From the French Best-seller.The hero is a man painter, he finds himself, despite himself, immersed in sordid stories. We couldn't leave him alone.

As in any good pulp fiction from the likes of Goodis or Chandler , take the time to put the pieces together in this roman noir until things turn ugly.In a Western port city in France, artist Bernard Balzac returns to his city of birth to paint the beautiful coastal scenery and get some rest from the bustle of Parisian life. Despite his efforts to live his life in peace and solitude, he is ensnared in the meanderings of a police investigation in whi...

The renowned French author's modern masterpiece: "one of the great novels of the century . . . on the level of Joyce, Proust, Mann, Kafka, and Nabokov" ( Boston Globe).Structured around a single moment in time—8:00 p.m. on June 23, 1975—Georges Perec's "elaborate jigsaw puzzle of a novel" begins in an apartment block in Paris where, chapter by chapter, room by room, a rich cast of characters is revealed in a series of tales that are bizarre, unlikely, movin...

Mark Helprin’s powerful, rapturous new novel is set in a present-day Paris caught between violent unrest and its well-known, inescapable glories. Seventy-four-year-old Jules Lacour—a maître at Paris-Sorbonne, cellist, widower, veteran of the war in Algeria, and child of the Holocaust—must find a balance between his strong obligations to the past and the attractions and beauties of life and love in the present. In the midst of what should be an effulgent time of life—days bright with music,...

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 this Prix Femina–winning memoir, a writer at the French satirical newspaper Charlie Hebdo recounts surviving the deadly terror attack on their office.On January 7, 2015, two terrorists claiming allegiance to ISIS attack the Paris office of the satirical weekly Charlie Hebdo. The event causes untold pain to the victims and their families, prompts a global solidarity movement, and ignites a fierce debate over press freedoms and the role of satire ...

From one of the most exciting novelists writing in France today comes Birth of a Bridge – the story of a handful of men and women of various backgrounds and classes, who assemble around the construction of a giant suspension bridge in Coca, a fictional city somewhere in a mythical and fantastic California.Told on a sweeping scale reminiscent of classic American adventure films, this Médicis Prize–winning novel chronicles the lives of these individuals, who represent a micr...

In Paris Noir Yonnet tells is about some of the darker quarters of Paris on the left bank of the Seine, centred on the place Mauberge and the rue Mouffetard, as seen from his own experience. It is mainly written during the 1940s, under the Occupation and in the immediate post-war period; there is a certain amount dealing with the resistance, but the main thrust of the book is a Paris that existed between the wars - and is well known from the film noir -but has since disappeared. It concent...

The Solitude of Compassion, a collection of short stories never before available in English, won popular acclaim when it was originally published in France in 1932. It tells of small-town life in Provence, drawing on a whole village of fictional characters, often warm and decent, at times immoral and coarse. Giono writes of a friendship forged in a battlefield trench in the midst of World War I; an old man’s discovery of the song of the world; and, in the title story, the not-unrelated fee...

Arrested for snorting cocaine off a car bonnet, award-winning author and quintessential dilettante Frederic Beigbeder reflects on his troubled childhood, while spending a night in the cells.In his most autobiographical book to date, the author of the award-winning ‘Windows on the World’ recounts his stay in police custody, when in January 2008 he was arrested for snorting cocaine outside a Paris nightclub. As he lies in his cell, he revisits his childhood, from the carefree days wh...

WINNER OF THE 2022 NOBEL PRIZE IN LITERATURETaking the form of random journal entries over seven years, Exteriors captures the feeling of contemporary living on the outskirts of Paris. Poignantly lyrical, chaotic, and strangely alive.

Seven short stories by the Prix Goncourt winner—"the most distinctive voice of his generation . . . master magician of the contemporary French novel" ( The Washington Post).France's preeminent fiction writer, Jean Echenoz is celebrated for his ability to craft stories with such precision that readers are caught off guard by the intense emotion and imagination just beneath the placid surface of his writing. As Gary Indiana put it in his essay "Conjuror of S...