Setting out to tell the story of a mysterious cowboy -- a stranger in town with a terrible secret -- Christine Montalbetti is continually sidetracked by the details that occur to her along the way, her CinemaScope camera focusing not on the gunslinger's grim and determined eyes, but on the insects crawling in the dust by his boots. A collection of the moments usually discarded in order to tell even the simplest and most familiar story, "Western" presents us with the world behind the clich?s, where the much-anticipated violence of the plot is continually, maddeningly delayed, and no moment is too insignificant not to be valued. Montalbetti's daring theft of movie technique and subversion of a genre where women are usually relegated to secondary roles -- victims, prostitutes, widows, schoolmarms -- makes Western a remarkable wake for the most basic of American mythologies.

With a name like Jacques Boucher de Cr?vecoeur de Perthes, it ought to be easy to become a hero. Yet, how to go about it? A reallife nineteenth-century paleontologist and explorer, excavated here by Christine Montalbetti to serve as her protagonist, Jacques has tried everything: fighting off pirates, writing poetry, becoming a dandy, a man of culture... all without ever quite feeling he fits the bill. At last, when Jacques decides he'll make his name by discovering evidence of early man, it seems we, his, will be treated to a novel about mankind itself -- unless, of course, our putative hero gets shanghaied into a love story along the way. "The Origin of Man" is the story of one man -- and all humanity -- waging a war against oblivion without ever quite winning the day. It's also a comedy about being immersed in heroic and fantastical events without one's ever noticing.

A New York Times New and Noteworthy Book Edouard Glissant's novels, closely tied to the theories he developed in Poetique de la Relation (Poetics of relation), are rich explorations of a deported and colonized people's loss of their own history and the ever-evolving social and political effects this sense of groundlessness has caused in Martinique. In Mahagony Glissant identifies both the malaise of and the potential within Martinican society through a powerful collective narrative of geographic identity explored through multiple narrators. These characters' lives are viewed back and forth over centuries of time and through tales of resistance, linked always by the now-ancient mahogany tree. Attempting to untangle the collective memory of Martinique, Mathieu, the contemporary narrator, creates a conscious history of these people in that place-a record that unearths the mechanics of misrepresentation to get at the fundamental, enduring truths of that history, perhaps as only the mahogany tree knows it.

In writing "Le Livre de Promethea" Helene Cixous set for herself the task of bridging the immeasurable distance between love and language. She describes a love between two women in its totality, experienced as both a physical presence and a sense of infinity. The result is a stunning example of Pecriture feminine that won kudos when published in France in 1983. Its translation into English by Betsy Wing will extend the influence of a writer already famous for her novels and contributions to feminist theory.

In her introduction Betsy Wing notes the contemporary emphasis on "fictions of presence." Cixous, in "The Book of Promethea," works to "repair the separation between fiction and presence, trying to chronicle a very-present love without destroying it in the writing."

Mathilde Lewly -- a female painter at the dawn of the twentieth century -- has achieved notoriety among the Parisian avant-garde. She and her husband, also a talented young artist, pursue their separate visions side by side in a Clichy atelier, galvanized by the artistic ferment that surrounds them. But the couple are threatened by the shadow of Mathilde's little sister, Eug?nie: since the two girls' sudden departure from their native England, Eug?nie has been determined to vault the eight years separating her from Mathilde. Now, devoured by envy and haunted by a past she never actually experienced, the "little one" hurls herself into the artistic and personal life of her elder sister. It is the birth of a fierce rivalry, an emotional tug-of-war, played out against the bohemian riot of the last century's wildest years. But will the First World War's sudden and brutal eruption allow Mathilde to escape this intimate conflict and achieve her destiny?

Over the past 30 years the writings of Georges Bataille have had a profound influence on French intellectual thought, informing the work of Foucault, Derrida, and Barthes, among others. Against Architecture offers the first serious interpretation of this challenging thinker, spelling out the profoundly original and radical nature of Bataille's work.Denis Hollier is Professor of French at Yale University.

Lucie Aubrac (1912-2007), of Catholic and peasant background, was teaching history in a Lyon girls' school and newly married to Raymond, a Jewish engineer, when World War II broke out and divided France. The couple, living in the Vichy zone, soon joined the Resistance movement in opposition to the Nazis and their collaborators. Outwitting the Gestapo is Lucie's harrowing account of her participation in the Resistance: of the months when, though pregnant, she planned and took part in raids to free comrades—including her husband, under Nazi death sentence—from the prisons of Klaus Barbie, the infamous Butcher of Lyon. Her book is also the basis for the 1997 French movie, Lucie Aubrac, which was released in the United States in 1999.   Purchase the audio edition.

With Édouard Glissant’s The Fourth Century, the Village Voice observed, “we get the full effect of his overarching project: a literary exorcism of Martinique’s scarred psyche and past, a lingering cry against the ‘black hole of time and forgetting.’� Glissant, “one of the most significant figures in Caribbean literature� (Washington Post), continues that project in The Overseer’s Cabin, conjuring in one woman’s story centuries knotted together by unknown blood, voiceless suffering, and death without echo.  Beginning with the birth in 1928 of Mycea, the last of the intertwining ancestral families introduced in The Fourth Century, and ending with her release from an asylum in 1978, the novel moves back and forth across a framework that weaves the story of Mycea’s family against the legacy of Martinique as an island whose history and indigenous people have all but been erased. From the beginnings of Mycea’s family in the tale of two blood brothers, both named Odono, to its ending with the fate of her two sons, the novel encapsulates the island’s destiny in one Martinican woman’s plight. With the past irretrievable and the future in doubt, Mycea journeys inward, finding in her connection to the land of Martinique, and to the seafloor littered with drowned slaves, a reality, and a possibility, uncolonized by others’ history.

Winner of the Prix Goncourt in 1998, this book is the work of one of France's most celebrated and interesting novelists writing at the height of her powers. It is fiction that leads readers through fascinating chambers of life where autobiography is constantly reimagined. A darkly comic novel about four women aging less-than-gracefully, "Trading Secrets" takes us to an academic conference in Kansas where, in an encounter between Aurore, a French woman, and her American counterpart, Gloria, the differences between their two cultures become sharply apparent. The result is a bitingly funny portrait of painfully complex, psychologically damaged individuals, all of whom have been, in some sense, "colonized." The novel also offers an incisive picture of a French posture toward things American, from race relations to feminism to academia. As Paule Constant herself has said: "C'est un livre en miroir." The book is a mirror, both in how its characters reflect one another and in what it shows us of ourselves and our world.

"The Fourth Century" tells of the quest by young Mathieu Beluse to discover the lost history of his country, Martinique. Aware that the officially recorded version he learned in school omits and distorts, he turns to a "quimboiseur" named Papa Longoue. This old man of the forest, a healer, seer, and storyteller, knows the oral tradition and its relation to the powers of the land and the forces of nature. He tells of the love-hate relationship between the Longoue and Beluse families, whose ancestors were brought as slaves to Martinique. Upon arrival, Longoue immediately escaped and went to live in the hills as a maroon. Beluse remained in slavery. The intense relationship that had formed between the two men in Africa continued and came to encompass the relations between their masters, or, in the case of Longoue, his would-be master, and their descendants. "The Fourth Century" closes the gap between the families as Papa Longoue, last of his line, conveys the history to Mathieu Beluse, who becomes his heir.

After answering a classified ad placed by an import-export company looking for energetic young men willing to take on responsibilities for its African branches--no diploma required--Victor finds himself on "The Will of God," a dilapidated boat heading into the heart of darkness as even Conrad couldn't have imagined. With the piquant mixture of hilarity and painful disenchantment characterizing Paule Constant's vision of the "colonial novel," "White Spirit" follows three innocents--Victor; Lola, a mulatto prostitute; and Alexis, who does not know he's a monkey--as they negotiate the perverse system of desires and hatreds on an African banana plantation.
Selling what no one wants or needs, Victor takes delivery of a barrel of mysterious powder promptly christened "white spirit" for its ability to bleach the black arms of the workers handling the shipment. To become whiter and worthier of love, Lola buys some--and then the rest vanishes. In this nightmarish Africa where colonized and colonizers have each other in a stranglehold, the "white spirit" unleashes an obsession that merges whiteness with a return to paradise--an obsession that can only end in catastrophe. Through it all, with her characteristic caustic language, fierce irony, and enormous tenderness for human frailty, Constant portrays the ridiculous without ridicule--and, miraculously, sparks a light of hope in the midst of the torment and suffering.