On the first Tuesday of every month, Clarisse Rivière leaves her husband and young daughter and secretly takes the train to Bordeaux to visit her mother, Ladivine. Just as Clarisse's husband and daughter know nothing of Ladivine, Clarisse herself has hidden nearly every aspect of her adult life from this woman, whom she dreads and despises but also pities. Long abandoned by Clarisse's father, Ladivine works as a housecleaner and has no one but her daughter, whom she knows as Malinka. After more than twenty-five years of this deception, the idyllic middle-class existence Clarisse has built from scratch can no longer survive inside the walls she's put up to protect it. Her untold anguish leaves her cold and guarded, her loved ones forever trapped outside, looking in. When her husband, Richard, leaves her, Clarisse finds comfort in the embrace of a volatile local man, Freddy Moliger. With Freddy, she finally feels reconciled to, or at least at ease with, her true self. But this peace comes at a terrible price. Clarisse will be brutally murdered, and it will be left to her now-grown daughter, who also bears the name Ladivine, to work out who her mother was and what happened to her.  

Product Description: Mysterious Island the book tells the adventures of five Americans on an uncharted island in the South Pacific. The story begins in the American Civil War, during the siege of Richmond, Virginia, the capital of the Confederate States of America...read more

Product Description: ?ric Chevillard here seeks to clear up a persistent and pernicious literary misunderstanding: the belief that a novel's narrator must necessarily be a mouthpiece for his or her writer's own opinions. Thus, we are introduced to a narrator haunted by a deep loathing for cauliflower gratin (and by a no less passionate fondness for trout almondine), but his monologue has been helpfully and hilariously annotated in order to clarify all the many ways in which this gentleman and ?ric Chevillard are nothing alike...read more

Product Description: A moody and beautiful reflection on relationships, and how our idea of the world too often fails to match reality, All My Friends delivers five stories that probe the boundaries between individuals to mediate on how well we really know anybody, including ourselves...read more

Product Description: From one of the most original French writers of our day comes a mysterious, prismatic, and at times profoundly sad reflection on humanity in its darker moments—one of which may very well be our own. In a collection of fictions that blur distinctions between dreaming and waking reality, Lutz Bassmann sets off a series of echoes—the “entrevoutes” that conduct us from one world to another in a journey as viscerally powerful as it is intellectually heady...read more

Product Description: New work from the acclaimed author of "The Crab Nebula" and "Palafox."

Product Description: Jordan Stump had often contemplated the relationship between a translation and “the book itself,” ruminating on the intriguing inherent sameness and difference between the two. In The Other Book, Stump examines the “other” forms of a book and the ways in which they both mirror and depart from the original...read more

In a postcataclysmic world, a group of old crones who oppose the forces of capitalism as they reestablish themselves creates an avenging grandson out of rags, who, instead of crushing capitalism, finds himself seduced by its charms.

Product Description: 'Twelve little machines to make death and failure,' Redonnet calls the twelve characters -- or the twelve stories -- we find in this book, and it's true: every tale we find here tells the same story, albeit in twelve different forms, the story of a kind of erasure, of disappearance and undoing, owing to the characters' fatal need to make of themselves a copy of another...read more

Product Description: The Wrong Side of Paris, the final novel in Balzac’s The Human Comedy, is the compelling story of Godefroid, an abject failure at thirty, who seeks refuge from materialism by moving into a monastery-like lodging house in the shadows of Notre-Dame...read more

The first new translation of Balzac's novel in more than a century follows Godefroid, a thirty-year-old failure, who seeks refuge at the unusual lodging house of a tragic noblewomen, where he encounters an assortment of men, all scarred by the tumult that followed the French Revolution, who have dedicated their lives to anonymous acts of charity. 10,000 first printing.

Product Description: Winner of the prestigious Prix Medicis and a bestseller in France, My Big Apartment is a humorous and ironic look at the serious subject of growing up. Always accessible but never facile, Christian Oster's books tell of the endless human quest for love and equilibrium in the world...read more

The Nobel Prize-winning writer takes a dive into human consciousness in his latest novel, using his own battle experience during World War II to explore the 'fabulous chaos' of war.

Product Description: On the Ceiling tells the story of a young man who wears a chair upside down on his head. He falls in love with a young woman named Méline, and soon he and his friends move in with her and her family. They are disappointed by the life they find at Méline’s, however, and in search of something better they make the collective decision to move to the ceiling of her house, where they expect to find a more orderly, more rational, and less encumbered existence...read more

Product Description: On the Ceiling tells the story of a young man who wears a chair upside down on his head. He falls in love with a young woman named Méline, and soon he and his friends move in with her and her family. They are disappointed by the life they find at Méline’s, however, and in search of something better they make the collective decision to move to the ceiling of her house, where they expect to find a more orderly, more rational, and less encumbered existence...read more

Product Description: Naming and Unnaming is a dazzling study that centers on the work of Raymond Queneau, one of the most influential French novelists of the twentieth century. Jordan Stump takes as his subject the many implications—epistemological, political, literary, sometimes even physical—of naming in Queneau’s remarkable novels...read more (view table of contents, read Amazon.com's description)

Product Description: Patrick Modiano, winner of the 2014 Nobel Prize in Literature, is the author of more than thirty books and one of France’s most admired contemporary novelists. Out of the Dark is a moody, expertly rendered tale of a love affair between two drifters...read more