App Store

Google Play

{{seriesTitle}} - سلسلة الكتب

Details page - Device banner - 894x1036

خطوة إلى عالم لا حدود له من القصص

الاستماع والقراءة

Raymond Queneau

Sally Mara’s Intimate Diary, dating from 1950, is exceptional; a salacious, black humorous and meaningful story by the influential and erudite French novelist, Raymond Queneau. When ‘Sally Mara’ begins her diary in January 1934, she is 17 years old and lives with her mother, older brother and younger sister in south central Dublin. The everyday language is, of course, English, but she is writing in ‘newly-learned’ French to impress her beloved and just departed French tutor, a professional polyglot linguist. To impress him even more, she decides to learn Irish in order to write a novel of some kind in Irish. However, the action throughout is determined by Sally’s resolution to overcome her ignorance of the mysteries of sex and reproduction. 
The often sensual and dark humour of Sally Mara’s Journal intime is founded on language and languages, so this translation, while prioritizing clarity, aims to maintain ‘Frenchness’, tinged of course with Dublinese. Surprisingly, for a French author, Irish words and phrases occur throughout; these are not translated but, like some challenging French phrases, are supported by footnotes. In 1949, when Raymond Queneau wrote Journal intime, published anonymously under the pseudonym Sally Mara, he was, as always, greatly influenced by James Joyce and fascinated by the limitations of language. He was also in need of the ready money provided by Éditions du Scorpion, publishers of erotic and violent pulp fiction, and of Journal intime.

Dalkey Archive Press

French Literature

Sally Mara's Intimate Diary

James Gosling

Xabi Molia

The ugly side of superheroes

What if you suddenly had superpowers? What would you do? How would your friends and family react? What would your obligations to society be?

The superheroes’ first missions— combating terrorists or rescuing disaster victims— are a boon to France. Yet while these actions bring the country pride, unity quickly starts to unravel. These superheroes, ultimately, are human. Paparazzi are everywhere. One has an affair with another’s wife. Another questions following the government’s imperialist agenda. Meanwhile the public carps on social media. Molia takes our fascination with superheroes and adds a cutting portrayal of contemporary social mores to create an entertaining and disturbing work with deep dystopian underpinnings.

The Firsts: A History of French Superheroes

Alexander Hertich

Corinne Hoex

Every night when she goes to sleep, a woman dreams of erotic encounters with different men. She dreams of being the sponge squeezed to foaming in a gas station attendant's hand, and of twining her bare skin with a sea lion's thick pelt under the watchful eye of the sea lion trainer. From a gas station attendant to a sea lion trainer, a watchmaker to a teacher, a furrier to an astrologer, each evening's new encounter is more sensual and extravagant than the last.

Gentlemen Callers

Caitlin O'Neil

Tanguy Viel

"Tanguy Viel's parody/pastiche of the American novel is subtle and experimental; it tells a story at the same time as it implicitly poses questions about the narrative structure it is deploying." —The French Review

In The Disappearance of Jim Sullivan, disappearance is both a theme and a stylistic device. Indeed, this publication narrates the disappearance of Dwayne Koster, who, fascinated by the story of Jim Sullivan, commits suicide in the New Mexico desert which was the setting of the rocker’s disappearance in 1975. But this novel is for the most part set in the metanarrative tale of its own genesis, and, as a result, is partially eclipsed: its -fictitious- author doesn’t relate it in its entirety and keeps adding bits and pieces of first drafts and preliminary sketches to his text, thus blurring its boundaries. Tanguy Viel’s work can therefore be perceived as a double response, existential and aesthetic, to the question of the end.

The Disappearance of Jim Sullivan

Clayton McKee

Olivier Targowla

For seventeen years, Narcisse Dièze, chronic sufferer of a mysterious condition called "cerebral rheumatism"; has lived in the protective confines of a psychiatric hospital. There he has been attended by a contingent of nurses, for whom he has obligingly fathered somewhere between thirty-five and one hundred seventy-one children. (No one knows the exact number.)

But the doctors abruptly decide that he is cured and prod him to reenter the outside world. Narcisse is floored, yet he gradually summons the will to try. What follows is an account of this naïve and timid patient’s adventures in the realm of the so-called sane. An endearing misfit in the tradition of Walter Mitty and Forrest Gump, Narcisse is destined to totter precariously on the highwire of his existence. Will we see him fall?

A quirky fable that pokes holes in the accepted mental health verities and pleads for a touch of madness. With an introduction by Warren Motte.

Narcisse on a Tightrope

Paul Curtis Daw

Danielle Mémoire

Who’s really telling this story? That’s the mystery at the heart of Danielle Mémoire’s novel, which opens with a writer on stage at a public reading—a public reading that isn’t one, because she never reads a word, much to the audience’s annoyance. When an audience member finally heckles her, the writer’s response sets off a chain reaction of nested stories that tumble one after another like a row of dominoes.

Each storyteller in the series (most are writers at public readings) builds on what’s come before while often radically changing its meaning. Along the way, we encounter fatal stepladders, a painter obsessed with a transom window, a lovestruck dog-walker, and a lost cat restored to its owners through divine intervention. Playful, thought-provoking, and utterly unique, Public Reading Followed by Discussion defies classification and invites every reader to join the game.

Public Reading Followed by Discussion

K. E. Gormley

Edouard LevÃ©

Suicide cannot be read as simply another novel—it is, in a sense, the author’s own oblique, public suicide note, a unique meditation on this most extreme of refusals.

Presenting itself as an investigation into the suicide of a close friend—perhaps real, perhaps fictional—more than twenty years earlier, Levé gives us, little by little, a striking portrait of a man, with all his talents and flaws, who chose to reject his life, and all the people who loved him, in favor of oblivion. Gradually, through Levé’s casually obsessive, pointillist, beautiful ruminations, we come to know a stoic, sensible, thoughtful man who bears more than a slight psychological resemblance to Levé himself. But Suicide is more than just a compendium of memories of an old friend; it is a near-exhaustive catalog of the ramifications and effects of the act of suicide, and a unique and melancholy farewell to life.

Suicide

Jan Steyn

Sebastien Brebel

The narrator of Villa Bunker receives letters, dozens of them, written by his mother in an isolated seaside villa, which tell of his parents' troubles in this uninhabitable house, which is soon to become a kind of labyrinth roamed by memories and long-buried feelings. At first the narrator's parents fret most about the villa's physical deterioration, but soon their own psychological deterioration becomes the inescapable focus of their stories. 

Is their joint madness due to the villa's aberrant architecture? Or is the isolation of the villa to blame? Or were they mad all along? The narrator is left to decipher the clues, himself in turn becoming prey to his own house, which like memory and time, seems in a state of permanent metamorphosis.

Villa Bunker

Andrew Wilson

Oliver Rohe

Oliver Rohe's first novel is a word-crazed monologue in the mind of a man named Selber flying back to his wartorn native country for the first time in years. Grappling with his fear of flying and increasingly possessed by reminiscences of his long-dead childhood friend Roman, the narrator begins to wonder if any of his thoughts, or the decisions he has made in his life, are truly his own. From meditations upon loss, violence, repetition, and individuality, to explicit homages to the works of Thomas Benhard, Without Origin is a remarkable and incisive debut.

Origin Unknown

Lauren Messina

Marie Chaix

A memoir and meditation on the themes of separation and silence, The Summer of the Elder Tree was Marie Chaix's first book to appear in fourteen years, and deals with the reasons for her withdrawal from writing and the events in her life since the death of her mother (as detailed in Silences, or a Woman's Life). 

 With uncompromising sincerity, and in the same beautiful prose for which she is renowned, Marie Chaix here takes stock of her life as a woman and writer, as well as the crises that caused her to give up her work. The Summer of the Elder Tree has its roots in Chaix's previous books while standing alone as a work of immense power: a new beginning.

Summer of the Elder Tree

Harry Matthews

Brigitte Lozerec'h

Mathilde Lewly—a female painter at the dawn of the twentieth century—has achieved notoriety among the Parisian avant-garde. She and her husband, also a talented young artist, pursue their separate visions side by side in a Clichy atelier, galvanized by the artistic ferment that surrounds them. But the couple are threatened by the shadow of Mathilde's little sister, Eugénie: since the two girls' sudden departure from their native England, Eugénie has been determined to vault the eight years separating her from Mathilde. 

Now, devoured by envy and haunted by a past she never actually experienced, the "little one" hurls herself into the artistic and personal life of her elder sister. It is the birth of a fierce rivalry, an emotional tug-of-war, played out against the bohemian riot of the last century's wildest years. But will the First World War's sudden and brutal eruption allow Mathilde to escape this intimate conflict and achieve her destiny?

Sisters

Betsy Wing

A woman falls into a coma. Perhaps she's going to die. Becoming the sleeper's shadow, the woman's daughter will accompany her mother through six weeks of agony, bearing witness to the prolonged death imposed upon her by the monstrous machine of modern medicine. During this final voyage through the fog, the narrator attempts to recover the vivacious woman she knew before this illness: the mad lover, the romantic spouse, the musician who sacrificed her dreams to the reality of life with her husband. 

By assembling her memories of the dying woman, gluing together scraps of recollections like puzzle pieces, Marie Chaix reconstructs the portrait of a woman who she deeply loved—a blurred silhouette forever fixed in that "museum of dust" where each life ends.

Silences, or a Woman's Life

Harry Mathews

Alain Robbe-Grillet

Part prophecy and part erotic fantasy, this classic tale of otherworldly depravity features New York itself—or a foreigner's nightmare of New York—as its true protagonist. Set in the towers and tunnels of the quintessential American city, Alain Robbe-Grillet's novel turns this urban space into a maze where politics bleeds into perversion, revolution into sadism, activist into criminal, vice into art—and back again. 

Following the logic of a movie half-glimpsed through a haze of drugs and alcohol, Project for a Revolution in New York is a Sadean reverie that bears an alarming resemblance to the New York, and the United States, that have actually come into being.

Project for a Revolution in New York

Richard Howard

Jean-Philippe Toussaint

Moving through a variety of locales and adventures, The Truth about Marie revisits the unnamed narrator of Toussaint's acclaimed Running Away, reporting on his now disintegrated relationship with the titular Marie—the story switching deftly between first- and third-person as the narrator continues to drift through life, and Marie does her best to get on with hers. 

Like all of Toussaint's novels, The Truth about Marie's plot matters far less than its pace and tempo, its chain of images, its sequence of events. From pouring rain in Paris to blazing fires on the island of Elba, from moments of intense action to perfectly paced lulls, The Truth about Marie relies on a series of contrasts to tell a beguiling, and finally touching, story of intimacy forever being regained and lost.

The Truth about Marie

Matthew B. Smith

The delightful and daring English-language debut of French author Hervé le Tellier is a series of short, intimately interconnected stories making up a lively user's manual to pleasure, relating the various liaisons of couples from Anna and Ben to Yolande and Zach (taking in Chloe and Xavier along the way, as well as twenty others, as you may have guessed), until the criss-crossing of their lives and partners makes up a pattern as intricate as the fresco on the ceiling of a chapel …

Harkening back to another playful book on an intimate subject—Harry Mathews's Singular Pleasures—Hervé le Tellier's The Sextine Chapel celebrates the wonderful, often random, often excruciating possibilities of sexual intimacy, with something here for just about everyone—and their wife, husband, lover, or passing fancy.

The Sextine Chapel

Ian Monk

Moving back and forth between detailed explanation and personal anecdotes, Gérard Gavarry's Making a Novel is partly a memoir of a writer's life and partly a memoir of his work, showing us how every story, no matter how well-planned, could always have been written countless other ways.

Making a Novel

Jane Kuntz

The answers are spontaneous, revealing, ominous, insignificant, grotesque, amusing, lecherous, tragic and trivial by turns, and lovable in their cheerful imperfection. This is a book about the basics: love, sexuality, death, and all the other things that lurk in our everyday thoughts.

A Thousand Pearls (for a Thousand Pennies)

Raymond Roussel

In a mythical African land, some shipwrecked and uniquely talented passengers stage a grand gala to entertain themselves and their captor, the great chieftain Talou. In performance after bizarre performance—starring, among others, a zither-playing worm, a marksman who can peel an egg at fifty yards, a railway car that rolls on calves' lungs, and fabulous machines that paint, weave, and compose music—Raymond Roussel demonstrates why it is that André Breton termed him "the greatest mesmerizer of modern times." 

But even more remarkable than the mind-bending events Roussel details—as well as their outlandish, touching, or tawdry backstories—is the principle behind the novel's genesis, a complex system of puns and double-entendres that anticipated (and helped inspire) such movements as Surrealism and Oulipo. Newly translated and with an introduction by Mark Polizzotti, this edition of Impressions of Africa vividly restores the humor, linguistic legerdemain, and conceptual wonder of Raymond Roussel's magnum opus.

Impressions of Africa

Mark Polizzotti

Jacques Jouet

Two minutes into the second act, there is a knock on Nicolas Boehlmer's dressing-room door, just as he's smoking his last cigarette before having to go back on stage … and, without thinking, he says, “Come in, ” still in character. He quickly finds himself bound, gagged, and stripped by a man who appears to be his mirror image: costumed in the same wig, make-up, and clothes. 

Nicolas is powerless to prevent his usurper from going out and playing his role—with increasingly ridiculous consequences. Is this “upstaging” the act of a depraved amateur? Sabotage by a rival? A piece of guerrilla theatre? A political statement? Whatever the cause, Nicolas and his fellow actors soon find their play—and their lives—making less and less sense, as the parts they play come under assault by this irrational intruder.

Upstaged

Leland de la Durantaye

Jean Rolin

In this nominally true story of an epic, transcontinental road trip, Jean Rolin travels to Africa from darkest France, accompanying a battered Audi to its new life as a taxi to be operated by the family of a Congolese security guard. 

The ghost of Joseph Conrad haunts Rolin's journey, as do memories of his expatriate youth in Kinshasa in the early 1960s—but no less present are W. G. Sebald and Marcel Proust, who are the guiding lights for Rolin's sensual and digressive attack upon history: his own as well as the world's. By turns comic, lyrical, gruesome, and humane, The Explosion of the Radiator Hose is a one-of-a-kind travelogue, and no less an exploration of what it means to be human in a life of perpetual exile and migration.

French Literature - سلسلة الكتب

French Literature - سلسلة الكتب

French Literature كتب بالترتيب

الاستماع والقراءة