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French literature

Book Review: “Les Diaboliques” — An Essential Hidden Dimension in French Literature

In “Les Diaboliques” readers must expect quite a lot of crime and some misogyny as well.

By: John Taylor Filed Under: Books, Featured, Review, World Books Tagged: Diaboliques: Six Tales of Decadence, French literature, Jules Barbey d’Aurevilly, Raymond N. MacKenzie, University of Minnesota Press

Book Review: Patrick Modiano’s Maximal Minimalism

These three books by Patrick Modiano are short, intense, and sensuous.

By: David Mehegan Filed Under: Books, Featured, Review, World Books Tagged: A Margellos World Republic of Letters Book, After the Circus, French literature, Paris Nocturne, Patrick Modiano, Pedigree: A Memoir, translation, Yale-University-Press

Book Review: “The Sexual Night” — Origins Unknown

French writer Pascal Quignard strives to peer beyond, or behind, what psychoanalysts typically rationalize as the primal parental realities.

By: John Taylor Filed Under: Books, Featured, Review, World Books Tagged: French literature, Pascal Quignard, sex, Sex and Terror, sexuality, The Sexual Night, translation

Book Review: “Happy Are the Happy” — You Can’t Get There from Here

Yasmina Reza’s dollhouse of a novel is a miniaturist’s miracle.

By: Ted Kehoe Filed Under: Books, Featured, Review, World Books Tagged: French literature, Happy Are the Happy, John Cullen, Other Press, Ted Kehoe, translation, Yasmina Reza

Fuse Book Review: The Subdued Yearning of “Guys Like Me” — The Sad-Droll Prose of Dominique Fabre

Very little happens in Dominique Fabre’s books, yet one keeps on reading. because he so genuinely depicts the ordinary lives that most of us lead.

By: John Taylor Filed Under: Books, Featured, World Books Tagged: Dominique Fabre, French literature, Guys Like Me, Howard Curtis, New Vessel Press, translation

Book Review: Émile Zola’s “The Conquest of Plassans” — “Tartuffe” Gone Realpolitik

Entertaining yet incisive, The Conquest of Plassans remains a devastatingly acute reminder that religion and politics make surprisingly compatible bedfellows.

By: Arts Fuse Editor Filed Under: Books, Featured, Review, World Books Tagged: 19th century French literature, Emile Zola, French literature, Oxford University Press, politics, religion, The Conquest of Plassans

Fuse Book Commentary: Patrick Modiano — An Oddly Elliptical Choice for the Nobel Prize for Literature

Patrick Modiano’s simple sentences pull one in; the nostalgia of loss and pain of youth and the hunt for a vague, romantic Other are easy to relate to.

By: Arts Fuse Editor Filed Under: Books, Commentary, World Books Tagged: French literature, Kai Maristed, nobel-prize-for-literature, Patrick Modiano, Suspended Sentences

Book Review: “On Leave” — An Engaging Anti-War Story From France

“On Leave” is a worthwhile novel that deserves this English revival because it convincingly conveys the alienation felt by soldiers who return home on a brief leave from hostilities taking place abroad.

By: John Taylor Filed Under: Books, Featured, Review, World Books Tagged: Algerian War, Daniel Anselme, David Bellos, Faber and Faber, French literature, On Leave, translation

Fuse Book Review: Inclement “Climates”

While reading Andre Maurois’ “Climates” you feel your world narrowing in uncomfortable ways.

By: Roberta Silman Filed Under: Books, Featured, World Books Tagged: André Maurois, Climates, French literature, Other Press, translation

Book Review: Classic Supernatural Satire — “The Wild Ass’s Skin”

Helen Constantine’s new translation of Balzac’s “The Wild Ass’s Skin” serves this wonderful and weird book well. It is one of the great, black comic fables in world literature, a dazzlingly demented exploration of a society’s lack of imagination.

By: Bill Marx Filed Under: Books, Featured, World Books Tagged: French literature, Helen Constantine, Honoré de Balzac, Oxford University Press, The Black Sheep, The Wild Ass's Skin, translation

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