Obsessed by her encounters with the mysterious green women, and haunted by the Garonne River, a nameless narrator seeks them out in La Roele, Paris, Marseille, and Ouagadougou. Each encounter reveals different aspects of the women; real or imagined, dead or alive, seductive or suicidal, driving the narrator deeper into her obsession, in this unsettling exploration of identity, memory and paranoia. Self Portrait in Green is the multi-prize winning, Marie NDiaye's brilliant subversion of the memoir. Written in diary entries, with lyrical prose and dreamlike imagery, we start with and return to the river, which mirrors the narrative by posing more questions than it answers.

When Gilles Principaux walks into Maître Susane's law office seeking representation for his wife, his presence triggers memories from her childhood she had long buried. Gilles's wife is charged with drowning their three children and the media are circling around what will be one of the biggest trials in Bordeaux. So why has he chosen the small legal practice of a lawyer he seems not to recognise? Maître Susane can't shake the feeling that she has met him before, that something happened between them one afternoon when she was barely ten and he was fourteen, something that she has never known how to remember. As she works on one of the biggest cases of her career, her own sense of what is true and not true will draw her into an uneasy reckoning with her past. Translated from the French by Jordan Stump.

The classic Grimms' fairy tale of the valiant little tailor, as you've never read it before "A creative take on storytelling, suggesting the potential in even the most familiar tale, with Chevillard riffing comfortably across subject-matters and stories old and new."-M. A.Orthofer, Complete Review Once upon a time, there lived a valiant little tailor who killed seven flies with one blow-but who is this narrator who has abruptly inserted himself into the story, claiming authorship? He's indignant: the fairy tale, borne carelessly along by the popular imagination, subjected to the transformations of oral tradition, was collected in a lamentable state by the Brothers Grimm, and he intends to restore the tale and its giant-slaying, unicorn-fighting, boar-hunting star to their original magnificence. But the true hero of the story remains to be seen: Is it the tailor, the narrator, or someone else entirely? In this explosive retelling of the classic tale, Eric Chevillard enlists the reader in a dizzying game of crack-the-whip, with new directions and delights in every paragraph. At once irreverent and deeply sincere, this book is a mischievous, multifarious celebration of the power of stories and those who tell them.

Longlisted for the Man Booker International Prize 2016 Clarisse Riviere's life is shaped by a refusal to admit to her husband Richard and to her daughter Ladivine that her mother is a poor black housekeeper. Instead, weighed down by guilt, she pretends to be an orphan, visiting her mother in secret and telling no-one of her real identity as Malinka, daughter of Ladivine Sylla. In time, her lies turn against her. Richard leaves Clarisse, frustrated by the unbridgeable, indecipherable gulf between them. Clarisse is devastated, but finds solace in a new man, Freddy Moliger, who is let into the secret about her mother, and is even introduced to her. But Ladivine, her daughter, who is now married herself, cannot shake a bad feeling about her mother's new lover, convinced that he can bring only chaos and pain into her life. When she is proved right, in the most tragic circumstances, the only comfort the family can turn to requires a leap of faith beyond any they could have imagined. Centred around three generations of women, whose seemingly cursed lineage is defined by the weight of origins, the pain of alienation and the legacy of shame, Ladivine is a beguiling story of secrets, lies, guilt and forgiveness by one of Europe's most unique literary voices. Translated from the French by Jordan Stump

Which came first, words or things? Are your words yours, or someone else's? And what do the Crusades have to do with it? And what do ants have to do with it? Jean Ricardou has been given something of a bad rap: he's widely seen as a difficult writer, or worse yet, as an intensely serious one. However, he easily sheds this weighty reputation in his hilariously playful new novel about the notoriously complex world of literary theory. Supplying his readers with everything they need to know to navigate this world, Ricardou uses his own irreverent interpretation of deconstructive theory to ask questions about language and history, theory and life, and all the intriguing connections between them.

These three short novels are the first works to appear in English by a remarkable contemporary French author, Marie Redonnet. Born in Paris in 1947, Redonnet taught for a number of years in a suburban "lycee" before deciding to pursue a writing career full time. Since her volume of poetry "Le Mort & Cie" appeared in 1985, she has published four novels, a novella, numerous short stories, and three dramatic works.

In translator Jordan Stump's words, these three novels, "unmistakably fit together, although they have neither characters nor setting in common. Redonnet sees the three novels as a triptych: each panel stands alone, and yet all coalesce to form a whole." Each is narrated by a different woman. "Hotel Splendid "recounts the daily life of three sisters who live in a decrepit hotel on the edge of a swamp; "Forever Valley "is about a sixteen-year-old girl who works in a dance-hall and looks for the dead; "Rose Mellie Rose" is the story of another adolescent girl who assembles a photographic and written record of her life in the dying town of Oat.

Redonnet's novels have been compared to those of Annie Ernaux, Alain Robbe-Grillet, and Samuel Beckett. She has since acknowledged the crucial influence which Beckett's work has had upon her literary work. And yet she is also notably different from the great master of modern literature. "Where Beckett's characters slide almost inevitably toward extinction, resignation, and silence," Stump points out, "Redonnet's display a force for life and creation that borders on the triumphant. . . . They] retain even in the darkest situations a remarkable persistence, openness, and above all hope, a hope that may well be, however unspectacularly, repaid in the end."

New work from the acclaimed author of "The Crab Nebula" and "Palafox."

These three short novels are the first works to appear in English by a remarkable contemporary French author, Marie Redonnet. Born in Paris in 1947, Redonnet taught for a number of years in a suburban "lycee" before deciding to pursue a writing career full time. Since her volume of poetry "Le Mort & Cie" appeared in 1985, she has published four novels, a novella, numerous short stories, and three dramatic works.

In translator Jordan Stump's words, these three novels, "unmistakably fit together, although they have neither characters nor setting in common. Redonnet sees the three novels as a triptych: each panel stands alone, and yet all coalesce to form a whole." Each is narrated by a different woman. "Hotel Splendid "recounts the daily life of three sisters who live in a decrepit hotel on the edge of a swamp; "Forever Valley "is about a sixteen-year-old girl who works in a dance-hall and looks for the dead; "Rose Mellie Rose" is the story of another adolescent girl who assembles a photographic and written record of her life in the dying town of Oat.

Redonnet's novels have been compared to those of Annie Ernaux, Alain Robbe-Grillet, and Samuel Beckett. She has since acknowledged the crucial influence which Beckett's work has had upon her literary work. And yet she is also notably different from the great master of modern literature. "Where Beckett's characters slide almost inevitably toward extinction, resignation, and silence," Stump points out, "Redonnet's display a force for life and creation that borders on the triumphant. . . . They] retain even in the darkest situations a remarkable persistence, openness, and above all hope, a hope that may well be, however unspectacularly, repaid in the end."

From one of the most original French writers of our day comes a mysterious, prismatic, and at times profoundly sad reflection on humanity in its darker moments--one of which may very well be our own. In a collection of fictions that blur distinctions between dreaming and waking reality, Lutz Bassmann sets off a series of echoes--the "entrevoutes" that conduct us from one world to another in a journey as viscerally powerful as it is intellectually heady. While humanity seems to be fading around them, the members of a shadowy organization are doing their inadequate best to assist those experiencing their last moments. From a soldier-monk exorcising what seem to be spirits (but are they?) from an abandoned house, to a spy executing a mission whose meaning eludes him, to characters exploring cells, wandering through ruins, confronting political dissent and persecution, encountering--perhaps--the spirits once exorcised, these stories conduct us through a world at once ambiguous and sharply observed. This remarkable work, in Jordan Stump's superb translation, offers readers a thrilling entry into Bassmann's numinous world.

From Antoine Volodine comes a deeply disturbing and darkly hilarious novel whose full meaning, its author asserts, will be found not in the book's pages but in the dreams people will have after reading it. In "Minor Angels" Volodine depicts a postcataclysmic world in which the forces of capitalism have begun to reestablish themselves. Sharply opposed to such a trend, a group of crones confined to a nursing home--all of them apparently immortal--resolves to create an avenging grandson fashioned of lint and rags. Though conjured to crush the rebirth of capitalism, the grandson is instead seduced by its charms--only to fall back into the hands of his creators, where he manages to forestall his punishment by reciting one "narract" a day. It is these narracts, or prose poems, that compose the text of "Minor Angels."

Winner of the prestigious Prix Medicis and a bestseller in France, "My Big Apartment" is a humorous and ironic look at the serious subject of growing up. Always accessible but never facile, Christian Oster's books tell of the endless human quest for love and equilibrium in the world. Oster's gift is to make this timeless theme new through deadpan humor, a slyly cerebral style, and a deeply ingrained sense of melancholy.
Gavarine, the gentle but immature protagonist of "My Big Apartment," is ambitious only in the search for love. When he loses the keys to his apartment, he loses much more than access to his home. Yet through a true comedy of errors Gavarine ends up finding everything he was looking for, in a way he could never have expected.

Though "My Big Apartment" can be read purely as a wry romantic comedy, the language is unfailingly rich in implications; there is always more going on in this story than meets the eye. At once unapologetically sentimental and overtly intellectual, Oster's writing belongs to that particular strain of French literature in which seriousness and jest, or passion and the cerebral, fruitfully coexist without effort or contradiction.

Winner of the prestigious Prix Medicis and a bestseller in France, "My Big Apartment" is a humorous and ironic look at the serious subject of growing up. Always accessible but never facile, Christian Oster's books tell of the endless human quest for love and equilibrium in the world. Oster's gift is to make this timeless theme new through deadpan humor, a slyly cerebral style, and a deeply ingrained sense of melancholy.
Gavarine, the gentle but immature protagonist of "My Big Apartment," is ambitious only in the search for love. When he loses the keys to his apartment, he loses much more than access to his home. Yet through a true comedy of errors Gavarine ends up finding everything he was looking for, in a way he could never have expected.

Though "My Big Apartment" can be read purely as a wry romantic comedy, the language is unfailingly rich in implications; there is always more going on in this story than meets the eye. At once unapologetically sentimental and overtly intellectual, Oster's writing belongs to that particular strain of French literature in which seriousness and jest, or passion and the cerebral, fruitfully coexist without effort or contradiction.

"On the Ceiling" tells the story of a young man who wears a chair upside down on his head. He falls in love with a young woman named Meline, and soon he and his friends move in with her and her family. They are disappointed by the life they find at Meline's, however, and in search of something better they make the collective decision to move to the ceiling of her house, where they expect to find a more orderly, more rational, and less encumbered existence.

Eric Chevillard's trademark is inventing characters who have little choice but to dream up the most hopelessly outlandish and breathtakingly brilliant schemes if they are to survive the rigors of their existence. He is fascinated by the imperious need we all feel to make life bearable and by the lengths to which we are willing to go in that pursuit. The characters in "On the Ceiling" are prepared to go rather further than most of us. Chevillard, one of the most inventive young authors on the French literary scene, is the author of eight novels.

Patrick Modiano, winner of the 2014 Nobel Prize in Literature, is the author of more than thirty books and one of France's most admired contemporary novelists. Out of the Dark is a moody, expertly rendered tale of a love affair between two drifters. The narrator, writing in 1995, looks back thirty years to a time when, having abandoned his studies and selling off old art books to get by, he comes to know Gerard Van Bever and Jacqueline, a young, enigmatic couple who seem to live off roulette winnings. He falls in love with Jacqueline; they run off to England together, where they share a few sad, aimless months, until one day she disappears. Fifteen years later, in Paris, they meet again, a reunion that only recalls the haunting inaccessibility of the past: they spend a few hours together, and the next day, Jacqueline, now married, disappears once again. Almost fifteen years after that, he sees her yet again, this time from a distance he chooses not to bridge. A profoundly affecting novel, Out of the Dark is poignant, strange, delicate, melancholy, and sadly hilarious.

These three short novels are the first works to appear in English by a remarkable contemporary French author, Marie Redonnet. Born in Paris in 1947, Redonnet taught for a number of years in a suburban "lycee" before deciding to pursue a writing career full time. Since her volume of poetry "Le Mort & Cie" appeared in 1985, she has published four novels, a novella, numerous short stories, and three dramatic works.

In translator Jordan Stump's words, these three novels, "unmistakably fit together, although they have neither characters nor setting in common. Redonnet sees the three novels as a triptych: each panel stands alone, and yet all coalesce to form a whole." Each is narrated by a different woman. "Hotel Splendid "recounts the daily life of three sisters who live in a decrepit hotel on the edge of a swamp; "Forever Valley "is about a sixteen-year-old girl who works in a dance-hall and looks for the dead; "Rose Mellie Rose" is the story of another adolescent girl who assembles a photographic and written record of her life in the dying town of Oat.

Redonnet's novels have been compared to those of Annie Ernaux, Alain Robbe-Grillet, and Samuel Beckett. She has since acknowledged the crucial influence which Beckett's work has had upon her literary work. And yet she is also notably different from the great master of modern literature. "Where Beckett's characters slide almost inevitably toward extinction, resignation, and silence," Stump points out, "Redonnet's display a force for life and creation that borders on the triumphant. . . . They] retain even in the darkest situations a remarkable persistence, openness, and above all hope, a hope that may well be, however unspectacularly, repaid in the end."

Patrick Modiano, winner of the 2014 Nobel Prize in Literature, is the author of more than thirty books and one of France's most admired contemporary novelists. Out of the Dark is a moody, expertly rendered tale of a love affair between two drifters. The narrator, writing in 1995, looks back thirty years to a time when, having abandoned his studies and selling off old art books to get by, he comes to know Gerard Van Bever and Jacqueline, a young, enigmatic couple who seem to live off roulette winnings. He falls in love with Jacqueline; they run off to England together, where they share a few sad, aimless months, until one day she disappears. Fifteen years later, in Paris, they meet again, a reunion that only recalls the haunting inaccessibility of the past: they spend a few hours together, and the next day, Jacqueline, now married, disappears once again. Almost fifteen years after that, he sees her yet again, this time from a distance he chooses not to bridge. A profoundly affecting novel, Out of the Dark is poignant, strange, delicate, melancholy, and sadly hilarious.

The Crab Nebula (La Nébuleuse du crabe) is comprised of fifty-two vivid chapters that provide startling insights into the existence of this nebulous man named Crab: his nightmarish—and none too solid—physique, his mysterious absence from the pages of history, his birth in prison, his never having been born at all. In his portrait of Crab, Éric Chevillard gives us a character who is genuinely strange and curiously like ourselves. A postmodernist novel par excellence, The Crab Nebula parodies literary conventions, deconstructs narrative and meaning, and brilliantly combines absurdity and hopelessness with irony and humor. What distinguishes it most of all is the startling originality of Chevillard’s voice and vision. There is whimsy and despair in this novel, pathos and laughter, satire and warm affection. The Crab Nebula is the fifth novel—and the first to be translated into English—by the brilliant young French author Éric Chevillard. His sympathetic yet outrageous portrait of Crab calls to mind works by Melville, Valéry, and Kafka, while never being less than utterly unique.

When Deputy Willy Bost arrives in the mysterious border town of San Rosa, he does not know why he has been sent there or what he will find. What he encounters, gradually, is an obscure network of private and public relations tarnished by corruption, ambition, manipulation, and deceit. Nothing is clear in the workings of this sinister city; and no one, including Willy Bost, is altogether innocent. Murder, bombings, deceptions, seductions--all come to the fore in this spellbinding portrait of a society that seems both absurd and real.

"Nevermore" is Marie Redonnet's fifth novel. Her earlier novels display her talent for capturing the unique voices and personalities of isolated women. "Nevermore" reflects her equally great gift for portraying the workings--and failures--of whole societies.

Born in Paris in 1947, Marie Redonnet taught for a number of years in a suburban lycee before deciding to pursue a writing career full time. Since her volume of poetry "Le Mort & Cie" appeared in 1985, she has published five novels, a novella, short stories, and three dramatic works.

Based on the true story of Alexander Selkirk, who survived alone for almost five years on an uninhabited island off the coast of Chile, The Mysterious Island is considered by many to be Jules Verne’s masterpiece. “Wide-eyed mid-nineteenth-century humanistic optimism in a breezy, blissfully readable translation by Stump” (Kirkus Reviews), here is the enthralling tale of five men and a dog who land in a balloon on a faraway, fantastic island of bewildering goings-on and their struggle to survive as they uncover the island’s secret.