French Literature

Who would we be if we had made different choices? Told that secret, left that relationship, written that book? We all wonder—the passengers of Air France 006 will find out. In their own way, they were all living double lives when they boarded the plane: Blake, a respectable family man who works as a contract killer.; Slimboy, a Nigerian pop star who uses his womanizing image to hide that he's gay.; Joanna, a Black American lawyer pressured to play the good old boys' game to succeed with her Big Pharma client.; Victor Miesel, a critically acclaimed yet largely obscure writer suddenly on the precipice of global fame.; About to start their descent to JFK, they hit a shockingly violent patch of turbulence, emerging on the other side to a reality both perfectly familiar and utterly strange. As it charts the fallout of this logic-defying event, The Anomaly takes us on a journey from Lagos and Mumbai to the White House and a top-secret hangar. In Hervé Le Tellier's most ambitious work yet, high literature follows the lead of a bingeable Netflix series, drawing on the best of genre fiction from "chick lit" to mystery, while also playfully critiquing their hallmarks. An ingenious, timely variation on the doppelgänger theme, it taps into the parts of ourselves that elude us most.

Set against the translucent beauty of France in summer, Bonjour Tristesse is a bittersweet tale narrated by Cécile, a seventeen-year-old girl on the brink of womanhood, whose meddling in her father's love life leads to tragic consequences. Freed from boarding school, Cécile lives in unchecked enjoyment with her youngish, widowed father—an affectionate rogue, dissolute and promiscuous. Having accepted the constantly changing women in his life, Cécile pursues a sexual conquest of her own with a 'tall and almost beautiful' law student. Then, a new woman appears in her father's life. Feeling threatened but empowered, Cécile sets in motion a devastating plan that claims a surprising victim. Deceptively simple in structure, Bonjour Tristesse is a complex and beautifully composed portrait of casual amorality and a young woman's desperate attempt to understand and control the world around her.

With its vibrant new translation, perceptive introduction, and witty packaging, this new edition of Voltaire's masterpiece belongs in the hands of every reader pondering our assumptions about human behavior and our place in the world. Candide tells of the hilarious adventures of the naive Candide, who doggedly believes that 'all is for the best' even when faced with injustice, suffering, and despair. Controversial and entertaining, Candide is a book that is vitally relevant today in our world pervaded by—as Candide would say—'the mania for insisting that all is well when all is by no means well.'

Falsely accused of treason, the young sailor Edmond Dantès is arrested on his wedding day and imprisoned in the island fortress of the Château d'If. Having endured years of incarceration, he stages a daring and dramatic escape and sets out to discover the fabulous treasure of Monte Cristo, and to catch up with his enemies. A novel of enormous tension and excitement, The Count of Monte Cristo is also a tale of obsession and revenge. Believing himself to be an 'Angel of Providence', Dantès pursues his vengeance to the bitter end, only then realizing that he himself is a victim of fate. One of the great thrillers of all time, The Count of Monte Cristo has been adapted for film and television many times. This newly revised, unabridged translation is as unputdownable now as it was when the novel first appeared, and William Thackeray, enthralled, 'began to read Monte Cristo at six one morning and never stopped till eleven at night'.

The lives of fifty-four-year-old concierge Rene Michel and extremely bright, suicidal twelve-year-old Paloma Josse are transformed by the arrival of a new tenant, Kakuro Ozu.

Un matin de la Grande Guerre, le capitaine Armand siffle l'attaque contre l'ennemi allemand. Les soldats s'élancent. Dans leurs rangs, Alfa Ndiaye et Mademba Diop, deux tirailleurs sénégalais parmi tous ceux qui se battent alors sous le drapeau français. Quelques mètres après avoir jailli de la tranchée, Mademba tombe, blessé à mort, sous les yeux d'Alfa, son ami d'enfance, son plus que frère. Alfa se retrouve seul dans la folie du grand massacre, sa raison s'enfuit. Lui, le paysan d'Afrique, va distribuer la mort sur cette terre sans nom. Détaché de tout, y compris de lui-même, il répand sa propre violence, sème l'effroi. Au point d'effrayer ses camarades. Son évacuation à l'Arrière est le prélude à une remémoration de son passé en Afrique, tout un monde à la fois perdu et ressuscité dont la convocation fait figure d'ultime et splendide résistance à la première boucherie de l'ère moderne.

The dazzling and exuberant moral stories of Rabelais (c. 1471–1553) expose human follies with their mischievous and often obscene humour, while intertwining the realistic with carnivalesque fantasy to make us look afresh at the world. Gargantua depicts a young giant, reduced to laughable insanity by an education at the hands of paternal ignorance, old crones and syphilitic professors, who is rescued and turned into a cultured Christian knight. And in Pantagruel and its three sequels, Rabelais parodied tall tales of chivalry and satirized the law, theology and academia to portray the bookish son of Gargantua who becomes a Renaissance Socrates, divinely guided in his wisdom, and his idiotic, self-loving companion Panurge.

Rejected by fifteenth-century Parisian society, the hideously deformed bell-ringer Quasimodo believes he is safe under the watchful eye of his master, the Archdeacon Claude Frollo. But after Quasimodo saves the beautiful Romani girl Esmeralda from the gallows and brings her to sanctuary in the cathedral, his and Frollo's desire for her puts them increasingly at odds, before compassion and cruelty clash with tragic results...

Since the original, prewar translation there has been no completely new rendering of the French original into English. This translation brings to the fore a more sharply engaged, comic and lucid Proust. In Search of Lost Time is one of the greatest, most entertaining reading experiences in any language...

Céline's masterpiece—colloquial, polemic, hyper realistic—boils over with bitter humor and revulsion at society's idiocy and hypocrisy. Journey to the End of the Night is a literary symphony of cruelty and violence that hurtles through the improbable travels of the petit bourgeois (and largely autobiographical) antihero, Bardamu: from the trenches of WWI, to the African jungle, to New York, to the Ford Factory in Detroit, and finally to life in Paris as a failed doctor. Ralph Manheim's pitch-perfect translation captures Céline's savage energy, and a dynamic afterword by William T. Vollmann presents a fresh, furiously alive take on this astonishing novel.

In 2018, Diégane Latyr Faye, a young Senegalese writer, discovered a legendary book in Paris, published in 1938: The Labyrinth of the Inhuman. We have lost track of its author, described in his time as 'Rimbaud nègre,' since the scandal that the publication of his text triggered. Diégane then embarked, fascinated, on the trail of the mysterious T.C. Elimane, confronting himself with the great tragedies of colonialism or the Shoah. From Senegal to France via Argentina , what truth awaits him at the center of this labyrinth? Without ever losing the thread of this quest which monopolizes him, Diégane, in Paris, hangs out with a group of young African authors: they all observe each other, discuss, drink, do a lot of reading. love, and question the necessity of creation from exile. He will especially become attached to two women: the sulphurous Siga, holder of secrets, and the fleeting photojournalist Aïda...

The youngest daughter of Algerian immigrants, Fatima Daas is raised in a home where love and sexuality are considered taboo. Living in the majority-Muslim suburb of Clichy-sous-Bois, she goes from unstable student to maladjusted adult, doing four years of therapy—her longest relationship. But as she gains distance from her family, she grapples more directly with her attraction to women and how it fits with her religion, which she continues to practice. When Nina comes into her life, she doesn't know exactly what she needs but feels that something crucial has been missing.

Few novels ever swept across the world with such overpowering impact as Les Misérables. Within 24 hours, the first Paris edition was sold out. In other great cities of the world it was devoured with equal relish. Sensational, dramatic, packed with rich excitement and filled with the sweep and violence of human passions, Les Misérables is not only superb adventure but a powerful social document. The story of how the convict Jean-Valjean struggled to escape his past and reaffirm his humanity, in a world brutalized by poverty and ignorance, became the gospel of the poor and the oppressed.

When Constance told her ex-husband that she was dating women, he made a string of unfounded accusations that separated her from her young son, Paul. Laurent trained Paul to say he no longer wants to see his mother, and the judge believed him. She approaches this new life with passionate intensity and the desire for an unencumbered existence, certain that no love can last. Apart from cigarettes, two regular lovers and women she has brief affairs with, Constance's approach is monastic and military—she swims daily, reads, writes, and returns to small or borrowed rooms for the night. A starkly beautiful account of impossible sacrifices asked from mothers, Love Me Tender is a bold novel of defiance, freedom and self-knowledge.

Emma Bovary is beautiful and bored, trapped in her marriage to a mediocre doctor and stifled by the banality of provincial life. An ardent reader of sentimental novels, she longs for passion and seeks escape in fantasies of high romance, in voracious spending and, eventually, in adultery. But even her affairs bring her disappointment and the consequences are devastating. Flaubert's erotically charged and psychologically acute portrayal of Emma Bovary caused a moral outcry on its publication in 1857. It was deemed so lifelike that many women claimed they were the model for his heroine; but Flaubert insisted- 'Madame Bovary, c'est moi'.

The Salpêtrière Asylum: Paris, 1885. Dr. Charcot holds all of Paris in thrall with his displays of hypnotism on women who have been deemed mad and cast out from society. But the truth is much more complicated—these women are often simply inconvenient, unwanted wives, those who have lost something precious, wayward daughters, or girls born from adulterous relationships. For Parisian society, the highlight of the year is the Lenten ball—the Mad Women's Ball—when the great and good come to gawk at the patients of the Salpêtrière dressed up in their finery for one night only. For the women themselves, it is a rare moment of hope. Genevieve is a senior nurse. After the childhood death of her sister Blandine, she shunned religion and placed her faith in both the celebrated psychiatrist Dr. Charcot and science. But everything begins to change when she meets Eugenie, the 19-year-old daughter of a bourgeois family that has locked her away in the asylum. Because Eugenie has a secret: she sees spirits. Inspired by the scandalous, banned work that all of Paris is talking about, The Book of Spirits, Eugenie is determined to escape from the asylum--and the bonds of her gender—and seek out those who will believe in her. And for that she will need Genevieve's help...

Annie Ernaux's father died exactly two months after she passed her practical examination for a teaching certificate. Barely educated and valued since childhood strictly for his labor, Ernaux's father had grown into a hard, practical man who showed his family little affection. Narrating his slow ascent towards material comfort, Ernaux's cold observation reveals the shame that haunted her father throughout his life. She scrutinizes the importance he attributed to manners and language that came so unnaturally to him as he struggled to provide for his family with a grocery store and cafe in rural France. Over the course of the book, Ernaux grows up to become the uncompromising observer now familiar to the world, while her father matures into old age with a staid appreciation for life as it is and for a daughter he cautiously, even reluctantly admires. A Man's Place is the companion book to her critically acclaimed memoir about her mother, A Woman's Story. [Winner of the 2022 Nobel Prize in Literature and a New York Times Notable Book]. Access the French text here: La place.

Traumatized by memories of his war-ravaged country, and with his son and daughter-in-law dead, Monsieur Linh travels to a foreign land to bring the child in his arms to safety. The other refugees in the detention centre are unsure how to help the old man; his case-workers are compassionate, but overworked. Struggling beneath the weight of his sorrow, Monsieur Linh becomes increasingly bewildered in this unfamiliar, fast-moving town, and then he encounters Monsieur Bark. They do not speak each other's language, but Monsieur Bark is sympathetic to the foreigner's need to care for the child. The two men share their solitude, and find friendship in an unlikely dialogue between two very different cultures. Access the French text here: La petite fille de monsieur Linh: roman.

Anne Berest's The Postcard is among the most acclaimed and beloved French novels of recent years. Luminous and gripping to the very last page, it is an enthralling investigation into family secrets, a poignant tale of mothers and daughters, and a vivid portrait of twentieth-century Parisian intellectual and artistic life. January, 2003. Together with the usual holiday cards, an anonymous postcard is delivered to the Berest family home. Fifteen years after the postcard is delivered, Anne, the heroine of this novel, is moved to discover who sent it and why. Aided by her chain-smoking mother, family members, friends, associates, a private detective, a graphologist, and many others, she embarks on a journey to discover the fate of the Rabinovitch family: their flight from Russia following the revolution, their journey to Latvia, Palestine, and Paris. What emerges is a moving saga of a family devastated by the Holocaust and partly restored through the power of storytelling that shatters long-held certainties about Anne's family, her country, and herself.

This fine example of the French realist novel contrasts the social progress of an impoverished but ambitious aristocrat with the tale of a father, whose obsessive love for his daughters leads to his personal and financial ruin.

Stendhal's great novel The Red and the Black, published in 1830, is seen as one of the most distinguished monuments of literary realism. In this introductory study, Stirling Haig shows how this realism derives from the incorporation of both history and legal reportage into the novel, and how it combines autobiography with mimesis. Professor Haig locates the novel in the context of Stendhal's own experiences as a Commissariat officer in the Napoleonic army, journalist, opera-lover, salon dandy and traveller in Italy and Restoration France, and highlights the constant inter-penetration of personal, documentary, and fictional elements in Stendhal's writings.

Through the story of an ordinary man unwittingly drawn into a senseless murder on an Algerian beach, Camus explored what he termed 'the nakedness of man faced with the absurd.'

Alpes, dans les années 1990. La narratrice, prénommée Neige, est violée régulièrement par son beau-père. En 2000, elle et sa mère portent plainte et l'homme est condamné à neuf ans de prison. À travers ce récit fictionnel, l'auteure relate ce qu'elle a subi, explore les moyens de dire le traumatisme ainsi que le pouvoir et l'impuissance de la littérature pour raconter l'inceste et le viol (leslibraires.ca).

Un soir, une jeune chienne, traînant une sale histoire avec sa chaîne brisée, surgit à la porte d'un vieux couple : Sophie, romancière, qui aime la nature et les marches en forêt et son compagnon Grieg, déjà sorti du monde, dormant le jour et lisant la nuit, survivant grâce à la littérature. D'où vient cette bête blessée ? Qu'a-t-elle vécu? Est-on à sa poursuite ? Son irruption va transformer la vieillesse du monde, celle d'un couple, celle d'une femme, en ode à la vie, nous montrant qu'un autre chemin est possible. Un chien à ma table relie le féminin révolté et la nature saccagée : si notre époque inquiétante semble menacer notre avenir et celui des livres, les poètes des temps de détresse sauvent ce qu'il nous reste d'humanité.

Au grand jeu du destin, Mimo a tiré les mauvaises cartes. Né pauvre, il est confié en apprentissage à un sculpteur de pierre sans envergure. Mais il a du génie entre les mains. Toutes les fées ou presque se sont penchées sur Viola Orsini. Héritière d'une famille prestigieuse, elle a passé son enfance à l'ombre d'un palais génois. Mais elle a trop d'ambition pour se résigner à la place qu'on lui assigne. Ces deux-là n'auraient jamais dû se rencontrer. Au premier regard, ils se reconnaissent et se jurent de ne jamais se quitter. Viola et Mimo ne peuvent ni vivre ensemble, ni rester longtemps loin de l'autre. Liés par une attraction indéfectible, ils traversent des années de fureur quand l'Italie bascule dans le fascisme. Mimo prend sa revanche sur le sort, mais à quoi bon la gloire s'il doit perdre Viola ? Un roman plein de fougue et d'éclats, habité par la grâce et la beauté (page 4 of cover).

En un récit tendu qui agit comme un véritable compte à rebours, Brigitte Giraud tente de comprendre ce qui a conduit à l'accident de moto qui a coûté la vie à son mari le 22 juin 1999. Vingt ans après, elle fait pour ainsi dire le tour du propriétaire et sonde une dernière fois les questions restées sans réponse. Hasard, destin, coïncidences ? Elle revient sur ces journées qui s'étaient emballées en une suite de dérèglements imprévisibles jusqu'à produire l'inéluctable. À ce point électrisé par la perspective du déménagement, à ce point pressé de commencer les travaux de rénovation, le couple en avait oublié que vivre était dangereux. Brigitte Giraud mène l'enquête et met en scène la vie de Claude, et la leur, miraculeusement ranimées (page 4 of cover).

From the author of Life A User's Manual comes an equally mind-bending novel: an interpretive vision of the Holocaust and a dystopian world. W or The Memory of Childhood is a narrative that reflects a great writer's effort to come to terms with his childhood during the Nazi occupation of France. Perec tells two parallel stories. The first is autobiographical, describing his wartime boyhood. The second tale, denser, more disturbing, more horrifying, is the allegorical story of W, a mythical island off Tierra del Fuego governed by the thrall of the Olympic "ideal," where losers are tortured and winners held in temporary idolatry. As the reader soon discovers, W is a place where "it is more important to be lucky than to be deserving," and "you have to fight to live...no recourse, no mercy, no salvation, not even any hope that time will sort things out." Perec's memory of the Holocaust and vision about its meaning has resulted in an astonishing achievement that stands with the best of his work. Access the French text here: W, ou, Le souvenir d'enfance: une fiction.

In the aftermath of the efflorescence of experimental literature and theory that characterized the Trente Glorieuses (1945–1975), 'contemporary' French literature is often said to embrace more traditional or readable novelistic forms. This rejection of the radical aesthetics of mid-century French literature, this rehabilitation of fictional forms that have been called sub-literary, regressive, or outdated, has been given a name: the 'return to the story'. In Beyond Return, Lucas Hollister proposes new perspectives on the cultural politics of such fictions. Examining adventure novels, radical noir, postmodernist mysteries, war novels, and dystopian fictions, Hollister shows how authors like Jean Echenoz, Jean-Patrick Manchette, Jean Rouaud, and Antoine Volodine develop radically dissimilar notions of the aesthetics of 'return', and thus redraw in different manners the boundaries of the contemporary, the French, and the literary. In the process, Hollister argues for the need to move beyond the nostalgic, anti-modernist rhetoric of the 'return to the story' in order to appreciate the potentialities of innovative contemporary genre fictions.

Our global literary field is fluid and exists in a state of constant evolution. Contemporary fiction in French has become a polycentric and transnational field of vibrant and varied experimentation; the collapse of the distinction between 'French' and 'Francophone' literature has opened up French writing to a world of new influences and interactions. In this collection, renowned scholars provide thoughtful close readings of a whole range of genres, from graphic novels to crime fiction to the influence of television and film, to analyse modern French fiction in its historical and sociological context. Allowing students of contemporary French literature and culture to situate specific works within broader trends, the volume provides an engaging, global and timely overview of contemporary fiction writing in French, and demonstrates how our modern literary world is more complex and diverse than ever before.

Although the great French novelists of the last two centuries are widely read in America, there is a widespread notion that little of importance has happened in French literature since the heyday of Sartre, Camus, and the nouveau roman. Some might argue that even well read Americans are ignorant about what is happening in European literature generally. Certainly, there has never been so few translations of foreign books in the United States, or so little coverage of foreign writers. Curious American readers need new, up-to-date information and analyses about what is happening elsewhere. Paths to Contemporary French Literature is a stimulating and much-needed guide to the major currents of one of the world's great literatures. This critical panorama of contemporary French literature introduces English-language readers to over fifty important writers and poets, many of whom are still little known outside of France. Emphasizing authors who are admired by their peers (as opposed to those with overnight reputations), John Taylor offers a compelling insider's view. The pioneering essays included in this book offer incisive analyses of the ideas motivating current writing and delve into a writer's or poet's entire output...

This is the first book-length study of female adolescence in the French novel of this period. It analyzes representations of the 'world apart' of female adolescence in selected novels from the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In the nineteenth century, several factors contributed to the shaping of a new social category for young women, which then gained increasing attention from writers. Art and life echoed one another, as novels about female adolescents created a social stir, and incited further discussion about the proper role for young women in French society. In this book, the author considers key novels of female adolescence from the period as a means of understanding the concerns and desires they embody. Examining these novels thematically and chronologically, Dr. Gale traces shifting social values and sexual roles and examines the ways in which various artistic, intellectual, or literary influences of each period shape its portraits of female adolescence. Novelists create their young female characters as French society undergoes parallel transformation. In this sense, female adolescents represent, for the novelists, the possible futures of France.