A single volume that gathers together three of the most remarkable novels from Jean Echenoz, the most distinctive French voice of his generation (The Washington Post), Three by Echenoz demonstrates the award-winning author's extraordinary versatility and elegant yet playful style at its finest.
A parodic thriller sparkling with wit (L'Humanite), Big Blondes probes our universal obsession with fame as a television documentary producer tries to track down a renowned singer who has mysteriously disappeared. A darkly comedic, noir-style tour de force, it finally answers the age-old question: do blondes have more fun?
Fluid, never forced...like a garment that fits beautifully even inside-out (Elle), Piano brings Dante's Inferno to contemporary Paris, following Max Delmarc, a concert pianist suffering from paralyzing stage fright and alchoholism, as he meets his untimely death and descends through purgatory--part luxury hotel, part minimum-security prison--into a modern vision of hell.
Running is a small wonder of writing and humanity (L'Express)--a portrait of the legendary Czech athlete Emil Zatopek, who became a national hero, winning three gold medals at the 1952 Helsinki Olympics even as he was compelled to face the unyielding realities of life under an authoritarian regime.

Jean Echenoz's sly and playful novels have won critical and popular acclaim in France as well as in the United States, where he has been profiled by the New Yorker and called the "most distinctive voice of his generation" by theWashington Post. With his wonderfully droll and intriguing new work Special Envoy, Echenoz turns his hand to the espionage novel which, when published in France, stormed the bestseller lists. Special Envoy begins with an old general in his dilapidated office in France's intelligence agency asking his trusted lieutenant Paul Objat for ideas about a person he wants for a particular job: someone pretty, female, and easily manipulated. Objat has someone in mind: Constance, an attractive, restless, bored woman in a failing marriage to a washed-up pop musician. She is abducted by Objat's cronies and spirited away into the bowels of France's intelligence bureaucracy where she is trained for the mission to spearhead the destabilization of Kim Jong-un's regime in North Korea. Will Constance survive her mission in Pyongyang? Will her feckless husband ever write another pop hit? Joyously strange and unpredictable, full of twists and coincidences, Special Envoy is, in the words of L'Express "a pure gem, a delight at all times, a comedy monument, a celebration of the French language."

Ravel is a beguiling and original evocation of the last ten years in the life of the musical genius Ravel, written by novelist Jean Echenoz. The book opens in 1928 as Maurice Ravel—dandy, eccentric, curmudgeon—crosses the Atlantic abroad the luxury liner the SS France to begin his triumphant grand tour of the United States. A “master magician of the French novelâ€� (The Washington Post), Echenoz captures the folly of the era as well as its genius, including Ravel’s personal life—sartorially and socially splendid—as well as his most successful compositions from 1927 to 1937. Illuminated by flashes of Echenoz’s characteristically sly humor, Ravel is a delightfully quirky portrait of a famous musician coping with the ups and downs of his illustrious career. It is also a beautifully written novel that’s a deeply touching farewell to a dignified and lonely man going reluctantly into the night.

A New York Review Books Original

Whether you call her a coldhearted grifter or the soul of modern capitalism, there's no question that Aimee is a killer and a more than professional one. Now she's set her eyes on a backwater burg--where, while posing as an innocent (albeit drop-dead gorgeous) newcomer to town, she means to sniff out old grudges and engineer new opportunities, deftly playing different people and different interests against each other the better, as always, to make a killing. But then something snaps: the master manipulator falls prey to a pure and wayward passion.
Aimee has become the avenging angel of her own nihilism, exacting the destruction of a whole society of destroyers. An unholy original, Jean-Patrick Manchette transformed the modern detective novel into a weapon of gleeful satire and anarchic fun. In "Fatale" he mixes equal measures of farce, mayhem, and madness to prepare a rare literary cocktail that packs a devastating punch.

I'm Off"I'm off," says FTlix Ferrer to his wife. "I'm leaving you." Thus Ferrer, a creature of appetite, impulse and habit, a man of our times, embarks on a journey to the extremes. After making for the frozen North Pole in pursuit of a rare cargo of Inuit artifacts, he is now back in his atelier in a Paris packed with ex-girlfriends, anxious artists and suspicious creditors, and beginning to feel very hot indeed . . . One YearVictoire wakes up one morning to find her boyfriend lying dead beside her.

Not wanting to be caught with a corpse, she packs her bags, raids her bank account and makes off, randomly, for the Southwest. And, when she has lost her belongings, her money, her looks and almost her self - one year later - the coast is clear for her to come back to Paris. But nothing prepares her for the shock of what greets her return