[Audimat Circus]
by Thierry Maugenest

Publisher: Seeking an American Publisher
Translated by David Beardsmore from Audimat Circus, Liana Levi 2007

[...]: English titles to be announced

[Corniche Kennedy]
by Maylis de Kerangal

Publisher: Seeking an American Publisher
Translated by Michael Lucey from Corniche Kennedy Editions Verticales, 2008

[...]: English titles to be announced

Publisher: Seeking an American Publisher
Translated by Alison Dundy & Emmanuelle Ertel from Daewoo, Fayard, 2004

[...]: English titles to be announced

Democracy in What State?
by Giorgio Agamben, Alain Badiou, Daniel Bensaïd, Wendy Brown, Jean-Luc Nancy, Jacques Rancière, Kristin Ross, Slavoj Zizek

Publisher: Columbia University Press, December 2010
Translated by Willam McCuaig, from Démocratie dans quel état ? , La Fabrique 2009

"Is it meaningful to call oneself a democrat? And if so, how do you interpret the word?"In responding to this question, eight iconoclastic thinkers prove the rich potential of democracy, along with its critical weaknesses, and reconceive the practice to accommodate new political and cultural realities. Giorgio Agamben traces the tense history of constitutions and their coexistence with various governments. Alain Badiou contrasts current democratic practice with democratic communism. Daniel Bensaid ponders the institutionalization of democracy, while Wendy Brown discusses the democratization of society under neoliberalism. Jean-Luc Nancy measures the difference between democracy as a form of rule and as a human end, and Jacques Ranciere highlights its egalitarian nature. Kristin Ross identifies hierarchical relationships within democratic practice, and Slavoj eiuek complicates the distinction between those who desire to own the state and those who wish to do without it. Concentrating on the classical roots of democracy and its changing meaning over time and within different contexts, these essays uniquely defend what is left of the left-wing tradition after the fall of Soviet communism. They confront disincentives to active democratic participation that have caused voter turnout to decline in western countries, and they address electoral indifference by invoking and reviving the tradition of citizen involvement. Passionately written and theoretically rich, this collection speaks to all facets of modern political and democratic debate.

“Democracy in What State? is an extremely significant contribution to the critical debate on the current state of world politics and, more specifically, to the role of the term 'democracy' in political theory and practice. It includes invited contributions and interviews with a battery of intellectuals who possess a rare conceptual pedigree, including some of the most well-known living European philosophers, as well as the welcome contribution of two renowned American intellectuals.”
Gabriel Rockhill, Villanova University

[Des hommes]
by Laurent Mauvignier

Publisher: Seeking an American Publisher
Translated by David and Nicole Ball from Des Hommes, Editions de Minuit, 2009

[...]: English titles to be announced

Awakening Islam: The Politics of Religious Dissent in Contemporary Saudi Arabia
by Stéphane Lacroix

Publisher: Harvard University Press, March 2011
Translated by George Holoch from Les Islamistes Saoudiens, PUF, 2010

Amidst the roil of war and instability across the Middle East, the West is still searching for ways to understand the Islamic world. Stéphane Lacroix has now given us a penetrating look at the political dynamics of Saudi Arabia, one of the most opaque of Muslim countries and the place that gave birth to Osama bin Laden. The result is a history that has never been told before. Lacroix shows how thousands of Islamist militants from Egypt, Syria, and other Middle Eastern countries, starting in the 1950s, escaped persecution and found refuge in Saudi Arabia, where they were integrated into the core of key state institutions and society. The transformative result was the Sahwa, or “Islamic Awakening,” an indigenous social movement that blended political activism with local religious ideas. Awakening Islam offers a pioneering analysis of how the movement became an essential element of Saudi society, and why, in the late 1980s, it turned against the very state that had nurtured it. Though the “Sahwa Insurrection” failed, it has bequeathed the world two very different, and very determined, heirs: the Islamo-liberals, who seek an Islamic constitutional monarchy through peaceful activism, and the neo-jihadis, supporters of bin Laden's violent campaign. Awakening Islam is built upon seldom-seen documents in Arabic, numerous travels through the country, and interviews with an unprecedented number of Saudi Islamists across the ranks of today’s movement. The result affords unique insight into a closed culture and its potent brand of Islam, which has been exported across the world and which remains dangerously misunderstood.

“Looking at the Muslim misfits of the past half-century and how many received refuge in Saudi Arabia, Parisian professor Stéphane Lacroix argues that the resulting movement has yielded two opposing camps--the Islamo-liberals and the neo-jihadis, both headquartered out of that Islamic heartland.”
Asma Gull Hasan, Publishers Weekly

“An extraordinary contribution that reshapes our understanding of Saudi Arabia and of Islamic politics in the Middle East. Lacroix takes us deep inside the evolution of the Sahwa and its competitors in Saudi Arabia, with unprecedented access to participants and a close reading of a vast array of rare sources.”
Marc Lynch, Director, Institute for Middle East Studies, George Washington University

[Meat Eaters: From Prehistory to Present Day]
by Marylène Patou-Mathis

Publisher: Seeking an American Publisher
Translated by George Holoch from Mangeurs de Viande, Plon-Perrin, 2009

Nutritionists, health experts, and ethicists may argue over the risks and benefits of eating meat, and Western societies may be reducing meat eating, but from the earliest times, meat has been important in human diets and in developing and maintaining cultures. Marylène Patou-Mathis, an authority in prehistory who has spent 15 years on research that includes seminal food practices, explores the essential and fascinating position in human history of the hunting and consumption of meat. In prehistoric times, she found, game hunting was a central necessity that contributed not just to diet but also to the organization of society and the development of certain life skills. Hunting had important social consequences: the development of strategic thinking, the division of labor, the distribution of the yield of the hunt, and group cohesion. Prey has often been multisymbolic, making it necessary for the hunters to choose carefully what and how they hunted and for the entire society to be selective about methods of consumption. The object of the hunt was often considered sacred, and across time, rituals had to be performed before and after the killing or before and after eating. Patou-Mathis discusses the symbolic importance of animal flesh—and of human flesh. Human sacrifices and cannibalistic rituals have been practiced by many diverse societies over the course of history, in all areas of the world. Most modern societies no longer rely on hunting for food, but hunting can still be seen as part of our cultural heritage in such practices as hunting for sport or watching bullfights.

[...]: English titles to be announced

The Eleven
by Pierre Michon

Publisher: Archipelago Books, Fall 2012
Translated by Jody Gladding & Elizabeth Deshays, Verdier, 2009

Corentin, a young man of humble origins, rises up in Parisian society, becoming a famous painter who is called upon to decorate the homes of Louis XIV’s mistresses. Yet his masterpiece is “The Eleven,” a revolutionary “Mona Lisa", a representation of the eleven members of the Committee of Public Safety (including Robespierre and Saint-Just) during the Reign of Terror.

“Michon's prose tends to slow down in order to oblige you to hear its rhythms and also to see and touch and smell what is happening beneath it.”
Harper's

“…just over one hundred pages, stunning.”
Lire

Grand Prix du roman de l'Académie française 2009

[And the River Will Kill the White Man]
by Patrick Besson

Publisher: Seeking an American Publisher
Translated by Edward Gauvin from Mais le Fleuve Tuera l'homme Blanc, Fayard, 2009

By one of France’s most esteemed authors, Mais le fleuve tuera l’homme blanc is an intricately plotted political thriller that depicts the Congo-Brazzaville of today and the Rwandan genocide. An executive at an oil company, Christophe Parmentier recognizes a retired spy, Blandine de Kergalec, in the plane taking him to Brazzaville. A fan of anything spy related, he decides to follow her on his arrival. De Kergalec is in the Congolese capital for an ultimate and lucrative mission: organizing the assassination of Jean-Pierre Rwabango, a Hutu priest who actively participated in the genocide. During his one-week stay, Christophe will meet a large cast of characters, including Tessy, a young Congolese woman who was raped 13 times during the 1994 events; Pouchkine, a mulatto and father of Tessy’s younger son, Elena; Pouchkine’s mother, a Russian who has been living and doing business in the Republic of Congo for 20 years; Bernard Lemaire, her business partner and lover; Joshua of the Tutsi secret services; Angèle and Charles, siblings of Jean-Pierre Rwabango; and Tendresse, the gorgeous Tutsi girl who escaped from the genocide. At different levels, all become involved in this act of revenge. With a narrative interspersing flashbacks and giving a voice to each of his characters, Besson creates a fascinating portrait of a Sub-Saharan Africa where each considers the other as an endless source of legends, mysteries, and occult powers. Mais le fleuve tuera l’homme blanc takes elements from the spy novel, the psychological thriller, the love story, and the adventure tale, even as it clarifies one of the darkest chapters of African history.

[...]: English titles to be announced

A Game for Swallows: To Die, to Leave, to Return
by Abirached Zeina

Publisher: Lerner Books, January 2012
Translated by Edward Gauvin, from Mourir, Partir, Revenir, Le jeu des hirondelles, Editions Cambourakis, 2007

Zeina Abirached also grew up there a bit later, never knowing anything else other than the war. “People have not written a lot about the Civil War in Lebanon, perhaps because it is too recent, its protagonists are still here. So there are no official versions of the war until now. One needs a bit of distance to arrive at a version that is not partial or biased.” In A Game of Swallows, she evokes the divided capital and its citizens’ attempts “to preserve some dignity and normailty, a sort of resistance not to cede to the pressures of war.”

No One
by Gwenaëlle Aubry

Publisher: Tin House Books, January 2012
Translated by Trista Selous from Personne, Mercure de France, 2009

In this critically acclaimed biographical novel, the author reconnects with her father, whose bipolar disorder had long removed him from her life—and his own. Cleaning up her father’s home after his death, Gwenaëlle Aubry discovers a handwritten, autobiographical manuscript with a note on the cover: “to novelize.” The title is The Melancholic Black Sheep, but the subtitle, An Inconvenient Specter, had been crossed out. The specter? Her father’s disabling bipolar disorder. Gwenaëlle had long known that she wanted to write about her father; his death, and his words, gave her the opportunity to explain his many absences—even while he was physically present—and to sculpt her memory of him. Personne is the portrait of a man without a true self; a one-time distinguished lawyer and member of the Paris bar who imagined himself in many important roles—a procession of doubles, a population of masks—who became a drifter and frequent visitor to mental institutions. Moving between the voices of daughter and father, this fictional memoir in dictionary form investigates the many men behind the masks, and a possible unified portrait evolves. A describes her father’s adopted persona as Antonin Artaud, the poet/playwright; B is for James Bond, H is for homeless, and finally, Z is for Zelig, the Woody Allen character who could transform his appearance to that of the people around him. Letter by letter, Aubry gives shape and meaning to the father who had long disappeared from her view. A stunning evocation of the shifting emotional landscape of a man who has lost his way and a daughter who cannot find her father, Personne is an intimate novel of love and loss.

"Aubry’s lucid prose has ascended to the heights of poetry."
Publishers Weekly

“The words are simple yet offer tremendous power. The fact is: we want to dog ear every page to relive certain moments, those certain expressions that put our hair on end…”
Le Figaro Litteraire

"A cubist and polyphonic portrait, ridden with elegance and restraint, [No One] is a two-fold autobiography of a father and daughter, its threads are delicately woven with impressions, memories and language that recreate the figure of complex and engaging man, stranger to the world- yet, also stranger to himself…”
Le Monde des Livres

[Savage Seasons]
by Kettly Mars

Publisher: University of Nebraska Press, forthcoming in 2012
Translated by Jeanine Herman from Saisons sauvages, Mercure de France, 2010

The Creole culture of Haiti and daily life under dictatorship are at the heart of Kettly Mars’s third novel, Saisons Sauvages. It is 1963 in Port-au-Prince, Haiti, a few months before François “Papa Doc” Duvalier declared himself president for life. Daniel Leroy, the editor-in-chief of the opposition newspaper, has been kidnapped by the secret police, commonly called the Tonton Macoutes. His wife, Nirvah, the mother of his two young children, is desperate for news of her husband. She has knocked on every possible door when, as a last resort, she goes to the secretary of the interior, Raoul Vincent, the man in charge of the repression of political opponents. This humiliating meeting between the former poor black boy, who became the strong man of the regime, and the beautiful bourgeois mulatto woman, doesn’t bring any results for Daniel’s case. But for Raoul Vincent, Nirvah represents everything that was forbidden to him while he was growing up, and he has to have her now. Nirvah has no desire for Raoul—yet she needs protection and she has no other hope in these impossible times. She convinces herself that sharing a bed with Raoul will benefit her children—and perhaps will help her see her husband again. Does she have a choice? She plays the ugly game but soon finds herself entangled in a net of conflicting demands, and the trap she has walked into becomes deeper and more complex. Set within the surreal and disturbing context of an arbitrary dictatorship, Saisons Sauvages is not just the story of a woman torn between right and wrong. The extracts of Daniel’s diary within the novel offer a critical reading of the class system and corruption that plagued Haiti during the Duvalier years.Kettly Mars was born in Port-au-Prince, Haiti, where she still lives. She is the author of several collections of short stories, poetry, and novels, and her works have been translated into Danish, English, Japanese, and Italian. Her first novel, Kasalé (Imprimeur II, 2003), was excerpted in Bomb Magazine.

[...]: English titles to be announced

[Vivre avec: la pensée de la mort et la mémoire des guerres]
by Marc Crépon

Publisher: University of Minnesota Press, forthcoming
Translated by Michael Loriaux from Vivre avec: la pensée de la mort et la mémoire des guerres, Hermann, 2008

[...]: English titles to be announced