease and filling him with fear and shame. After dinner he gathers up the empty wine bottles, shoves them in rubbish bags and drives two kilometres to dump them in a bin. He’s worried about being denounced by that red-haired guy who monitors the parking in his street, the one who’s let his beard grow and calls the girls at the private school bitches and whores. “We should marry them off whether they like it or not, right professor?” Amine does not reply. Amine says nothing." Leïla SlimaniThis collection brings together three short volumes of work by Goncourt-winning author Leïla Slimani. The stories and essays in The Devil is in the Detail approach questions close to Slimani’s heart: Islam and fundamentalism, the importance of literature, and Paris as a symbol of freedom and tolerance. On Writing is an illuminating dialogue in which Slimani discusses her writing approach and techniques, and My Heroine: Simone Veil is a homage to Veil, a feminist pioneer who fought tirelessly for women’s rights. From everyday restrictions to national tragedies, Slimani grapples with important and eternal issues, and is unafraid to face them head on.

In Arabic for All, Nabil Wakim transforms a deeply personal loss into a powerful public reckoning. Born in Beirut and raised in France, Wakim grew up with Arabic as his mother tongue, only to find himself, as an adult, unable to fully inhabit the language that shaped his earliest world. From that intimate fracture emerges a work of remarkable clarity, urgency, and emotional force.Blending memoir, investigation, and cultural analysis, Wakim moves far beyond one individual story to examine the paradoxical place of Arabic in contemporary France: a language that is widely present and deeply influential, yet persistently burdened by stigma, suspicion, and political anxiety. With warmth, wit, and precision, he brings together family memory, public debate, and the voices of others who have lived the same contradiction: to feel claimed by a language and estranged from it at once.The result is a book that is at once intimate and public-facing, moving and incisive, accessible and intellectually sharp. Arabic for All is a meditation on language, identity, and transmission, but also a compelling inquiry into who gets to belong, on what terms, and at what emotional cost.

“Now they are all wondering where they come from, who they are and what they are doing here. They are trying to show that they are French or, on the contrary, that they are not French, they cling ever more tightly to their laws, their customs, their traditions or their tribulations, their look and their lingo, their regions, their religions. They are proud of the empires of their fathers and the oaths of their brothers. It is the hubbub of memories, the great memorial tumult: one memory against the other, they stand shoulder to shoulder while elbowing each other out of the way, greasing each other’s palms, and then pointing the finger at each other.The truth is that these people are sealed off inside their heads, ears watertight, nothing seeps in. Their problem, a certain difficulty in relation to time, their great naivety, believing that time passes, they no longer know how to decipher the messages of the dead. Not a soul left to gather tenderly the spirits of the dead, to then speak more gently about things... No one knows how to remember or how to forget anymore, no one knows how to be French anymore.” - Michaël Ferrier

Rosa the Alligator (Un alligator nommé Rosa, 2007) is a powerful exploration of the limits of truth, reconciliation, and justice for Haiti. Set in France, it focuses on two child victims of the Duvalier regime as they confront their traumatic history and their torturer, Rosa, a character based on the woman who led Papa Doc’s paramilitary death squads. The novel draws on the harrowing testimony of survivors but derives its force from Agnant’s ethical framework: she asks questions not only about the conflicting goals of justice, truth and reconciliation, but also about how one lives with the knowledge of crimes against humanity. Agnant’s characters face choices with implications far beyond the specifics of Haiti: What defines our humanity? Is justice possible without atonement? What if perpetrators refuse to acknowledge their guilt? Whose voices must be heard? What would you sacrifice in the name of justice?This timely translation makes Agnant’s novel, the first to really seek accountability for the atrocities committed in Duvalier’s name, available in English. By voicing the buried stories of victims of Duvalier’s regime – without indulging the excuses of its supporters – Rosa the Alligator contributes to the on-going memory work of those grappling still with Haiti’s history.Marie-Célie Agnant is an internationally recognized author and poet dedicated to telling the silenced stories of Haiti’s past. Her novels include The Book of Emma (2001) and A Knife in the Sky (2022).

Rosa the Alligator (Un alligator nommé Rosa, 2007) is a powerful exploration of the limits of truth, reconciliation, and justice for Haiti. Set in France, it focuses on two child victims of the Duvalier regime as they confront their traumatic history and their torturer, Rosa, a character based on the woman who led Papa Doc’s paramilitary death squads. The novel draws on the harrowing testimony of survivors but derives its force from Agnant’s ethical framework: she asks questions not only about the conflicting goals of justice, truth and reconciliation, but also about how one lives with the knowledge of crimes against humanity. Agnant’s characters face choices with implications far beyond the specifics of Haiti: What defines our humanity? Is justice possible without atonement? What if perpetrators refuse to acknowledge their guilt? Whose voices must be heard? What would you sacrifice in the name of justice?This timely translation makes Agnant’s novel, the first to really seek accountability for the atrocities committed in Duvalier’s name, available in English. By voicing the buried stories of victims of Duvalier’s regime – without indulging the excuses of its supporters – Rosa the Alligator contributes to the on-going memory work of those grappling still with Haiti’s history.Marie-Célie Agnant is an internationally recognized author and poet dedicated to telling the silenced stories of Haiti’s past. Her novels include The Book of Emma (2001) and A Knife in the Sky (2022).

When Man Ray, forty-four, and Adrienne Fidelin, nineteen, cross paths at the Bal Colonial on Rue Blomet during Paris’ roaring twenties, an intense four-year love story is born. The four years of complicity and passion mark both of them for life, before their story is brutally interrupted by the war.Gisèle Pineau brings this suspended period of happiness back to life. Forced to leave her native Guadeloupe for Paris at the age of fifteen, the spontaneous young Ady soon charms Man Ray and finds herself swept along by the great American artist into the bohemian life he leads with his friends. In Montparnasse, as well as during the summers in Mougins with Paul and Nusch Éluard, Pablo Picasso and Dora Maar, Lee Miller and Roland Penrose, the sexual and intellectual freedom is unparalleled. Naked bodies are exposed to the sun or to Man's lens; Ady, Lee and Nusch indulge in endless delights. The true story recounts a golden age, a time of innovation and creation, a volcanic life whose protagonists are giants of art history.Ady is a dazzling muse, Man Ray’s “black sun” – a woman full of grace, who, according to Éluard, had “clouds in her hands”.

When Man Ray, forty-four, and Adrienne Fidelin, nineteen, cross paths at the Bal Colonial on Rue Blomet during Paris’ roaring twenties, an intense four-year love story is born. The four years of complicity and passion mark both of them for life, before their story is brutally interrupted by the war.Gisèle Pineau brings this suspended period of happiness back to life. Forced to leave her native Guadeloupe for Paris at the age of fifteen, the spontaneous young Ady soon charms Man Ray and finds herself swept along by the great American artist into the bohemian life he leads with his friends. In Montparnasse, as well as during the summers in Mougins with Paul and Nusch Éluard, Pablo Picasso and Dora Maar, Lee Miller and Roland Penrose, the sexual and intellectual freedom is unparalleled. Naked bodies are exposed to the sun or to Man's lens; Ady, Lee and Nusch indulge in endless delights. The true story recounts a golden age, a time of innovation and creation, a volcanic life whose protagonists are giants of art history.Ady is a dazzling muse, Man Ray’s “black sun” – a woman full of grace, who, according to Éluard, had “clouds in her hands”.

Located some 600 miles from the coast of India, Sentinel Island is the home of the last people entirely cut off from the modern world, the Sentinelese. No one knows where they come from, what language they speak, their beliefs. Only one thing is certain: for centuries they have violently rejected outsiders who set foot on their island, including Venetian travellers, British colonists, shipwrecked Chinese, Malaysian poachers, European monarchs, or American missionaries. Sentinel Island tells the story of this people and of Krish and Markus, two friends who have little in common other than their fascination with this forbidden island. One is an anthropologist of Indian origin in a badly fraught marriage to an American woman; the other an unmarried New York editor, heir to an enormous fortune built in the art market. Swept up in a grand adventure, Sentinel Island is the story of peoples in far-flung places, friendship, class relations, contemporary America, the gradual unravelling of an interracial marriage—and the story of globalization and those who attempt to escape it.