With a foreword by Maggie Nelson, an introduction from Frieze editor Andrew Durbin and afterword from Edmund White 'Unforgettable, heartbreaking' New York Times 'As much about friendship, intimacy, and betrayal as it is about sickness. ... Brilliant' - Dazed 'The father of autofiction, the master of finding that perfect balance of truth and beauty.' Guardian 'As brutal as it is elegant; shot through with a scalding and necessary rage.' - Neil Bartlett, author, Ready to Catch Him Should He Fall 'Written with urgency, clarity ... it is electrifying in its searing honesty' - Colm Toibin 'One of the most beautiful, haunting, and fascinating works in the French autofictional canon. Guibert grapples with his own AIDS diagnosis, and the death of his friend Muzil (Michel Foucault), in a dazzling piece of writing.' - Katherine Angel After being diagnosed with AIDS, Herve Guibert wrote this devastating, darkly humorous and personal novel, chronicling three months in the penultimate year of the narrator's life. In the wake of his friend Muzil's death, he goes from one quack doctor to another, from holidays to test centres, and charts the highs and lows of trying to cheat death. On publication in 1990, the novel scandalized French media, which quickly identified Muzil as Guibert's close friend Michel Foucault. The book became a bestseller, and Guibert a celebrity. The book has since attained a cult following for its tender, fragmented and beautifully written accounts of illness, friendship, sex, art and everyday life. It catapulted Guibert into notoriety and sealed his reputation as a writer of shocking precision and power.

Pig Tales is a brilliant satirical novel about a stunning young woman working in a beauty 'massage' parlour. She enjoys extraordinary success at bringing home the bacon (in part due to her increasingly rosy and irresistible backside) until she slowly metamorphoses - into a pig. Rejected by her boyfriend, left to wander the sewers and forage for food in public parks, she takes up with a werewolf with insatiable appetites. They share everything (pizza is a particular favourite; she gets the pizza, he gets the delivery boy) until someone alerts the authorities and tragedy strikes . . . Gender, politics and social hypocrisy all come under scrutiny in this entertaining and enlightening novel. Pig Tales is a Metamorphosis for the present day, a dark fable of political and sexual corruption, and a grim warning of what can happen in a society without a soul.

The heart-stopping (The Millions), richly layered (Brooklyn Rail), haunting, beautiful (BuzzFeed) story of an escaped captive and the killer hound that pursues him Slave Old Man is a cloudburst of a novel, swift and compressed--but every page pulses, blood-warm. . . . The prose is so electrifyingly synesthetic that, on more than one occasion, I found myself stopping to rub my eyes in disbelief. --Parul Sehgal, The New York Times Shortlisted for the National Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction, Patrick Chamoiseau's Slave Old Man was published to accolades in hardcover in a brilliant translation by Linda Coverdale, winning the French-American Foundation Translation Prize and chosen as a Publishers WeeklyBest Book of 2018. Now in paperback, Slave Old Man is a gripping, profoundly unsettling story of an elderly enslaved person's daring escape into the wild from a plantation in Martinique, with his enslaver and a fearsome hound on his heels. We follow them into a lush rain forest where nature is beyond all human control: sinister, yet entrancing and even exhilarating, because the old man's flight to freedom will transform them all in truly astonishing--even otherworldly--ways, as the overwhelming physical presence of the forest reshapes reality and time itself. Chamoiseau's exquisitely rendered new novel is an adventure for all time, one that fearlessly portrays the demonic cruelties of the slave trade and its human costs in vivid, sometimes hallucinatory prose. Offering a loving and mischievous tribute to the Creole culture of early nineteenth-century Martinique, this novel takes us on a unique and moving journey into the heart of Caribbean history.

Viviane is both an engrossing murder mystery and a gripping exploration of madness, a narrative that tests the shifting boundaries of language and the self. This breakthrough novel, nominated for the Prix Femina, the Prix France Inter and the Prix du Premier Roman, is sure to become a contemporary classic. Linda Coverdale, one of the most celebrated French translators working today, has created a faithful and propulsive English text that has been revised and approved by the author.

For fans of Patricia Highsmith, Harriet Tyce, Jorn Lier Horst, Fred Vargas and Jean-Patrick Manchette.

Patrick Chamoiseau first became known to the international literary world with Texaco, the vast and demanding novel that won France's prestigious Goncourt Prize in 1992. Less well known is the fact that Chamoiseau has written a number of extraordinary books about his childhood in Martinique. One of these, Creole Folktales, recreates in truly magical language the stories he heard as a child. Folktales with a twist, fairy tales with attitude, these stories are told in a language as savory as the spicy food so lovingly evoked within these pages. The urchins, dowagers, ne'er-do-wells, and gluttons in these tales are filled with longing for the simple things in life: a full plate, a safe journey, a good night's sleep. But their world is haunted, and the material comforts we take for granted are the stuff of dreams for them, for there are always monsters waiting to snatch away their tasty bowl of stew-or even life itself. Some of these monsters are familiar: the wicked hag, the envious neighbor, the deceitful suitor, the devil who gobbles up unwary souls. Others may be surprising, and their casual appearance in these tales makes them all the more frightening-like an unexpected glimpse into a fun-house mirror. But in contrast to these folktales' more fantastic creations, the white plantation owner and the slave ship's captain remind us that these are stories of survival in a colonized land. A marvelous introduction to a world, both real and imaginary, that North Americans have ignored for far too long.

The "heart-stopping" (The Millions), "richly layered" (Brooklyn Rail), "haunting, beautiful" (BuzzFeed) story of an escaped captive and the killer hound that pursues him "Slave Old Man is a cloudburst of a novel, swift and compressed--but every page pulses, blood-warm. . . . The prose is so electrifyingly synesthetic that, on more than one occasion, I found myself stopping to rub my eyes in disbelief." --Parul Sehgal, The New York Times Shortlisted for the National Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction, Patrick Chamoiseau's Slave Old Man was published to accolades in hardcover in a brilliant translation by Linda Coverdale, winning the French-American Foundation Translation Prize and chosen as a Publishers WeeklyBest Book of 2018. Now in paperback, Slave Old Man is a gripping, profoundly unsettling story of an elderly enslaved person's daring escape into the wild from a plantation in Martinique, with his enslaver and a fearsome hound on his heels. We follow them into a lush rain forest where nature is beyond all human control: sinister, yet entrancing and even exhilarating, because the old man's flight to freedom will transform them all in truly astonishing--even otherworldly--ways, as the overwhelming physical presence of the forest reshapes reality and time itself. Chamoiseau's exquisitely rendered new novel is an adventure for all time, one that fearlessly portrays the demonic cruelties of the slave trade and its human costs in vivid, sometimes hallucinatory prose. Offering a loving and mischievous tribute to the Creole culture of early nineteenth-century Martinique, this novel takes us on a unique and moving journey into the heart of Caribbean history.

Bruno Bontempelli's "The Traveler's Tree" is a spellbinding and most unusual tale of desperation and suspense, which takes place in the eighteenth-century maritime setting Patrick O'Brian made so familiar to American readers. A modern fable reminiscent of Camus's classic "The Plague," "The Traveler's Tree" is at its core an exploration of man's nature.

Somewhere in the Caribbean Sea the French ship "Entremetteuse" lies stranded without a breeze, its crew racked by starvation and disease, its wood rotting, and its masts limp. An island and the dim outline of the fabled traveler's tree appear on the horizon. Although only a gunshot away, the island's sheer cliffs and coral reefs make it cruelly unreachable. The heat grows unbearable, the ship's stores are nearly depleted, and the rats eagerly await the remains.

As listless as the ship and increasingly feeble with scurvy, the embattled crew dispatches one longboat after another against raging waves, barrier reefs, and poisonous fish in order to reach the island, but to no avail. As mutiny, rebellion, and utter starvation loom, they pin their last hopes on a direct charge of the ship across the reefs, in one last valiant effort to reach the traveler's tree.

Hailed in France as "a superb allegory" ("Le Monde"), "The Traveler's Tree" is an enthralling novel that tells a story of the human condition and man's limitations. Writing with extraordinary realism and historical accuracy, Bruno Bontempelli lures us into this absorbing morality tale that will be remembered for years to come.

At the City Hall in a small town in the South of France, one man starts his campaign to correct the ills that have overtaken his proud nation by lecuring the town's inhabitants on the art of conversation. In the narrator's opinion, "coversation is a specialty that is most eminently French," an art that should be nurtured and practiced, and can help repair France's reputation. Not to mention being a good conversationalist is extremely useful for seducing women, which is how the narrator managed to attract Lucienne, his "superbly lumpish" wife who died two months before giving this lecture. One of the oddest characters in contemporary fiction, the lecturer in this novel can't help but digress about his sad life in the midst of his speech, giving the reader a view of a self-centered man trying to turn one of his greatest faults into a virtue to be forced on everyone else. By turns ironic, hilarious, pathetic, and mortifying, Salvayre's The Lecture is an exuberant example of the exciting fiction being written in France.

In Sri Lanka, a tsunami sweeps a child out to sea, her grandfather helpless against the onrushing water. In France, a woman dies from cancer, leaving her husband and small children bereft. What links these two catastrophes is the presence of Emmanuel Carrere, who manages to find consolation and even joy as he immerses himself in lives other than his own. The result is a heartrending narrative of endless love, a meditation on courage in the face of adversity, and an intimate look at the beauty of ordinary lives.

Now a major motion picture starring Daniel Auteuil (Sade, Girl on the Bridge, Jean de Florette) directed by Nicole Garcia (Place Vendome)

Acclaimed master of psychological suspense, Emmanuel Carrère, whose fiction John Updike described as “stunning” (The New Yorker) explores the double life of a respectable doctor, eighteen years of lies, five murders, and the extremes to which ordinary people can go.

FROM THE BESTSELLING AUTHOR OF THE ADVERSARY

Little Nicolas is a delicate, timid schoolboy, with an excitable, if morbid imagination – the child of an overbearing father. So, two weeks away on the class trip is already enough to fill him with dread. But when a child goes missing, Nicolas’ mind turns to gruesome possibilities, impelling him to take up the role of detective – and edge closer to a truth more shocking than Nicolas’ worst fears.

Translated by Linda Coverdale

'There are few great writers in France today, and Emmanuel Carrère is one of them' Paris Review

Elegant, pocket-sized paperbacks, VINTAGE Editions celebrate the audacity and ambition of the written word, transporting readers to wherever in the world literary innovation may be found.

'The father of contemporary European detective fiction' Ann Cleeves A man picked up for wandering in obvious distress among the cars and buses on the Grands Boulevards. Questioned in French, he remains mute . . . A madman? In Maigret's office, he is searched. His suit is new, his underwear is new, his shoes are new. All identifying labels have been removed. No identification papers. No wallet. Five crisp thousand-franc bills have been slipped into one of his pockets. A distressed man is found wandering the streets of Paris, with no memory of who he is or how he got there. The answers lead Maigret to a small harbour town, whose quiet citizens conceal a poisonous malice. Penguin is publishing the entire series of Maigret novels in new translations. This novel has been published in a previous translation as Death of a Harbour Master. 'Compelling, remorseless, brilliant' John Gray 'A supreme writer . . . unforgettable vividness' Independent

A novel that describes, with devastating, darkly comic clarity, its narrator's experience of being diagnosed with AIDS. First published by Gallimard in 1990, To the Friend Who Did Not Save My Life describes, with devastating, darkly comic clarity, its narrator's experience of being diagnosed with AIDS. Guibert chronicles three months in the penultimate year of the narrator's life as, in the wake of his friend Muzil's death, he goes from one quack doctor to another, describing the progression of the disease and recording the reactions of his many friends. The novel scandalized the French media, which quickly identified Muzil as Guibert's close friend Michel Foucault. To the Friend became a bestseller, and Guibert a celebrity. Guibert continued to document the daily experiences of his body in a series of novels and diaries, mostly published posthumously. To the Friend has since attained a cult following for its intimate and candid tone, its fragmented and slippery form. As Edmund White observed, "[Guibert's] very taste for the grotesque, this compulsion to offend, finally affords him the necessary rhetorical panache to convey the full, exhilarating horror of his predicament." In his struggle to piece together a language suited to his suffering, Herve Guibert catapulted himself into notoriety and sealed his reputation for uncompromising, transgressive prose.

'His artistry is supreme' John Banville 'What was he doing there? A hundred times, in the middle of an investigation, he'd had the same feeling of helplessness or, rather, futility. He would find himself abruptly plunged into the lives of people he had never met before, and his job was to discover their most intimate secrets. This time, as it happened, it wasn't even his job. He was the one who had chosen to come, because a teacher had waited for him for hours in the Purgatory at the Police Judiciaire.' When a school teacher from a small coastal town near La Rochelle asks Maigret to help prove he is innocent of murder, the Inspector returns with him to his insular community and finds the residents closing ranks to conceal the truth. 'Compelling, remorseless, brilliant' John Gray

'Compelling, remorseless, brilliant' John Gray A first ink drawing showed a hanged man swinging from a gallows on which perched an enormous crow. And there were at least twenty other etchings and pen or pencil sketches that had the same leitmotif of hanging. On the edge of a forest: a man hanging from every branch. A church steeple: beneath the weathercock, a human body dangling from each arm of the cross. . . Below another sketch were written four lines from Francois Villon's Ballade of the Hanged Men. On a trip to Brussels, Maigret unwittingly causes a man's suicide, but his own remorse is overshadowed by the discovery of the sordid events that drove the desperate man to shoot himself. This novel has been published in previous translations as Maigret and the Hundred Gibbets and The Crime of Inspector Maigret. 'One of the greatest writers of the twentieth century' Guardian

'Compelling, remorseless, brilliant' John Gray 'She came forward, the outlines of her figure blurred in the half-light. She came forward like a film star, or rather like the ideal woman in an adolescent's dream. 'I gather you wish to talk to me, Inspector . . . but first of all please sit down . . .' Her accent was more pronounced than Carl's. Her voice sang, dropping on the last syllable of the longer words.' Maigret has been interrogating Carl Andersen for seventeen hours without a confession. He's either innocent or a very good liar. So why was the body of a diamond merchant found at his isolated mansion? Why is his sister always shut away in her room? And why does everyone at Three Widows Crossroads have something to hide? This novel has been published in previous translations as Maigret at the Crossroads and The Crossroad Murders. 'One of the greatest writers of the twentieth century . . . Simenon was unequalled at making us look inside, though the ability was masked by his brilliance at absorbing us obsessively in his stories' Guardian 'A supreme writer . . . unforgettable vividness' Independent

'Compelling, remorseless, brilliant' John Gray What was it about him that had struck Maigret so forcefully? . . . Little John had cold eyes! . . . Four or five times in his life, he had met people with cold eyes, those eyes that can stare at you without establishing any human contact. Persuaded to sail to New York by a fearful young law student, Maigret finds himself drawn into the city's underworld, and a wealthy businessman's closely guarded past. 'One of the greatest writers of the twentieth century . . . Simenon was unequalled at making us look inside, though the ability was masked by his brilliance at absorbing us obsessively in his stories' Guardian

A new translation of Simenon's gripping novel about lives transformed by deceit and the destructive power of lust. It was all real: himself, the room, Andree still lying on the ravaged bed. For Tony and Andree, there are no rules when they meet in the blue room at the Hotel des Voyageurs. Their adulterous affair is intoxicating, passionate - and dangerous. Soon it turns into a nightmare from which there can be no escape. Simenon's stylish and sensual psychological thriller weaves a story of cruelty, reckless lust and relentless guilt. 'A wondrous achievement, brief, inexorable, pared to, and agonisingly close to, the bone, and utterly compelling; in short, a true and luminous work of art.' John Banville 'A double crime, a dark provincial scandal, and a dreadful sort of triumph . . . presented with shattering power' San Francisco Chronicle 'One of the greatest writers of the twentieth century . . . Simenon was unequaled at making us look inside, though the ability was masked by his brilliance at absorbing us obsessively in his stories' Guardian 'A supreme writer . . . unforgettable vividness' Independent

Renowned for his compeling, humane portraits of everyday Arab lives, Tahar Ben Jelloun has affirmed his place in the literary world by winning such awards as the Prix Goncourt and Prix Maghreb. In "The Last Friend," Ben Jelloun presents a spellbinding coming-of-age story and a dazzling portrait of Morocco in an era of repression and disillusionment. In Tangiers in the late 1950s, two teenagers, Mamed and Ali, strike up an intense friendship that will last a lifetime. But lurking just beneath the surface is a deep, unspoken jealousy in danger of destroying them both.

A concentration camp survivor confronts one of the most heated and vexed questions of the Holocaust: what price survival? In 1943, sixteen-year-old Paul Steinberg was arrested in Paris and deported to Auschwitz. A chemistry student, Steinberg was assigned to work in the camp's laboratory alongside Primo Levi, who would later immortalize his fellow inmate as "Henri," the ultimate survivor, the paradigm of the prisoner who clung to life at the cost of his own humanity. "One seems to glimpse a human soul," Levi wrote in If This Is a Man, "but then Henri's sad smile freezes in a cold grimace, and here he is again, intent on his hunt and his struggle; hard and distant, enclosed in armor, the enemy of all."

Now, after fifty years, Steinberg speaks for himself. In an unsparing act of self-scrutiny, he traces his passage from artless adolescent to ruthless creature determined to do anything to live. He describes his strategies of survival: the boxing matches he staged for the camp commanders, the English POWs he exploited, the maneuvers and tactics he applied with cold competence. Ultimately, he confirms Levi's judgment: "No doubt he saw straight. I probably was that creature, prepared to use whatever means I had available." But, he asks, "Is it so wrong to survive?"

Brave and rare, Speak You Also is a profound and necessary addition to the body of Holocaust writing: a survivor's reckoning with culpability and survival.

"School Days" (Chemin-d'Ecole) is a captivating narrative based on Patrick Chamoiseau's childhood in Fort-de-France, Martinique. It is a revelatory account of the colonial world that shaped one of the liveliest and most creative voices in French and Caribbean literature today. Through the eyes of the boy Chamoiseau, we meet his severe, Francophile teacher, a man intent upon banishing all remnants of Creole from his students' speech. This domineering man is succeeded by an equally autocratic teacher, an Africanist and proponent of "Negritude." Along the way we are also introduced to Big Bellybutton, the class scapegoat, whose tales of Creole heroes and heroines, magic, zombies, and fantastic animals provide a fertile contrast to the imported French fairy tales told in school. In prose punctuated by Creolisms and ribald humor, Chamoiseau infuses the universal terrors, joys, and disappointments of a child's early school days with the unique experiences of a Creole boy forced to confront the dominant culture in a colonial school. School Days mixes understanding with laughter, knowledge with entertainment--in ways that will fascinate and delight readers of all ages.

Read this an expansive meditation on death, grief and the limtless reach of the human spirit from the bestselling author of The Adversary

‘Compelling… Carrère has the gift of speaking simply and directly of the essentials’ Evening Standard

Beset by arguments and the fear that things between them may be falling apart, writer Emmanuel Carrère and his partner, Hélène, journey to Sri Lanka to spend Christmas along the coast. But when the 2004 tsunami devastates the country, sweeping their friends’ young daughter away, the couple are bound in their search among the dead. As further tragedy strikes back home, with the news that Hélène’s sister is dying of cancer, Carrère turns his characteristic eye to the subject of these two lives, documenting the dramatic effect that their deaths have on those around them.

Precise, sober, and suspenseful, Other Lives But Mine offers an intimate portrait of the fragility of life and the restorative processes of grief, that illuminates the astonishing richness of human connection.

Lyonel Trouillot's harrowing novel depicts a night of blazing violence in modern-day Port-au-Prince and recalls hundreds of years of violence stretching back even before the birth of Haiti in the fires of revolution. Three narrators--a madam, a taxi driver, and a post office employee--describe in almost hallucinatory terms the escalating chaos of a bloody uprising that pits the partisans of the Prophet against the murderous might of the great dictator Deceased Forever-Immortal. The drama of promise and betrayal in Haitian life inform's "Street of Lost Footsteps" with the grim irony and savage tenderness characteristic of writers for whom the repetitiveness of history has gone beyond tragedy, through farce, and on into insanity. With impressive originality and touching immediacy, Trouillot explores the nature of political oppression, memory, and truth.

During the spring of 1994, in a tiny country called Rwanda, some 800,000 people were hacked to death, one by one, by their neighbors in a gruesome civil war. Several years later, journalist Jean Hatzfeld traveled to Rwanda to interview ten participants in the killings, eliciting extraordinary testimony from these men about the genocide they perpetrated. As Susan Sontag wrote in the preface, "Machete Season" is a document that "everyone should read . . . because making] the effort to understand what happened in Rwanda . . . is part of being a moral adult."