Publisher: Bloomsbury, 2007
Translated by Jeffrey Mehlam from Comment parler des livres que l’on n’a pas lus?, Editions de Minuit, 2007

If civilized people are expected to have read all important works of literature, and thousands more books are published every year, what are we supposed to do in those awkward social situations in which we’re forced to talk about books we haven’t read? Literature professor and psychoanalyst Pierre Bayard argues that it’s actually more important to know a book’s role in our collective library than its details. Using examples from such writers as Graham Greene, Oscar Wilde, Montaigne, and Umberto Eco, and even the movie Groundhog Day, he describes the many varieties of “non-reading” and the horribly sticky social situations that might confront us, and then offers his advice on what to do.

“It may well be that too many books are published, but by good fortune, not all must be read…A survivor’s guide to life in the chattering classes…evidently much in need.”
New York Times

“In this work of inspired nonsense —which nevertheless evokes our very real sense of insecurity about the gaps in our cultural knowledge— reading is not only superfluous, it is meaningless. Our need to appear well-read is all.”
Sarah Gold, Chicago Tribune

“Brilliant…A witty and useful piece of literary sociology, designed to bring lasting peace of mind to the scrupulous souls who grow anxious whenever the book-talk around them becomes too specific.”
London Review of Books

“With rare humor, Bayard liberally rethinks the social use [of literature] and the position of the reader…Read or skim How to Talk About Books You Haven’t Read. Or simply listen to what people say about it so that you can talk about it with ease. In either case, you may not be able to forget it.”
Les Inrockuptibles

Publisher: University of Nebraska Press, February 2011
Translated by Alyson Waters from Coda, P.O.L., 2005

“It is to me that we owe our immortality, and this is the story that proves it beyond all doubt.” With this sentence René Belletto begins a novel that compresses every genre he has worked in—thriller, science fiction, experimental literature, horror—into one breathless narrative in which what is at stake is nothing less than our own immortality. Playing with the expectations of the reader, Belletto constructs a logical puzzle that defies logic, much like the “almost-perpetual motion machine” invented by the narrator of this novel and his father. What sets the story in (perpetual) motion is a package of frozen seafood. This lowly mechanism triggers a series of picaresque and otherworldly events, from the storyteller’s meeting with Fate disguised as a beautiful woman, to the kidnapping of his daughter, to his amorous reunion with the younger half-sister of a high school friend, to the elimination of death from the world. It’s a funny business, but Belletto’s playful and falsely transparent language opens the book to such serious matters as explorations of death, immortality, love, and the innocence of children.

The Elegance of the Hedgehog
by Muriel Barbery

Publisher: Europa, 2008
Translated by Alison Anderson from L’Elégance du hérisson, Gallimard, 2006.

We are in the center of Paris, in an elegant apartment building inhabited by bourgeois families. Renée, the concierge, is witness to the lavish but vacuous lives of her numerous employers. Outwardly she conforms to every stereotype of the concierge: fat, cantankerous, addicted to television. Yet, unbeknownst to her employers, Renée is a cultured autodidact who adores art, philosophy, music, and Japanese culture. With humor and intelligence she scrutinizes the lives of the building’s tenants, who, for their part, are barely aware of her existence. Then there’s Paloma, a twelve-year-old genius. She is the daughter of a tedious parliamentarian, a talented and startlingly lucid child who has decided to end her life on the sixteenth of June, her thirteenth birthday. Until then she will continue behaving as everyone expects her to behave: a mediocre pre-teen high on adolescent subculture, a good but not an outstanding student, an obedient if obstinate daughter. Paloma and Renée hide both their true talents and their finest qualities from a world they suspect cannot or will not appreciate them. They discover their kindred souls when a wealthy Japanese man named Ozu arrives in the building. Only he is able to gain Paloma’s trust and to see through Renée’s timeworn disguise to the secret that haunts her. This is a moving, funny, triumphant novel that exalts the quiet victories of the inconspicuous among us.

"The formula that made more than half a million readers in France fall in love with The Elegance of the Hedgehog has, among other ingredients: intelligent humor, fine sentiments, [and] an excellent literary and philosophical backdrop"
September 22 2007, Repubblica (Italy)

[Le Bébé]
by Marie Darrieussecq

Publisher: Seeking an American publisher
Translated by Ann Kaiser from Le Bébé, P.O.L, 2002.

What is a baby? Why are there so few in literature? How do we talk about them? What is a mother? And why women and not men?

In her book, le Bébé, published by P.O.L. éditions in 2002 and reprinted in 2005, Marie Darrieussecq makes an attempt to respond to these questions – for us, her readers, yes, but especially for herself. This seemingly simple telling of the first six months of the life of her child, recorded in journal form, invites us into the mother and child’s inner circle where we find ourselves often surprised, sometimes even disturbed.

It is as if the author, known for her penchant for science, tries at the beginning to lead a rigorous scientific inquiry into this little being. She ends up discovering, however, that maternity, in its biological, psychological and sociological aspects is much more nuanced than she had imagined. Despite her own modernity, artistic or otherwise – she likes to describe herself as an “atheist, feminist and European” – the existence of her child will lead her to her ancestral heritage, the tissue of “maternal fiber” itself.

In the world of books on the experience of maternity, le Bébé speaks with an original voice. It is, all at the same time, a reflective, serious and, ironic take on being a first-time mother. And, above all, with le Bébé, Marie Darrieussecq remains faithful to her idea of the Book:

“What’s the point of a book if it doesn’t ask you to see the world as if for the first time?”

[Cousine K]
by Yasmina Khadra

Publisher: University of Nebraska Press
Translated by Alyson Waters and Donald Nicholson-Smith from Cousine K, Julliard, 2003.

[The Heartbreak]
by Frédéric Pajak

Publisher: University of Nebraska Press
Translated by Donald Nicholson-Smith from Le chagrin d’amour, PUF, 2000.

Frédéric Pajak revisits Guillaume Apollinaire’s love letters and life in Le chagrin d’amour, which is at once a biography of Apollinaire, an autobiography, and a graphic novel. From the depths of World War I trenches, Guillaume Apollinaire sent more than 400 letters to Lou, an old flame, and Madeleine, his lover at the time. Pajak revives Apollinaire’s kaleidoscopic figure as a forerunner of cubism, surrealism, and cinema. While the author recalls his own love joys and pains, he invites the reader on a journey where reality and fantasy mingle. He blends his memories of an unhappy manhood into a celebration of Apollinaire’s ardent love—which often resulted in disillusionment. The book also embraces the chaotic world of the artistic elite of the time, inhabited by the unforgettable authors of Alcools, including Francis Picabia, Pablo Picasso, Marcel Duchamp, and Piet Mondrian. Illustrated literature more than graphic novel, Le chagrin d’amour gathers memories and quotations of the poet’s texts, along with around 300 beautiful black-and-white line drawings. Le chagrin d’amour won the French Voices stipend to cover $6,000 of the translation cost. Donald Nicholson-Smith is currently working on the English translation.

Children of Heroes
by Lyonel Trouillot

Publisher: University of Nebraska Press 2008
Translated by Linda Coverdale from Les enfants des héros, Actes Sud, 2002.

Children of Heroes is the story of two children who are children only in appearance. Oppresed by violence of their alcoholic father, Corazon, the silence of their subjugated mother, Josephine, the family’s poverty, and the crushing privations of their country, Haiti. Colin and his older sister Mariéla have lived their lives with one consolation: their father is a hero. A passionate boxer, Corazon could heve been a champion, and when he isn’t drinking he earns a good living as mechanic. At least, that’s the version they’ve always believed.

"Trouillot writes with his heart on his sleeve . . . and his unabashed empathy for plucky Colin and brave, sexy Mariéla recalls elements of Dickens."
Publishers Weekly

"Lyonel Trouillot's novel Children of Heroes is a real tour de force. Set in Haiti,it is a story about surviving the vulnerabilities of childhood. Beautifully written and beautifully translated, its images linger."
Rose M. Rejouis , winner of the American Translators' Association Prize

"Lyonel Trouillot is perhaps the best known of contemporary Haitian novelists. Children of Heroes shows the author in his prime form for stylistic clarity and emotive impact. His characteristic first-person narrative is a well-constructed story that is vividly realistic and a most tragic tale."
Thomas C. Spear, editor of Une Journée Haitienne and co-editor of Celine and the Politics of Difference.

Beyond Suspicion
by Tanguy Viel

Publisher: The New Press, 2008
Translated by Linda Coverdale from Insoupçonnable, Editions De Minuit, 2007.

Published in 2007, this book is the fourth novel of this young author after Black Note, Cinema, and The Absolute Perfection of Crime (published by The New Press in 2002). Set in the south of France where the stakes are high and no one is beyond suspicion, this Hitchcockian tale presents siblings and lovers in constantly shifting configurations. The novel opens at a lavish wedding reception in the South of France. Two pairs of siblings have become one big happy family. Or have they? When Lise is kidnapped and Henri disappears, what begins as a simple blackmail scheme turns more sinister. Called “a marvel of grace and precision” by the French press, Beyond Suspicion is a Hitchcockian tale of marriage, murder, and betrayal. “

[...] Reads like William Faulkner trying his hand at a familiar story in the James M. Cain line.” ?Kirkus Reviews

“Tanguy Viel summons from his pen the shadows of Hitchcock and Brian De Palma in a tale in which dramatic intensity plays itself out in extremely classic situations.”
Femina

“A marvel of grace and precision. Like a Swiss watch. Beyond Suspicion reads like a Raymond Chandler novel.”
La Chronique Littéraire

Enchantment: The Seductress in Opera
by Jean Starobinski

Publisher: Columbia University Press 2008, with a preface by Victor Brombert Translated by G. Jon Delogu from Les Enchanteresses, Seuil, 2008

We often look to the theater for spectacle and wonder, but in opera, we find pure enchantment. What is it about the marriage of music and the stage that fills us with such bewilderment and passion? How does the sensual space of opera transport us into the realm of dream?

Jean Starobinski considers the allure of several seducers and seductresses from nineteenth-century opera-Monteverdi's Poppea, Handel's Alcina, and Massenet's Manon, among others-and how their stories are woven into the fabric of Western culture. A talented storyteller and renowned critic of literature and music, Starobinski moves from musical analysis and textual exegesis to an investigation of the political, social, and aesthetic scene of Europe at the time. He traces the elements of theater, poetry, painting, sculpture, dance, and music as they occur in operatic performance, and shows how opera's use of narrative genres, especially the fairy tale, in turn influenced many important short stories, novels, and other works.

Nineteenth-century romantics were drawn to opera because of their desire to revive a religious vision of the world that the Enlightenment suppressed. Starobinski revisits the experiences of Rousseau, Stendhal, Hoffmann, Balzac, and Nietzsche, major writers who fell for opera's portrayal of "heaven," the loss of one's love, and the task of the artist, whether composer or performer. Starobinski's critical breadth and depth, as well as his eclectic taste and keen observation, echo such great comparative critics as Erich Auerbach, René Wellek, George Steiner, Harold Bloom, and Angus Fletcher. This spellbinding book will enchant not only fans of the opera, but also those who wish to understand the form's enduring heritage in Western culture.

"The originality and inestimable contribution of this book lie in the finesse, range of cultural reference, and profundity of thought that Jean Starobinski brings to his analyses of the structural translation of words into song (libretti into music) in a rich body of operatic works. Starobinski writes from a great depth of cultural knowledge, without a drop of jargon, in clear, poetically resonant prose that brings highly complex subjects alive both intellectually and aesthetically."
Suzanne C. Nash, professor of romance languages and literatures, Princeton University.

[Ecrits politiques]
by Maurice Blanchot

Publisher: Fordham University Press, spring 2009
Translated by Paul Zakir from Ecrits Politiques, Editions Léo Scheer 2003

Voice Over
by Céline Curiol

Publisher: Seven Stories, 2008
Translated by Sam Richard from Voix sans issue, Actes Sud, 2005

A lonely young woman works as an announcer in Paris’s Gare du Nord, surrounded by people yet separate from them. Obsessed with a man who loves another, she suffers alone as she waits for him. In her solitude, she wanders the streets of the modern city, playing on the edge of danger, seeking connection.. […] Voice Over was recently published in the author’s native France to great acclaim, and rights have been sold in fourteen countries. The novel appears now for the first time in English.

“Not only is it the finest first novel I have read in many years, but it is, quite simply, one of the most original and brilliantly executed works of fiction by any contemporary writer I know of.”
Paul Auster

Things Seen
by Annie Ernaux

Publisher : University Of Nebraska Press, 2010
Translated by Jonathan Kaplansky from La Vie extérieure, Gallimard, 2000

“Annie Ernaux’s work,” wrote Richard Bernstein in the New York Times, “represents a severely pared-down Proustianism, a testament to the persistent, haunting and melancholy quality of memory.” In the New York Times Book Review, Kathryn Harrison concurred: “Keen language and unwavering focus allow her to penetrate deep, to reveal pulses of love, desire, remorse.”

In this “journal” Ernaux turns her penetrating focus on those points in life where the everyday and the extraordinary intersect, where “things seen” reflect a private life meeting the larger world. From the war crimes tribunal in Bosnia to social issues such as poverty and AIDS; from the state of Iraq to the world’s contrasting reactions to Princess Diana’s death and the starkly brutal political murders that occurred at the same time; from a tear-gas attack on the subway to minute interactions with a clerk in a store: Ernaux’s thought-provoking observations map the world’s fleeting and lasting impressions on the shape of inner life.

"Beautiful and powerful."
Alison McCulloch, New York Times Book Review

"Readers unafraid of mixing the personal and political, as in the works of Simone de Beauvoir and Jean-Paul Sartre, will glean much here. And memoir readers of a more traditional bent may look at the world quite differently after savoring this book." Travis Fristoe, Library Journal