THE PLAGUE
by Albert Camus
The first new translation of The Plague to be published in the United States in more than seventy years.
“We can finally read the work as Camus meant it to be read. Laura Marris’s new translation of The Plague is, quite simply, the translation we need to have. In her translator’s note, Marris writes that she “worked to restore Camus’s original restraint, so that a reader can feel the sincere emotion it provokes.” Her finished work is a marvel of clarity and poetry.” —Robert Zaretsky, LARB
TO LIVE IS TO RESIST: THE LIFE OF ANTONIO GRAMSCI
by Jean-Yves Frétigné
“If, as Primo Levi so presciently warned in 1974, ‘every age has its own fascism,’ it follows that every age needs its own Gramsci. And Jean-Yves Frétigné has given us a Gramsci for our perilous times.” — Stanislao Pugliese
IN THE SHADOW OF YOUNG GIRLS IN FLOWER
by Marcel Proust, drawings and adaptation by Stéphane Heuet
Celebrated as a “literary gateway drug” to Proust’s masterpiece (NPR), the New York Times–best-selling graphic adaptation continues with this highly anticipated new volume.
“Heuet’s “clear line” approach to illustration leads to some panels of startling beauty, even as he manages to retain a sense of the particular and emphasize the importance of seemingly trivial details that will eventually trigger specific emotions in the narrator. Laura Marris also does a commendable job as translator, extracting the essence of Proust’s prose to fit these beautiful images and sometimes, wisely, letting the illustrations do all the work without words.” —Lindsay Pereria, Rogues Portal
Broken Frontier: “Stéphane Heuet Makes Marcel Proust Cool Again”
BLOOD DARK
by Louis Guilloux
Shortlisted for the 2018 Oxford-Weidenfeld Translation Prize. Read the judges’ citation here. Nominated by the press for the PEN Translation Prize.
"At the heart of this apocalyptic satire lies the outsize figure of Cripure, a nihilistic highschool teacher of philosophy, a monstrous Ahab of the intellect suicidally in quest of his Nietzschean white whale. Guilloux’s Le Sang noir here emerges afresh—and urgent—in this new translation by Laura Marris."
—Richard Sieburth (NYRB Classics)
The Times Literary Supplement: "Bitter Victory"
Publisher's Weekly: Starred review.
The Wall Street Journal: "The Best New Fiction: Guilloux’s Comical and Horrific Novel Links the Sparkling Contempt of Flaubert to the Tender Resignation of Camus."
The New Republic: "Louis Guilloux's Great, Forgotten War Novel"
Culture Trip: "The Best International Book Releases of October"
Jewish Currents: "The Uncivil Servant"
The Safe House
by Christophe Boltanski
Winner of the 2015 Prix Femina and the Prix des Prix.
The house (and its vehicular appendage) are at the heart of Christophe Boltanski’s ingeniously structured, lightly fictionalized account of his grandparents and their extended family. The novel unfolds room by room—each chapter opening with a floorplan— introducing us to the characters who occupy each room, including the narrator’s grandmother--a woman of “savage appetites”--and his uncle Christian, whose haunted artworks would one day make him famous. (University of Chicago Press)
The New Yorker: "Briefly Noted"
Publisher's Weekly: Starred review.
The Globe and Mail: "Christophe Boltanski's The Safe House"
Pippa Koszerek, A-N: "A Phenomenal and Phenomenological Novel"
Bob Duffy, Washington Independent Review of Books: "A Parisian Manse Becomes a Metaphorical Frame for a Century of Memories"
Ron Slate, On the Seawall: "The Vertigo of Being Alive"
Foreword: "The Safe House"
THOSE WHO FORGET
by Géraldine Schwarz
Winner of the 2018 European Book Prize, Shortlisted for the Scott Moncrieff Prize, Shortlisted for the French-American Foundation Translation Prize, Shortlisted for the Mark Lynton History Prize, Longlisted for the 2020 Baillie-Gifford Prize.
“This fresh translation by Laura Marris into English is overdue…The stories are vital, and Schwarz is a meticulous, eloquent chronicler. Her epigraph, from André Gide, shows awareness as well as impatience: ‘Everything that needs to be said has already been said. But since no one is listening, everything must be said again.’” —Michael Scott Moore, LARB
"In searing yet engaging prose, Schwarz makes her case for the need for memory work.” —Library Journal (starred review)
“In this exceptionally timely and well-reasoned debut, Géraldine Schwarz, the granddaughter of a Nazi Party member, makes a powerful case that seeds of the recent resurgence of far-right nationalism in Europe were sown first by the denial and rationalizations of millions of people like her grandparents and then by postwar mythmaking that preempted the "memory work" needed to correct faulty recollections of Nazism. —Kirkus (starred review)
Triste tristan
by Paol Keineg
The opening sequence quilts the early medieval versions of Tristan and Isolde by Thomas of Britain and Béroul together with a demythologizing perspective that "takes down the pants of the lyrical tradition." Other poems take us on walks through Brittany and drives through North Carolina that fuse landscape, language, history, and memory into a complex space in motion. (Co-translated by Rosmarie Waldrop for Burning Deck Press)
Claire Luchette, The Poetry Foundation: "Reader Discretion Advised: on Profanity and the Sublime in Poetry"
World Literature Today: "Nota Benes, Nov. 2017"