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To research his thesis on contemporary agrarian life, anthropology
student David Mazon moves from Paris to La Pierre-Saint-Christophe,
a village in the marshlands of western France. Determined to
capture the essence of rurality, the intrepid scholar shuttles
around restlessly on his moped to interview local residents.
   Unbeknownst to David, in these nondescript
lands, once theatres of wars and revolutions, Death leads the
dance. When an existence ends, the Wheel of Life recycles its soul
and hurls it back into the world as microbe, human or wild animal,
sometimes in the past, sometimes in the future. Only once a year do
Death and the living observe a temporary truce, during a gargantuan
three-day feast where gravediggers gorge themselves on food,
libations and language, presided over by the village mayor.
   Brimming with Mathias Enard’s characteristic
wit and encyclopaedic brilliance, The Annual Banquet of the
Gravediggers’ Guild is a riotous novel where the edges between
past and present are constantly dissolving against a Rabelaisian
backdrop of excess – and a paradoxically macabre paean to
life’s inexhaustible richness.
In November 2019, Paul B. Preciado was invited to speak in front of
3,500 psychoanalysts at the Ecole de la Cause Freudienne's annual
conference in Paris. Standing up in front of the profession for
whom he is a 'mentally ill person' suffering from 'gender
dysphoria', Preciado draws inspiration in his lecture from Kafka's
'A Report to an Academy', in which a monkey tells an assembly of
scientists that human subjectivity is a cage comparable to one made
of metal bars. Demonstrating the discipline's complicity with the
ideology of sex, gender and sexual difference dating back to the
colonial era, Preciado was heckled and booed and unable to finish.
The lecture, filmed on smartphones, ended up published online,
where fragments were transcribed, translated and published with no
regard for exactitude. Eighteen months on, Can the Monster Speak?
is published in a definitive translation for the first time.
Teeming with life and compulsively readable, the pieces gathered
together in The Tribe aggregate into an extraordinary mosaic of
Cuba today. Carlos Manuel Ălvarez, one of the most exciting young
writers in Latin America, employs the crónica form – a genre
unique to Latin American writing that blends reportage, narrative
non-fiction, and novelistic forms – to illuminate a particularly
turbulent period in Cuban history, from the re-establishment of
diplomatic relations with the US, to the death of Fidel Castro, to
the convulsions of the San Isidro Movement. Unique, edgy and
stylishly written, The Tribe shows a society in flux, featuring
sportsmen in exile, artists, nurses, underground musicians and
household names, dissident poets, the hidden underclass at a
landfill, migrants attempting to make their way across Central
America, fugitives escaping the FBI, dealers from the black market,
as well as revelers and policemen in the noisy Havana night. It is
a major work of reportage by one of Granta’s Best of Young
Spanish-Language novelists.
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The Art of Losing (Paperback)
Alice Zeniter; Translated by Frank Wynne
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R549
R466
Discovery Miles 4 660
Save R83 (15%)
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Ships in 10 - 15 working days
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'A magnificent small book to read urgently' Liberation Once upon a
time in an enormous forest there lived a poor woodcutter and his
wife. Around them a war wages, and hunger is a constant companion.
Yet every night, the woodcutter's wife prays for a child. On a
train crossing the forest, a Jewish father holds his twin children.
His wife no longer has enough milk to feed them. In hopes of saving
both their lives, he wraps his daughter in a shawl and gently
throws her from the train. While foraging for food, the
woodcutter's wife finds a bundle, a baby girl wrapped in a shawl.
She knows that this little girl will be pursued, but she cannot
ignore this gift: she will accept the precious cargo, and raise her
as her own. . . Set against the horrors of the Holocaust and told
with a fairytale-like lyricism, The Most Precious of Cargoes,
translated from French by Frank Wynne, is a deeply moving fable
about family and redemption, a story that reminds us that humanity
can be found in the most inhumane of places.
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The Fallen (Paperback)
Carlos Manuel Alvarez; Translated by Frank Wynne
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R229
Discovery Miles 2 290
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Ships in 12 - 17 working days
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A powerful, unsettling portrait of ordinary family life in Cuba,
Carlos Manuel Ălvarez’s debut novel The Fallen is a masterful
portrayal of a society in free fall. Diego, the son, is
disillusioned and bitter about the limited freedoms his country
offers him. Mariana, the mother, is unwell and forced to relinquish
her control over the home to her daughter, Maria, who has left
school and is working as a chambermaid in one of the state-owned
tourist hotels. The father, Armando, is a committed revolutionary
who is sickened by the corruption he perceives all around him. In
meticulously charting the disintegration of a family, The Fallen
offers a poignant reflection on contemporary Cuba and the clash of
the ardent idealism of the old guard with the jaded pragmatism of
the young.
'Literature with conviction; a furious talent' L'Obs The first
volume of THE GLORIOUS YEARS series, translated by Frank Wynne
Beirut, 1948. The Pelletier family returns... The Pelletiers are a
prominent French family living in Beirut. The patriarch, Louis, has
built a successful business manufacturing and exporting artisanal
soaps. He hoped to pass the business on to his eldest son, Jean,
but Jean doesn't have the sharpness or aptitude for such an
enterprise. After nearly running the company into the ground, Jean
marries a money-grubbing young woman who quickly makes him
miserable, and they emigrate to Paris. But there's another reason
Jean must leave - he has committed a terrible crime... His brother,
Etienne, travels to Saigon, where he soon uncovers irregularities
in the local currency office and begins investigating what he
believes is a scheme to channel smuggled goods and cash to the Viet
Minh. It is evidence that presents a real threat to his own life.
François, the middle Pelletier brother, has gone to Paris,
ostensibly to study, but finds himself working as a journalist. His
career flies when he reports on the brutal murder of an actress in
a cinema ladies' room. It seems a serial killer is on the loose.
'You have the ingredients Balzac would have cooked with. And it is
exactly those great 19th century novels that Lemaitre will remind
you of' Sunday Times 'Pierre Lemaitre skilfully captivates and
stuns the reader' Le Figaro
The first epic novel in THE GLORIOUS YEARS series from the two
times winner of the prestigious Prix-Goncourt 'You have the
ingredients Balzac would have cooked with. And it is exactly those
great 19th century novels that Lemaitre will remind you of' Sunday
Times The Pelletiers are a prominent French family living in
Beirut, dominated by Louis, who has built a hugely successful
business manufacturing artisanal soaps. Louis has three sons, but
none seems to have the aptitude for commerce he desires. There's
Jean, the eldest, a feckless man who is both lazy and weak. When
his ambitious wife suggests a move to France, he jumps at the
chance for escape - for Jean has a secret that no-one must ever
uncover. Etienne is the youngest son, who travels to Saigon looking
for love, and there uncovers financial corruption and violence
linked to the very highest officials - evidence that presents a
real threat to his own life. François, the middle Pelletier
brother, leaves for Paris and becomes a journalist. When he reports
a shocking and brutal murder, he realises he's uncovered the work
of a dangerous serial killer, one who may be very close to home.
Absorbing, colourful and rich with no-holds-barred detail, THE WIDE
WORLD is a terrific novel of greed, blackmail, and shocking crime.
'Literature with conviction; a furious talent' L'Obs
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Animalia (Paperback)
Jean-Baptiste Del Amo; Translated by Frank Wynne
1
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R413
R339
Discovery Miles 3 390
Save R74 (18%)
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Ships in 9 - 15 working days
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Animalia retraces the history of a modest peasant family through
the twentieth century as they develop their small plot of land into
an intensive pig farm. In an environment dominated by the
omnipresence of animals, five generations endure the cataclysm of
war, economic disasters, and the emergence of a brutal
industrialism reflecting an ancestral tendency to violence. Only
the enchanted realm of childhood - that of Eleonore, the matriarch,
and that of Jerome, the last in the lineage - and the innate
freedom of the animals offer any respite from the visible barbarity
of humanity. Written in shifting prose that reflects the passage of
time, Animalia is a powerful novel about man's desire to conquer
nature and the transmission of violence from one generation to the
next.
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King Kong Theory (Paperback)
Virginie Despentes; Translated by Frank Wynne
1
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R338
R274
Discovery Miles 2 740
Save R64 (19%)
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Ships in 9 - 15 working days
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â€I write from the realms of the ugly, for the ugly, the frigid,
the unfucked and the unfuckables, all those excluded from the great
meat market of female flesh, and for all those guys who don’t
want to be protectors, for those who would like to be but don’t
know how, for those who are not ambitious, competitive, or
well-endowed. Because this ideal of the seductive white woman
constantly being waved under our noses – well, I’m pretty sure
it doesn’t exist.’   Powerful, provocative and
personal, King Kong Theory is a candid account of how the author of
Baise-moi came to be Virginie Despentes. Drawing from personal
experience, Despentes shatters received ideas about rape and
prostitution, and explodes common attitudes towards sex and gender.
King Kong Theory is a manifesto for a new punk feminism, reissued
here in a brilliant new translation by Frank Wynne.
LGBTQ writing from ancient times to yesterday, selected by
award-winning translator Frank Wynne. Since the dawn of literature,
queer people have turned to writing to document their existence: to
share great triumphs and deep despairs; to praise the virtues of
their lover, extol their loneliness and proclaim their lust; to
tell of their peculiarities and mundanities. For almost as long,
they have been censored and bowdlerised, persecuted and relegated
to the margins. No longer. Alive in these pages, readers will hear
Homer's Achilles beat his chest in grief for the loss of his
Patroclus and Paul Verlaine exalt the arsehole of his lover. They
will see Alison Bechdel tiptoe then leap out of the closet and Juno
Dawson come out again, but differently. They will bite and lick and
groan in sweet surprise with Roz Kaveney, and fall in and out of
love alongside Qiu Miaojin in Paris and Taiwan. They will recognise
queer saints and icons - Audre Lorde, Larry Kramer, Virginia Woolf
- and meet young queer, trans and non-binary writers - Keith
Jarrett, Zhang Yueran and Niviaq Korneliussen, among others. Frank
Wynne allows their voices to ring out, unashamed and unabashed, in
eighty pieces that straddle the spectrum of queer existence: short
stories, poems, essays, extracts and scenes from countries the
world over, from ancient times to yesterday. Reviews for Queer: 'A
landmark anthology of queer writing' BBC Front Row 'A landmark
collection of LGBTQ writing from ancient times to yesterday,
featuring powerful voices in many literary forms' Spectator, Books
of the Year 'A fearless and life-affirming celebration of what
Gilbert Adair [...] called 'the second most natural thing in the
world'' Review 31, Books of the Year
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Standing Heavy
Gauz; Translated by Frank Wynne
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R453
R364
Discovery Miles 3 640
Save R89 (20%)
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Ships in 10 - 15 working days
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Standing Heavy (Paperback)
Gauz; Translated by Frank Wynne
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R330
R264
Discovery Miles 2 640
Save R66 (20%)
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Ships in 5 - 10 working days
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"One of those rare, transformative novels" KARIM MISKE "Funny and
poignant" TIFFANY TSAO, author of The Majesties Initially a little
intrigued, all babies eventually return the security guard's smile.
The security guard adores babies. Perhaps because babies do not
shoplift. Babies adore the security guard. Perhaps because he does
not drag babies to the sales. The 1960s - Ferdinand arrives in
Paris from Cote d'Ivoire, ready to take on the world and become a
big somebody. The 1990s - It is the Golden Age of immigration, and
Ossiri and Kassoum navigate a Paris on the brink of momentous
change. The 2010s - In a Sephora on the Champs-Elysees, the
all-seeing eyes of a security guard observes the habits of those
who come to worship at this church to consumerism. Amidst the
political bickering of the inhabitants of the Residence for
Students from Cote d'Ivoire and the ever-changing landscape of
French immigration policy, Ferdinand, Ossiri and Kassoum, two
generations of Ivoirians, attempt to make their way as undocumented
workers, taking shifts as security at a flour mill. Sharply
satirical, political and poignant, Standing Heavy is a searingly
witty deconstruction of colonial legacies and capitalist
consumption, an unprecedented and unforgettable account of
everything that passes under a security guard's gaze. Translated
from the French by Frank Wynne "Inventive and very funny" Guardian
"A compact, humane satire" Financial Times
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Vernon Subutex 1 (Paperback)
Virginie Despentes; Translated by Frank Wynne
1
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R479
R396
Discovery Miles 3 960
Save R83 (17%)
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Ships in 10 - 15 working days
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All Human Wisdom (Hardcover)
Pierre Lemaitre; Translated by Frank Wynne
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R610
R502
Discovery Miles 5 020
Save R108 (18%)
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Ships in 9 - 15 working days
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"Terrific . . . Easily the most purely entertaining novel I have
read so far this year" David Mills, The Sunday Times "A really
excellent suspense novelist" Stephen King The second volume of
Pierre Lemaitre's enthralling, award-winning between-the-wars
trilogy In 1927, the great and the good of Paris gather at the
funeral of the wealthy banker, Marcel PĂ©ricourt. His daughter,
Madeleine, is poised to take over his financial empire (although,
unfortunately, she knows next to nothing about banking). More
unfortunately still, when Madeleine's seven-year-old son, Paul,
tumbles from a second floor window of the PĂ©ricourt mansion on the
day of his grandfather's funeral, and suffers life-changing
injuries, his fall sets off a chain of events that will reduce
Madeleine to destitution and ruin in a matter of months. Using all
her reserves of ingenuity, resourcefulness, and a burning desire
for retribution, Madeleine sets about rebuilding her life. She will
be helped by an ex-Communist fixer, a Polish nurse who doesn't
speak a word of French, a brainless petty criminal with a talent
for sabotage, an exiled German Jewish chemist, a very expensive
forger, an opera singer with a handy flair for theatrics, and her
own son with ideas for a creative new business to take Paris by
storm. A brilliant, imaginative, free-falling caper through
between-the-wars Paris, and a portrait of Europe on the edge of
disaster. Translated from the French by Frank Wynne Frank Wynne is
an award-winning writer and translator. His previous translations
include works by Virginie Despentes, Javier Cercas and Michel
Houellebecq. His translation of Vernon Subutex I was shortlisted
for the Man Booker International Prize. With the support of the
Creative Europe Programme of the European Union From the reviews
for The Great Swindle "The most purely enjoyable book I've read
this year" Jake Kerridge, Sunday Telegraph "The vast sweep of the
novel and its array of extraordinary secondary characters have
attracted comparisons with the works of Balzac. Moving, angry,
intelligent - and compulsive" Marcel Berlins, The Times
Police officers are obliged to give an account of every incident
they are involved in. But what happened today will never be logged.
Because that's what police solidarity means: what happens in the
van stays in the van. Well, not always. Not this time. What really
happens behind the walls of a police station? To answer this
question, investigative journalist Valentin Gendrot put his life on
hold for two years and became the first journalist in history to
infiltrate the police undetected. Within three months of training
to become an officer, he was given a permit to carry a weapon in
public. And although he lived in daily fear of being discovered, in
his book Gendrot hides nothing. Assigned to work in a tough area of
Paris where tensions between the law and locals ran high, Gendrot
witnessed police brutality, racism, blunders, and cover-ups. But he
also saw the oppressive working conditions that officers endured,
and mourned the tragic suicide of a colleague. Asking important
questions about who holds institutional power and how we can hold
them to account, Cop is a gripping expose of a world never before
seen by outsiders.
**SHORTLISTED FOR THE MAN BOOKER INTERNATIONAL 2018** WHO IS VERNON
SUBUTEX? An urban legend. A fall from grace. The mirror who
reflects us all. Vernon Subutex was once the proprietor of
Revolver, an infamous music shop in Bastille. His legend spread
throughout Paris. But by the 2000s his shop is struggling. With his
savings gone, his unemployment benefit cut, and the friend who had
been covering his rent suddenly dead, Vernon Subutex finds himself
down and out on the Paris streets. He has one final card up his
sleeve. Even as he holds out his hand to beg for the first time, a
throwaway comment he once made on Facebook is taking the internet
by storm. Vernon does not realise this, but the word is out: Vernon
Subutex has in his possession the last filmed recordings of Alex
Bleach, the famous musician and Vernon's benefactor, who has only
just died of a drug overdose. A crowd of people from record
producers to online trolls and porn stars are now on Vernon's
trail. Translated from the French by Frank Wynne "Thrilling,
magnificently audacious" Irish Times "Brimming with sex, violence
and deviant behaviour" Sunday Times "Virginie Despentes's Vernon
Subutex trilogy is the zeitgeistiest thing I ever read" NELL ZINK
Winner of the Prix Renaudot 2019 A New York Times Best Book of 2021
'Extraordinarily beautiful... a long last loving glance at the
planet.' Carl Safina, author of Becoming Wild The Art of Patience
sees the renowned French adventurer and writer set off for the high
plateaux of remotest Tibet in search of the elusive snow leopard.
There, in the company of leading wildlife photographer Vincent
Munier and two companions, at 5,000 metres and in temperatures of
-25C, the team set up their hides on exposed mountainsides, and
occasionally in the luxury of an icy cave, to await a visitation
from the almost mythical beast. This tightly focused and tautly
written narrative is simultaneously a dazzling account of an
exacting journey, an apprenticeship in the art of patience, an
acceptance of the ruthlessness of the natural world and, finally, a
plea for ecological sanity. A small masterpiece, it is one of those
books that demands to be read again and again.
To research his thesis on contemporary agrarian life, anthropology
student David Mazon moves from Paris to La Pierre-Saint-Christophe,
a village in the marshlands of western France. Determined to
understand the essence of the local culture, the intrepid young
scholar scurries around restlessly on his moped to interview
residents. But what David doesn’t yet know is that here, in this
seemingly ordinary place, once the stage for wars and revolutions,
Death leads a dance: when one thing perishes, the Wheel of Life
recycles its soul and hurls it back into the world as microbe,
human, or wild animal, sometimes in the past, sometimes in the
future. And once a year, Death and the living observe a temporary
truce during a gargantuan three-day feast where gravediggers gorge
themselves on food, drink, and language. Brimming with Mathias
Énard’s characteristic wit and encyclopedic brilliance, The
Annual Banquet of the Gravediggers’ Guild is a riotous novel
where the edges between past and present are constantly dissolving
against a Rabelaisian backdrop of excess. Â
FROM THE BESTSELLING AUTHOR OF LIE WITH ME It is the summer of 1916
and, with German Zeppelins on the skyline, the men of Paris are off
at war. For Vincent, the sixteen-year-old son of a prestigious
family, the tranquillity of the city sits at odds with the salons
and soirees he attends. But, after an electrifying encounter with
the enigmatic writer, Marcel P, draws Vincent's desires out into
the light, his ever-riskier liaisons with a young solider begin to
shape Vincent's future. Translated by Frank Wynne 'A short, bold
and original novel which beautifully captures the romance and
amorality of gilded youth' Independent
'A beautiful book about the best minds of a generation and the
devastation of war - an outrageous voyage from the past that speaks
eloquently to our present' Deborah Levy March 1941. A converted
cargo ship, the Paul-Lemerle, left Marseille on a voyage to the
Caribbean, fleeing Vichy France and the devastation of the war. The
ship was filled with immigrants from the East, exiled Spanish
Republicans, Jews, stateless persons and decadent artists. Among
them were Claude Levi-Strauss, the painter Wifredo Lam, the writers
Anna Seghers and Andre Breton, and the Russian revolutionary Victor
Serge. Can we know the taste of pineapple from listening to
travellers' tales? asks Bosc in the follow-up to his bestselling
debut. Can we ever feel the sensation of history? Mixing the
documentary techniques of history, the imaginative leaps of fiction
and the cool analysis of the essay, Bosc takes us from Marseille to
Casablanca to Martinique and on to New York, to tell an evocative
story of migration, cultural crisis and the intellectual cost of
the rise of fascism.
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