Common Place : The American Motel
by Bruce Bégout

Publisher: Otis Books/Seismicity Editions
Translated by Colin Keaveney from Lieu Commun, Le Motel Américain, Allia, 2003

Common Place : The American Motel by Bruce Bégout Publisher: Otis Books/Seismicity Editions, June 2010 Translated by Colin Keaveney from Lieu Commun, Le Motel Américain, Allia, 2003 A relatively old legacy of the twentieth century, the motel foreshadowed, unbeknownst to itself, a new type of urban existence. With it was born the society of permanent mobility and perpetual transit, a world of freeways and gas stations, travelling salesmen and massive seasonal migrations, outsourcing and spatial homogenizing, constant and reflexive house-moving: in short the itch to move.

The Holocaust by Bullets
by Père Patrick Desbois

Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
Translated by Catherine Spencer from Porteurs de Mémoire, Lafon, 2007

"Part memoir, part prosecutorial brief, The Holocaust by Bullets tells a compelling story in which a priest unconnected by heritage or history is so moved by an injustice he sets out to right a daunting wrong…One might think Holocaust history has been exhausted, but Desbois breaks real news about how an emerging democracy in the New Europe still hasn’t emerged from World War II. We have witnessed a decade of forensic excavations documenting genocides in Guatemala, Bosnia and Rwanda, but only now are these same tools being used to find the murdered Jews of Ukraine, thanks in large part to Desbois."
The Miami Herald

"Using a diverse team consisting of a researcher, photographer, interpreter, and ballistics expert, Desbois endeavored to uncover these burial sites and the brutal stories behind them. He uses ample testimony from those who may have witnessed key parts of this brutal process, and he makes some surprising discoveries. The narrative flows because Desbois has such a passion for his subject; he writes simply and well, so that even readers with little initial understanding will learn a lot. The result is an outstanding contribution to Holocaust literature, uncovering new dimensions of the tragedy, and should be on the shelves of even the smallest library. Highly recommended."
Library Journal

"An important addition to studies of the Shoah, agonizing to read and utterly necessary."
Kirkus Reviews

Beirut
by Samir Kassir

Publisher: University of California Press
Translated by Malcolm Debevoise from Histoire de Beyrouth, Fayard, 2003

Widely praised as the definitive history of Beirut, this is the story of a city that has stood at the crossroads of Mediterranean civilization for more than four thousand years. The last major work completed by Samir Kassir before his tragic death in 2005, Beirut is a tour de force that takes the reader from the ancient to the modern world, offering a dazzling panorama of the city's Seleucid, Roman, Arab, Ottoman, and French incarnations. Kassir vividly describes Beirut's spectacular growth in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, concentrating on its emergence after the Second World War as a cosmopolitan capital until its near destruction during the devastating Lebanese civil war of 1975-1990. Generously illustrated and eloquently written, Beirut illuminates contemporary issues of modernity and democracy while at the same time memorably recreating the atmosphere of one of the world's most picturesque, dynamic, and resilient cities.

Do Not Touch
by Eric Laurrent

Publisher: Dalkey Archive Press, 2009
Translated by Jeanine Herman from Ne pas toucher, Ed. De Minuit, 2002

When French mafioso Oscar Lux saved Clovis Baccara from killing himself, he became the boss and something of a mentor to Clovis. Twenty years later, it is no surprise that Clovis is named best man when Oscar decides to settle down and get out of the business. Fulfilling his role as second-hand man, Clovis is entrusted with the job of guarding Oscar’s new bride when Oscar is taken into police custody for embezzlement and racketeering on the day after his wedding. Alone on his boss’s honeymoon in Los Angeles with Oscar’s incredibly attractive new wife, Clovis tries his hardest to adhere to the one rule he has given himself, the rule which gets harder to heed as each moment passes: do not touch.

"Part of Laurrent's talent lies in his ability to reinvent (or perhaps subvert) a commonplace theme by means of language as well as humor. Together they allow the author to maintain an ironic distance that aptly reflects the modern condition."
Donald J. Dziekowicz

"Eric Laurrent [is] decidedly one of the most virtuosic of our young writers."
Jean-Claude Lebrun, L'Humanité

"Part of Laurrent's talent lies in his ability to reinvent (or perhaps subvert) a commonplace theme by means of language as well as humor. Together they allow the author to maintain an ironic distance that aptly reflects the modern condition."
Donald J. Dziekowicz, World Literature Today

The Explosion of the Radiator Hose
by Jean Rolin

Publisher: Dalkey Archive Press
Translated by Louise Rogers Lalaurie from L'explosion de la durite, POL, 2007

In this nominally true story of an epic, transcontinental road trip, Jean Rolin travels to Africa from darkest France, accompanying a battered Audi to its new life as a taxi to be operated by the family of a Congolese security guard. The ghost of Joseph Conrad haunts Rolin's journey, as do memories of his expatriate youth in Kinshasa in the early 1960s—but no less present are W. G. Sebald and Marcel Proust, who are the guiding lights for Rolin's sensual and digressive attack upon history: his own as well as the world's. By turns comic, lyrical, gruesome, and humane, The Explosion of the Radiator Hose is a one-of-a-kind travelogue, and no less an exploration of what it means to be human in a life of perpetual exile and migration.

[Cruels, 13]
by Luc Lang

Publisher: University of Nebraska Press
Translated by D. Nicholson-Smith from Cruels, 13, Stock, 2007

Salvation Army
by Abdellah Taïa

Publisher: Semiotext(e), 2009, with a preface by Edmund White
Translated by Frank Stolk from L'Armée du salut, Seuil, 2008

This most recent work by Moroccan expatriate Abdellah Taïa is a major addition to the new French literature emerging from the North African Arabic diaspora. Salvation Army is a coming-of-age novel that narrates the story of Taïa’s life with complete disclosure — from a childhood bound by family order and latent (homo)sexual tensions in the poor city of Salé, through an adolescence in Tangier charged by the young writer’s attraction to his eldest brother, to his disappointing “arrival” in the Western world to study in Geneva in adulthood — and in so doing manages to burn through the author’s first-person singularity to embody the complex mélange of fear and desire projected by Arabs on Western culture, and move towards restituting their alterity.

"Abdellah Taïa is a brilliant young Moroccan living in France. In this novel, appropriately, he talks about his first contacts with Europeans. We learn about the traditional Moroccan family, about Swiss sex tourists, about the Salvation Army in Geneva, about the first burgeoning of desire in a young Arab, about family love and carnal love. Taïa has a captivating way of taking us into his confidence and telling us essential truths."
Edmund White

"In a simple and straightforward language, the author leads the reader through a journey of uncertainty and self-discovery, beyond the nuanced resonance of words and emotions. Writing, which he discovers at an early age, involves for him a courageous and unprecedented act of exposing his country’s taboos and prohibitions."
Mustapha Hamil, Tingus Magazine

[Les Soeurs Délicata]
by Geneviève Brisac

Publisher: Seeking an American Publisher
Translated by J.A Underwood from Les soeurs Délicata, Editions de l’Olivier, 2004

[L’Hostie Profanée : Histoire d’une fiction téologique]
by Jean-Louis Scchefer

Publisher: Seeking an American Publisher
Translated by Edward Gauvin from L’hostie profanée : Histoire d’une fiction téologique P.O.L., 2007.