The Possible Life of Christian Boltanski
by Christian Boltanski and Catherine Grenier

Publisher: Museum of Fine Arts Editions, 2009
Translated by Marc Lowenthal from La vie possible de Christian Boltanski, Seuil, 2007

Christian Boltanski's votive installations, archives and objects, revolving around the fragile polarities of memory and amnesia, identity and anonymity, have made him one of the world's most renowned contemporary artists. And yet, despite the centrality of biography and testimony to his work, Boltanski's own story is little known and has never been fully told. Published on the occasion of the artist's sixty-fifth birthday, The Possible Life of Christian Boltanski, written in the form of a book-length interview (which the artist likens to a "psychoanalysis" or "confession") with the art historian Catherine Grenier, is Boltanski's oral autobiography. In it, he recounts his unusual wartime childhood ("my mother hid my father under the floorboards. He stayed there for a year and a half, between two floors in the house. He'd come out from time to time--I'm living proof of that!"), his career, friendships and marriage, successes and regrets, his approaches to art and teaching, how he created various installations, his relations with dealers and the public, and other matters that illuminate as never before his complex, enigmatic works. Boltanski is refreshingly phlegmatic about the realities of the world (art and otherwise), and he relates his remarkable stories--some enormously amusing, others tragic--with a matter-of-factness and self-deprecating humor that highlight his capacity for humane responsiveness. As both the self-portrait of a major contemporary artist and a frank, fascinating memoir, this is a document of capital importance.

Treason
by Hédi Kaddour

Publisher: Yale University Press, 2009
Translated by Marylin Hacker

Hédi Kaddour’s poetry arises from observation, from situations both ordinary and emblematic—of contemporary life, of human stubbornness, human invention, or human cruelty. With Treason, the award-winning poet and translator Marilyn Hacker presents an English-speaking audience with the first selected volume of his work.

The poetries of several languages and literary traditions are lively and constant presences in the work of Hédi Kaddour, a Parisian as well as a Germanist and an Arabist. A walker’s, a watcher’s, and a listener’s poems, his sonnet-shaped vignettes often include a line or two of dialogue that turns his observations and each poem itself into a kind of miniature theater piece. Favoring compact, classical models over long verse forms, Kaddour questions the structures of syntax and the limits of poetic form, combining elements of both international modernism and postmodernism with great sophistication.

". . . thoroughly delightful, Kaddour's poetics offer readers proof of the transcendent qualities of literature."
Library Journal

Running Away
by Jean-Philippe Toussaint

Publisher: Dalkey Archives, 2009
Translated by Matthew B. Smith from Fuir, Gallimard, 2005

A European man arrives in Shanghai, ostensibly on vacation, yet a small task given him by his Parisian girlfriend Marie starts a series of complications. There is a mysterious Chinese man and a manila envelope full of cash. Later, he meets a woman at an art gallery and they agree to travel together to Beijing, yet when he joins her at the train station, the Chinese man is along. Events eclipse explanations, and soon he surrenders himself to the on-rush of experience.

Toussaint's latest novel pulls the reader into a jet-lag reality, a confusion of time and place that is both particularly modern and utterly real. The Chaplinesque slapstick of his acclaimed early works The Bathroom and Camera is here replaced by an ever-unfolding fabric of questions, coincidences, and misapprehensions large and small. The mature Toussaint shows himself to be no less ingenious an inventor of existential dilemmas, but with a new, surprising tenderness, and a deepened concern for the inexpressible immediacy and sensuality of human experience.

"An original and significant writer, whose fiction can be as engaging as it is surprising."
The Times Literary Supplement

"The combination of the absurd and the conscious intellect recalls such other French-language writers as Raymond Queneau in a style that is elegant, erudite, and joyously superficial."
Publishers Weekly

03
by Jean-Christophe Valtat

Publisher: Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, Fall 2009
Translated by Mitzi Angel from 03, Gallimard, 2005

“From the bus stop across the street, it was hard to tell, but suddenly I understood, seeing the passengers in the van that picked her up every morning, that she was slightly retarded.”

A precocious teenager in a French suburb finds himself powerfully, troublingly drawn to the girl he sees every day on the way to school. As he watches and thinks about her, his daydreams—full of lyrics from Joy Division and the Smiths, fairy tales, Flowers for Algernon, sexual desire and fear, loneliness, rage for escape, impatience to grow up—reveal an entire adolescence. And this fleeting erotic obsession, remembered years later, blossoms into a meditation on what it means to be a smart kid, what it means to be dumb, and what it means to be in love with another person.

03 is a book about young love like none you have ever read. It marks the English-language debut of a unique French writer—one of the great stylists of his generation.

“[Valtat’s] hypersensitive high-school student listens to the Cure’s Pornography but speaks like someone out of Proust ...Valtat manages to re-create the exact unhappiness of lost youth.”
Les Inrockuptibles

[Children of the Colonies]
by Emmanuelle Saada

Publisher: University Of Chicago Press
Translated by Arthur Goldhammer from Les Enfants de la Colonie, Editions La Découverte, 2007

After a long period of conquests initiated with the seizure of Algiers in 1830, the modern French colonial empire entered a period of stability at the end of the 19th Century. Large parts of Africa and Southeast Asia were under French rule. Island territories in the Indian Ocean, the Pacific, and the Caribbean flew the French flag. Half a century would pass before it began to fall apart. For colonial rulers in this period, few subjects elicited as much concern as the ‘métis question,’ or what to do with the often-abandoned children of European fathers and indigenous mothers. Although few in number, the métis blurred the line between colonizers and colonized and in so doing threatened the legal and social distinctions on which colonial rule was based. Were the métis ‘citizens’ or ‘subjects’ of the empire? What to do when paternity could not be established? What did it mean, in the end, to be French? Children of the Colonies recovers the history of the métis, examining both personal histories and the broader debates and policies that affected them. Moving beyond recent anthropological and historical work on the “tensions of empire”, the book concentrates on the role of law as a tool of colonial domination, and thereby engages and reinvigorates a tradition of sociological engagement with the law. In a period of reexamination of the meaning of citizenship and the legacy of colonization in Europe, this study provides a fundamental corrective to conventional narratives about French national identity formation while offering a fresh perspective on colonial history, an analysis of the changing meaning of race in the French context, and a reflection on the impact of colonial modes of exclusion within contemporary French society. Methodologically, it breaks new ground in bringing together history, anthropology and legal theory in the analysis of imperialism.

[We Can’t See a Thing!: Writings on Painting]
by Daniel Arasse

Publisher: Princeton University Press
Translated by Alyson Waters from On n’y voit rien, Editions Denoël, 2003

In six short essays written in the form of letters and animated conversations with colleagues, Arasse shows us what it is to enter into the complexity of a work of art, visiting all of its dark corners, refuting received wisdom and supposed truths. He proposes adventures in seeing by way of works from Velasquez to Titian, Brueghel to Tintoretto. Eschewing “artspeak” for a more readable, accessible style, Arasse wages war with a recent proliferation of scholarly commentaries that render the works themselves virtually invisible. The repetition of theories, he writes, leads to their acceptance as fact, the result being a banalization of and a sort of erudite indifference to the work itself. This collection of knowledgeable and thought-provoking essays on a traditionally serious and academic subject is rife with humor and wit, and will appeal to art lovers everywhere. Originally published in 2000, Editions Denoel is proud to reissue this classic bestseller in a larger format offering 60 beautiful color reproductions.

[The Invention of Heterosexual Culture]
by Louis-Georges Tin

Publisher : MIT Press, Fall 2009
Translated By LTD, Oxford from L’invention de la culture hétérosexuelle, Editions Autrement, 2008

L’invention de la culture hétérosexuelle by Louis-Georges Tin is a study of the social, artistic, religious, medical, and political origins of heterosexual culture. According to Tin, the first emergence of a truly heterosexual society was not until medieval times, and it grew out of the “homosocial” culture of knights, and despite resistance amongst members of the clergy, and in the medical community. Turning to examples in medieval prose and lyrics, Tin unveils a portrait of gender behavior in the couple in the twelfth century. Representations of couples are predominantly about two knights and their manly friendship, a relationship based on love, trust, and devotion. Tin points to these “homosocial” values as the basis for the nascent heterosexual culture. Omnipresent in these relationships are ideals of love and chivalry most often expressed through song. The clergy was resistant to this development, as was the medical community, for whom love was considered a sickness, best avoided in relation to marriage.

[Where Tigers Feel at Home]
by Jean-Marie de Roblès

Publisher: Seeking an American Publisher
Translated by Edward Gauvin from Là où les tigres sont chez eux, Zulma, 2008

The fruit of ten years of research, this ambitious novel is both a monument of erudition and a subtle cocktail of characters, all of them pursuing knowledge that eludes them. Only the author’s perfect control and super narrative talent could have made this 800-page novel a success. Eleazard von Wogau is an obscure writer and press correspondent living in the ghost city of Alcântra, lost in the wild northern regions of Brazil. He is also an expert on the 17th century German encyclopaedist, Athanase Kircher. One day, a fascinating biography of Kircher, seemingly written by a German Jesuit called Caspar Schott, falls into his hands. Considered to be one of the greatest minds of the Roman Baroque period, Kircher was a renowned geometer, inventor, linguist, volcanologist, collector of hieroglyphs and astronomer. Eléazard’s journey into that biography intertwines with the intriguing destinies of the book’s other characters: Elaine, Eléazard’s ex-wife, on a jungle expedition in search of precious fossils; Moéma, his drug-dependent daughter, the diabolical governor of Maranao; and Nelson, a child from the favelas determined to avenge his father’s death…

A Life On Paper: Stories
by Georges Olivier Chateaureynaud

Publisher: Small Beer Press, June 2010
Translated by Edward Gauvin

The celebrated career of Georges-Olivier Châteaureynaud is well known to readers of French literature. This comprehensive collection—the first to be translated into English—introduces a distinct and dynamic voice to the Anglophone world. In many ways, Châteaureynaud is France’s own Kurt Vonnegut, and his stories are as familiar as they are fantastic.

A Life on Paper presents characters who struggle to communicate across the boundaries of the living and the dead, the past and the present, the real and the more-than-real. A young husband struggles with self-doubt and an ungainly set of angel wings in “Icarus Saved from the Skies,” even as his wife encourages him to embrace his transformation. In the title story, a father’s obsession with his daughter leads him to keep her life captured in 93,284 unchanging photographs. While Châteaureynaud’s stories examine the diffidence and cruelty we are sometimes capable of, they also highlight the humanity in the strangest of us and our deep appreciation for the mysterious.

“Both classic and modern, strange and simple, Châteaureynaud’s stories remind not only of Vonnegut but of Gogol and Kafka. What’s endearing about the stories is the amount of tenderness running through them. Even in stories about bizarre cruelty (the title story tells of a father who had his daughter photographed a dozen times a day for her entire life), affection provides the glue.”
Time Out Chicago

“These 22 curious tales verging on the perverse will strike new English readers of Châteaureynaud’s work as a wonderful find. Beautiful prose featuring ingenuous protagonists and clever, unexpected forays into horror are the hallmarks of these mischievous stories.”
Publishers Weekly

Zone
by Mathias Enard

Publisher: Open Letter
Translated by Charlotte Mandel from Zone, Actes Sud, 2008

Francis Servain Mirkovic, a French-born Croat who has been working for the French Intelligence Services for fifteen years, is traveling by train from Milan to Rome. He’s carrying a briefcase whose contents he’s selling to a representative from the Vatican; the briefcase contains a wealth of information about the violent history of the Zone—the lands of the Mediterranean basin, Spain, Algeria, Lebanon, Italy, that have become Mirkovic’s specialty.

Over the course of a single night, Mirkovic visits the sites of these tragedies in his memory and recalls the damage that his own participation in that violence—as a soldier fighting for Croatia during the Balkan Wars—has wreaked in his own life. Mirkovic hopes that this night will be his last in the Zone, that this journey will expiate his sins, and that he can disappear with Sashka, the only woman he hasn’t abandoned, forever...

Coma
by Pierre Guyotat

Publisher: Semiotext(e)
Translated by Noura Wedell from Coma, Mercure de France, 2008

Long ago, in childhood, when Summer reverberates and feels and throbs all over, it begins to circumscribe my body along with my self, and my body gives it shape in turn: the "joy" of living, of experiencing, of already foreseeing dismembers it, this entire body explodes, neurons rush toward what attracts them, zones of sensation break off almost in blocks that come to rest at the four corners of the landscape, at the four corners of Creation. —from Coma

The novelist and playwright Pierre Guyotat has been called the last great avant-garde visionary of the twentieth century, and the near-cult status of his work—because of its extreme linguistic innovation and its provocative violence—has made him one of the most influential of French writers today. He has been hailed as the true literary heir to Lautréamont and Arthur Rimbaud, and his "inhuman" works have been mentioned in the same breath as those by Georges Bataille and Antonin Artaud.

[The Past Ahead]
by Glibert Gatore

Publisher: To be published by Indiana University Press
Translated by Marjolijn de Jager from Le passé devant soi, Phébus, 2008

Gilbert Gatore was born in Rwanda in 1981. During the civil war, he kept a diary that was later lost during his escape. In an attempt to recreate what he had written, he started to write this first novel.

The Spark of Randomness
by Henri Atlan

Publisher: Stanford University Press, November 2010
Translated by Lenn Schramm from Les Etincelles de Hasard, Seuil, 1999, 2003

Science and technology always return us to problems of the human condition: knowledge, sexuality, generation, aging, disease, and death. Taking inspiration from the schools of antiquity, when myth, science, and philosophy were not yet separated and from the rabbinical inquiries that led to the Talmud, Henri Atlan founds an ethics adapted to modern science's power over life. He holds that the results of science cannot ground any ethical or political truth, while creative activity and the conquest of knowledge is always a double-edged sword.

This first volume of Atlan's magnum opus argues that the Judeo-Christian tradition does not demonize man for creating and changing living things. Further, though we will soon fabricate life "from scratch," synthetic biology has shown that there is no absolute distinction between life and nonlife, no threshold whose crossing would be taboo. He also demystifies our conviction that ethics depends upon free will, proposes a complete revision of cognitive science and philosophy of mind, and derives exciting considerations for medicine and epidemiology.

Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari: Intersecting Lives
by François Dosse

Publisher: Colombia University Press, June 2010
Translated by Deborah Glassman from Gilles Deleuze et Felix Guattari, La Découverte, 2007.

In May 1968, Gilles Deleuze was an established philosopher teaching at the innovative Vincennes University, just outside of Paris. Félix Guattari was a political militant and the director of an unusual psychiatric clinic at La Borde. Their meeting was quite unlikely, yet the two were introduced in an arranged encounter of epic consequence. From that moment on, Deleuze and Guattari engaged in a surprising, productive partnership, collaborating on several groundbreaking works, including Anti-Oedipus, What Is Philosophy? and A Thousand Plateaus.

François Dosse, a prominent French intellectual known for his work on the Annales School, structuralism, and biographies of the pivotal intellectuals Paul Ricoeur, Pierre Chaunu, and Michel de Certeau, examines the prolific if improbable relationship between two men of distinct and differing sensibilities. Drawing on unpublished archives and hundreds of personal interviews, Dosse elucidates a collaboration that lasted more than two decades, underscoring the role that family and history—particularly the turbulent time of May 1968—play in their monumental work. He also takes the measure of Deleuze and Guattari's posthumous fortunes and the impact of their thought on intellectual, academic, and professional circles.

"An exhaustive and fascinating account.... As a glimpse into a remarkable period in French intellectual history where politics, philosophy, and literary brilliance coalesced, it is captivating."
Publishers Weekly

The World According to Monsanto
by Marie-Monique Robin

Publisher: The New Press
Translated by George Holoch from Le Monde selon Monsanto, La Découverte, 2008

The result of a remarkable three-year-long investigation that took award-winning journalist and documentary filmmaker Marie-Monique Robin across four continents (North and South America, Europe, and Asia), The World According to Monsanto tells the little-known yet shocking story of this agribusiness giant--the world's leading producer of GMOs (genetically modified organisms)--and how its new "green" face is no less malign than its PCB- and Agent Orange-soaked past.

Robin reports that, following its long history of manufacturing hazardous chemicals and lethal herbicides, Monsanto is now marketing itself as a "life sciences" company, seemingly convinced about the virtues of sustainable development. However, Monsanto now controls the majority of the yield of the world's genetically modified corn and soy--ingredients found in more than 95 percent of American households--and its alarming legal and political tactics to maintain this monopoly are the subject of worldwide concern.

Released to great acclaim and controversy in France, throughout Europe, and in Latin America alongside the documentary film of the same name, The World According to Monsanto is sure to change the way we think about food safety and the corporate control of our food supply.

A vast investigation of Monsanto--the first of this scope to dismantle the malicious practices of the St. Louis-based agrochemical firm, world leader of GMO's.
Télérama