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: Seeking an American Publisher
Translated by Alyson Waters from Coda, P.O.L, 2005

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.

“Nobody ever imagined that this tender, funny book with a philosophical vein would have enjoyed such incredible success. For some, it is part Sophie’s World by Jostein Gaarder, part Monsieur Malaussene by Daniel Pennac. While for others it resembles a written version of the film Amelie. Either way, readers are responding in vast numbers.”
Le Monde

[Le Bébé]
by Marie Darrieussecq

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

[Cousine K]
by Yasmina Khadra

Publisher: Seeking an American publisher
Translated by Alyson Waters and Donald Nicholson-Smith from Cousine K, Julliard, 2003.

[Le Chagrin d’amour]
by Frédéric Pajak

Publisher: Seeking an American publisher
Translated by Donald Nicholson-Smith from Le chagrin d’amour, PUF, 2000.

Children of Heroes
by Lyonel Trouillot

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

Their father’s favorite saying, between drinks and blows, was, “Life holds only bad surprises, and the last one will be death.” And now, Colin observes of the man sprawled under all the broken furniture, their father was definitely and forever out of surprises. Children of Heroes is the story Colin tells of what happened—and what happened before that. Testimony, confession, a child’s outpouring: this is his painfully matter-of-fact account of how he and his older sister, Mariéla, killed the man who tyrannized them and their piously pathetic mother, who is now a “blank.” As he describes their flight from the slum in Haiti to an uncertain somewhere called “far away,” Colin conjures a bleak picture of the life he and his sister are trying to leave behind. And whether these two—children only in age—are guilty or merely victims of the violence festering in their city is a question only the reader can answer. In its picture of a world in which the heroes and the destroyers—whether fathers or leaders—are often indistinguishable, and where life’s poetry and poverty are inextricably linked, this book tells a story of Haiti that is at once intimate, universal, and otherworldly.

"Trouillot writes with his heart on his sleeve . . . and his unabashed empathy for plucky Colin and brave, sexy Mariéla recalls elements of Dickens."
Publisher 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-pperson 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, Ed. De Minuit, 2006.

"A book you read in a single sitting" (Le Magazine Littéraire), here is a "story worthy of Hitchcock" (Paris Vogue), from one of the most promising French novelists to emerge since Michel Houellebecq. Bestselling French wunderkind Tanguy Viel, heir to the legacy of Georges Simenon, has created his own literary genre in the noir tradition: thrillers with Proustian attention to detail and Freudian insights into his characters. A master of style and suspense, Viel explores moral dilemmas in poetic language rarely found in a crime novel. Called "a marvel of grace and precision" by the French press, Beyond Suspicion is a story of marriage, murder, and double-crosses. 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 grace and precision of Viel's language are eloquently captured by prizewinning translator Linda Coverdale's lyrical prose.

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

“A Machiavellian plot that leads us to a surprise revelation.”
Paris Vogue

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

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