Satisfaction is an intense, introspective novel that explores the intimate thoughts, feelings and impressions of Mme Akli, a French woman living in Algeria in the late 1970s. Mme Akli is a possessive mother in conflict with her own sexuality in a country that feels alien to her. The acquiescence of Catherine Bousba, mother of her son's best friend Bruce, will cause a turmoil of emotional events. Through a narrative charged with sensuality and repressed passion, we navigate Mme Akli's complex and paradoxical feelings towards her own son, Catherine, Bruce and the Algerian landscape. The representation of a troubled motherhood that echoes the tumultuous political situation of Algeria at the time, opens the story to wider community issues.

“It’s probably his age that makes the worrying worse. But he can’t help picking up on every detail that ruins his day, stoking his unease and filling him with fear and shame. After dinner he gathers up the empty wine bottles, shoves them in rubbish bags, and drives two kilometres to dump them in a skip. He’s worried about being denounced by the guy who monitors the parking in his street, that redhead who’s let his beard grow and calls the girls at the private school bitches and whores. ‘We should marry them off whether they like it or not, right professor?’ Amine does not reply. Amine says nothing.” Leïla Slimani This collection brings together three short volumes of work by Goncourt-winning author Leïla Slimani. The stories and essays in The Devil is in the Detail approach questions close to Slimani’s heart: Islam and fundamentalism, the importance of literature, and Paris as a symbol of freedom and tolerance. On Writing is an illuminating dialogue in which Slimani discusses her writing approach and techniques, and My Heroine: Simone Veil is a homage to Veil, a feminist pioneer who fought tirelessly for women’s rights. From everyday restrictions to national tragedies, Slimani grapples with important and eternal issues, and is unafraid to face them head on.

This pioneering work advocates for a shift toward inclusivity in the UK translated literature landscape, investigating and challenging unconscious bias around women in translation and building on existing research highlighting the role of translators as activists and agents and the possibilities for these new theoretical models to contribute to meaningful industry change. The book sets out the context for the new subdiscipline of feminist translator studies, positing this as an essential mechanism to work towards diversity in the translated literature sector of the publishing industry. In a series of five case studies that each exemplify a key component of the feminist translator studies "toolkit", Vassallo draws on exclusive interviews with a range of activist translators and publishers, setting these in dialogue with contemporary perspectives on feminism and translation to propose a new agent-based model of feminist translation practice. In synthesising these perspectives, Vassallo makes a powerful argument for questioning existing structures in the translated literature publishing system which perpetuate bias and connects these conversations to wider social movements towards promoting demonstrable change in the industry. This book will be a valuable resource for students and scholars of translation studies and publishing, as well as for the various agents involved in promoting translated literature in the UK and beyond.

Discussions of French 'identity' have frequently emphasised the importance of a highly centralised Republican model inherited from the Revolution. In reality, however, France also has a rich heritage of diversity that has often found expression in contingent sub-cultures marked by marginalisation and otherness - whether social, religious, gendered, sexual, linguistic or ethnic. This range of sub-cultures and variety of ways of thinking the 'other' underlines the fact that 'norms' can only exist by the concomitant existence of difference(s). The essays in this collection, which derive from the conference 'Alienation and Alterity: Otherness in Modern and Contemporary Francophone Contexts', held at the University of Exeter in September 2007, explore various aspects of this diversity in French and Francophone literature, culture, and cinema from the nineteenth to the twenty-first century. The contributions demonstrate that while alienation (from a cultural 'norm' and also from oneself) can certainly be painful and problematic, it is also a privileged position which allows the 'etranger' to consider the world and his/her relationship to it in an 'other' way.

Critical responses to Jeanne Hyvrard have generally categorised her as a writer of 'ecriture feminine' and/or autobiography, due to salient features of her oeuvre such as the use of first-person narrative, a cyclic writing style, and the quest for a 'female' language. Within these broader considerations, however, a recurrent motif throughout Hyvrard's writing is that of the body, specifically the female body, represented as suffering from different forms of physical/mental illness and emotional/social malaise. It is this primordial aspect of Hyvrard's work, on which surprisingly little critical analysis has been written, that this monograph explores. It has been demonstrated that Hyvrard's works can be studied as a unity as well as individually, given that all of her texts form part of her wider theory. While this theory is often referred to in abstract terms as 'pensee ronde', 'pensee globale' or 'pensee-femme', this study shows that it can be more specifically highlighted as a theory of dis(-)ease (i.e. the intertwining of physical malady and social malaise, medical terms and metaphor), and, particularly, as a social theory of the dis(-)eased female body.

“It’s probably his age that makes the worrying worse. But he can’t help picking up on every detail that ruins his day, stoking his unease and filling him with fear and shame. After dinner he gathers up the empty wine bottles, shoves them in rubbish bags, and drives two kilometres to dump them in a skip. He’s worried about being denounced by the guy who monitors the parking in his street, that redhead who’s let his beard grow and calls the girls at the private school bitches and whores. ‘We should marry them off whether they like it or not, right professor?’ Amine does not reply. Amine says nothing.” Leïla Slimani This collection brings together three short volumes of work by Goncourt-winning author Leïla Slimani. The stories and essays in The Devil is in the Detail approach questions close to Slimani’s heart: Islam and fundamentalism, the importance of literature, and Paris as a symbol of freedom and tolerance. On Writing is an illuminating dialogue in which Slimani discusses her writing approach and techniques, and My Heroine: Simone Veil is a homage to Veil, a feminist pioneer who fought tirelessly for women’s rights. From everyday restrictions to national tragedies, Slimani grapples with important and eternal issues, and is unafraid to face them head on.

The Body Beseiged: The Embodiment of Historical Memory in Nina Bouraoui and Leila Sebbar by Helen Vassallo brings together the work of two important contemporary writers, Nina Bouraoui and Leila Sebbar. Both authors embody a significant historical divide (they are half French and half Algerian), and each author's work returns unfailingly to the legacy of opposition engendered by the colonial past that France and Algeria share: neither Bouraoui nor Sebbar claims any intention to write about the Algerian War of Independence, and yet its impact is felt throughout all of the texts chosen for discussion. This inescapable omnipresence of the Algerian War is conceptualized here as "embodied memory," a corporeal impulse to write about a war whose legacy is transmitted to these "second-generation" writers rather than a conscious decision to engage with the historical aspect of their personal heritage. Both authors suffer a culturally imposed "de-territorialization" in their life and their early autobiographical narratives, and both subsequently undergo a voluntary "displacement," undertaking literal and psychological journeys to map out routes towards a sense of self, of belonging, and ultimately of "re-territorialization." However, the analysis reveals how this move from de-territorialization to re-territorialization is accompanied by a shift from internalization (through memory and silence) to externalization (via articulation and community): rather than using the individual as symbolic of the universal, Bouraoui's and Sebbar's life writing acknowledges that their experience begins with a universal, historical, or social context, and represents a personal act of remembrance which is key to the recovery of historical memory, and to the negotiation of an appropriate space for this memory. At a time of "reconciliation" and remembrance, the analysis exposes and probes open wounds in the Franco-Algerian relationship through a close focus on the autobiographical writings of two authors who embody both (hi)stories, and whose texts represent a site of this "embodied memory."