FOREIGN RIGHTS CATALOGUE
Frankfurt bookfair 2013
FOREIGN RIGHTS
Heidi Warneke Rights Director
[email protected]
CATALOGUE Pauline Perrignon Foreign Rights Manager
[email protected] +33.1.44.39.22.14
Christiaan van Raaijen Foreign Rights Manager
[email protected] +33.1.44.39.22.50
Frankfurt bookfair 2013
Editions Grasset & Fasquelle 61 rue des Saints-Pères 75006 Paris France
www.grasset.fr
Grasset
Editions Grasset & Fasquelle 61 rue des Saints-Pères 75006 Paris France
FOREIGN RIGHTS CATALOGUE FRANKFURT BOOKFAIR 2013
Heidi Warneke Rights Director
[email protected]
Pauline Perrignon
Christiaan van Raaijen
Foreign Rights Manager
Foreign Rights Manager
[email protected]
[email protected]
+33.1.44.39.22.14
+33.1.44.39.22.50
www.grasset.fr
LITERATURE Highlights METIN ARDITI
La Confrérie des moines volants
7
SORJ CHALANDON
Le Quatrième Mur
8
LÉONORA MIANO
La Saison de l’ombre
9
KARINE TUIL
L’Invention de nos vies
10
PASCAL BRUCKNER
La Maison des anges
11
DELPHINE COULIN
Voir du pays
12
FRANÇOISE HENRY
Sans garde-fou
13
GASPARD KŒNIG
La Nuit de la faillite
14
CLAIRE LEGENDRE
Vérité et Amour
15
MUTT-LON
Ceux qui sortent dans la nuit
16
YANN MOIX
Naissance
17
OLIVIER POIVRE D’ARVOR
Le Jour où j’ai rencontré ma fille
18
FRANÇOIS SAINTONGE
Dolfi et Marilyn
19
ANNE SIBRAN
Dans la montagne d’argent
20
PHILIPPE VILAIN
La Femme infidèle
21
TANCRÈDE VOITURIEZ
L’Invention de la pauvreté
22
LAURE ADLER
Immortelles
23
JULIEN DELMAIRE
Georgia
24
Jeune vieillard assis sur une pierre en bois
25
Novels
First novels
Short stories GEORGES-OLIVIER CHÂTEAUREYNAUD
Ceci n’est pas un fait divers / Crime DIDIER DECOIN
La Pendue de Londres
26
MARIE CARDINAL
L’Inédit
27
JEAN-LUC COATALEM
Nouilles froides à Pyongyang
28
ALEXANDRE JARDIN
Mes trois zèbres
29
DANY LAFERRIÈRE
Journal d’un écrivain en pyjama
30
LORETTE NOBÉCOURT
La Clôture des merveilles
31
MARIE CARDINAL
Les Mots pour le dire et autres romans
32
MAURICE GENEVOIX
La Boîte à pêche
33
Raboliot
33
FRANÇOIS MAURIAC
La Pharisienne
34
PAUL MORAND
Champions du monde
35
CHRISTIANE ROCHEFORT
Le Repos du guerrier
36
PIERRE SCHOENDOERFFER
L’Adieu au roi
37
AMIN MAALOUF
Les Désorientés
38
COLOMBE SCHNECK
La Réparation
39
Narratives / Journals
Cahiers Rouges
Reminders
COCTEAU Inédits/Unreleased writings JEAN COCTEAU
Démarche d’un poète
41
Paris, suivi de Notes sur l’amour
41
Les Enfants terribles
42
La Machine infernale
42
Portraits souvenir
42
Reines de la France
43
La Corrida du 1er mai
43
Proust contre Cocteau
44
EMMANUEL LEVINAS
Œuvres Complètes, tomes 1, 2 & 3
46
RITHY PANH with CHRISTOPHE BATAILLE
L’Image manquante
48
SANDRINE TREINER
L’Idée d’une tombe sans nom
49
Le Prince des lignes, Azzedine Alaïa
50
Yves Saint Laurent
51
CATEL
Ainsi soit Benoite Groult
52
ELIZABETH GOUSLAN
Grace de Monaco
53
Cahiers Rouges JEAN COCTEAU
Essay CLAUDE ARNAUD
NON FICTION Highlights
Biographies LAURENCE BENAÏM
MICHELLE PERROT
Mélancolie ouvrière
54
MAURIZIO SERRA
Italo Svevo ou l’antivie
55
NICOLAS GRIMALDI
Les Théorèmes du moi
56
BERNARD-HENRI LÉVY
Les Aventures de la vérité : Art et philosophie, une histoire.
57
FRANÇOIS JULLIEN
De l’intime : Loin du bruyant Amour
58
MICHEL ONFRAY
Les Freudiens hérétiques
59
Philosophy
Les Consciences réfractaires MARTINE TORRENSFRANDJI
Michel Onfray, le principe d’incandescence
60
MICHEL GUÉNAIRE
Le Retour des Etats
61
BERNARD MARIS
L'Homme dans la guerre
62
ALAIN MINC
Vive l’Allemagne
63
BRUNO PATINO JEAN-FRANCOIS FOGEL
La Condition numérique
64
DELPHINE HORVILLEUR
En tenue d'Eve : Féminin, Pudeur et Judaïsme
65
MAHMOUD HUSSEIN
Ce que le Coran ne dit pas
66
ANTOINE SFEIR
L’Islam contre l’Islam
67
ANNICK COJEAN
Les Proies
68
RITHY PANH with CHRISTOPHE BATAILLE
L’Élimination
69
CÉDRIC VILLANI
Théorème vivant
70
Essays / Politics / History
Religion
Reminders
LITERATURE
Frankfurt 2013
Editions Grasset & Fasquelle
Heidi Warneke
[email protected]
METIN ARDITI
Highlight
La Confrérie des moines volants / The Brotherhood of Flying Monks August 2013 352 pp. Longlisted for Prix Médicis, Prix Renaudot In this lively novel, Metin Arditi returns to a little known period of European history: the looting and abuse committed by the Bolsheviks against the Eastern Orthodox Church. 1937. The Soviet regime loots, sells, and destroys the treasures of the Eastern Orthodox Church and closes over one thousand monasteries. The luckiest of the monks escape and live hidden in the forest. Nicodemus is one of them, who, with the help of a handful of vagabond monks, tries to save the most beautiful treasures of Eastern Orthodox religious art. Nicodemus is an imposing figure who is constantly angry. A crime he committed in his youth led him to take refuge in a monastery, and he lives with the weight of this personal tragedy he cannot confess for fear of being excommunicated. Fascinating characters surround him on all sides: a former trapeze artist, a guileless twenty year old, and a number of other fanatics. And then there’s Irina, who flees from Hell, crosses Europe, arrives in Paris, and changes her identity… Her story is at the heart of this radiant testimony of resistance and redemption that carries us from prewar to the present day, from Bolshevik Russia to contemporary Moscow, with its billionaires and art galleries. This is a stunning tale of a few brave men. A French-language writer of Turkish descent, Metin Arditi is the author of essays and novels such as Le Turquetto (Prix Jean Giono, Prix Page des Libraires). He chairs the Instruments of Peace foundation.
Rights sold : Greek (Patakis)
“It’s brilliant, and skillfully told.” Livres H ebdo “Metin Arditi revives a little known adventure in Russian history.” Le Point “Metin Arditi skillfully tells the story of this disparate band of wandering monks and their tribulations trying to save artworks at the risk of losing their lives.” Le Fig aro Magazine
7
Frankfurt 2013
Editions Grasset & Fasquelle
Heidi Warneke
[email protected]
SORJ CHALANDON
Highlight
Le Quatrième Mur /The Fourth Wall August 2013 320 pp. Longlisted for Prix Goncourt Former war reporter Sorj Chalandon has traveled the globe and darkened his notebooks with stories of men and pain that inspire each of his novels. This time, he has chosen Lebanon as his backdrop, alongside two men with a magnificent, crazy project to transform the theater of war into a theater of words and ephemeral reconciliation. Sam is a secretly Jewish Greek refugee and theater director who dreams of putting on Jean Anouilh’s Antigone on a battlefield in Lebanon. 1976. On this earth, men massacre other men. Sam decides that the country of cedars will be his theater. He makes the trip and contacts the militias and all the fighters. His idea? To put on Anouilh’s Antigone on the front line. Creon will be Christian. Antigone will be Palestinian. Hemon will be Druze. The Shiites will be there as well, and the Chaldeans, and the Armenians. He only asks for one hour of respite – just one. It won’t be peace, but a moment of grace, a breach in the war. A burst of poetry and lowered guns. Everyone accepts. But Sam falls ill. On his deathbed, he makes Georges promise to carry things out in his stead, to go to Beirut, to assemble the actors one by one, to wrest them from the front and to put on this unique presentation. Georges agrees… at the risk of never being able to return. Sorj Chalandon, born in 1952, worked for many years as a journalist for the daily newspaper Libération before joining the satirical newspaper Le Canard Enchaîné. His reporting on Northern Ireland and the Klaus Barbie trial won him the Prix Albert-Londres in 1988. He has published Le Petit Bonzi (2005), Une promesse (2006, Prix Médicis), Mon Traître (2008), La Légende de nos pères (2009), and Retour à Killybegs (2011, Grand Prix du Roman de l'Académie Française). Rights sold for previous works: Castilian (Alianza), Chinese (complex: Global Group, Ten Points; simplified: Shanghai 99), English (Lilliput Press), German (DTV), Italian (Mondadori), Korean (Agora), Lithuanian (Tyto Alba), Polish (Sic), Ukranian (ECEM), Vietnamese (Savina)
“The novelist’s writing – which earned him the Prix Médicis and the Grand Prix du Roman de l’Académie Française – is so powerful that it makes us feel all the tension, horror, and absurdity in scenes written with outstanding visual force.” Le Point “Le Quatrième mur explodes like a cluster bomb in the reader’s mind and is sure to haunt his memory long after.” Les Echos “Le Quatrième mur renders war magnificently, but it leaves a peaceful impression – that of a reader who has discovered a great book.” Le Magazine Littéraire
8
Frankfurt 2013
Editions Grasset & Fasquelle
Heidi Warneke
[email protected]
LÉONORA MIANO
Highlight
La Saison de l’ombre / The Season of Shadow August 2013 272 pp. Longlisted for Prix Femina In this epic saga, with its metaphorical and sublime style, Léonora Miano returns to one of the great tragedies of African history: the slave trade. There is no period or specific place. This is Sub-Saharan Africa, somewhere inland, where the eldest sons have disappeared and the crying women huddle in a group away from their tribe. What is this seminal catastrophe? Who are these boys? How responsible are the mothers? Should they search for those who have disappeared, and how? Must they accept the lack of a tomb? The men of the Mulongo tribe do not know how to fight: they respect life. And yet, Evil exists and they must face this. Little by little, throughout an initiatory and dangerous journey, the tribe’s emissaries, Mukano the powerhungry chief, and the women Eyabe, Ebeise, and Ebusi, will understand that their neighbours, the armed and vengeful Bwele, are responsible for the disappearance of their children – their boys, chained and rushed off to the coast, captured and sold to the “chicken-footed” foreigners from the North. Léonora Miano’s epic and dark novel deals with the sensitive subject of the black slave trade, and the complicity of Africans united against their peers and neighbouring populations for profit. A historical novel on the Transatlantic slave trade? No. A tale where the history of Sub-Saharan Africa drapes itself in magnificent and mysterious prose, marked by religion, mysticism, faith, and “the need to invent in order to survive.” Léonora Miano was born in 1973, in Douala, Cameroun, where she spent her adolescence before coming to France in 1991. She is the author of six novels, including L’intérieur de la nuit (2005), Contours du jour qui vient (winner of the Prix Goncourt des Lycéens, 2006) and Les Aubes écarlates (2009), two collections of short pieces, and a text for the theatre.
“La Saison de l’ombre is a powerful novel that would be a sublime choice for the Prix Femina.” Elle “A magnificent, poetic book in which the Cameroonian novelist takes on ‘the hunting of man by man.’” Afrique Magazine “Like Toni Morrison before her, Miano builds a world filled with tragic accidents and strong images.” Transfuge
9
Frankfurt 2013
Editions Grasset & Fasquelle
Heidi Warneke
KARINE TUIL
[email protected]
Highlight
L’Invention de nos vies / The Invention of Our Lives August 2013 496 pp. Longlisted for Prix Goncourt, Prix Femina From New York to Paris, from the up-scale neighbourhoods of the French Capital to the wastelands of the periphery, Karine Tuil takes us on a humorous odyssey through society. L’Invention de nos vies is an epic and unique work which, not unlike Saul Bellow’s H erzog , brings the reader face-to-face with his/her own lies. What drives Sam Tahar to keep going? Money, luxury goods, a lovely marriage to the daughter of a powerful man, success with women, recognition from the New York State Bar, where this fearsome lawyer practices, or his numerous appearances on TV? Sam has got it all… so what more does he want? To forget, maybe. Because his success is based on a lie: he made his fortune by ransacking the life of his once best friend, Samuel Baron, a failed writer, son of Jewish intellectuals, who slowly wastes away in an explosive inner city, and whose only consolation is the beautiful and gentle Nina, a model for department store catalogues. These three were close friends twenty years ago. And when they meet again, after the suspense pulls the reader through to the last page, everything explodes. Nina prostitutes her beauty while believing she can love again. Sam’s past catches up with him: his real name is Samir, the son of Muslim immigrants, raised in the council estate. As for his old friend Samuel, the loser… he manages to turn things around. “You can go very far with a lie, but you can’t come back,” goes the old Yiddish proverb underlying this novel’s tempo and extraordinary construction, where one secret always hides another. Rights sold for this title: German (Aufbau), Netherlands (De Bezige) Rights sold for previous works: Italian (Voland)
“How could you not fall for this nearly 500 page novel about the failures of our society? […] a huge success. Unquestionably one of the season’s best. […] Masterful.” Paris Match “Karine Tuil has succeeded in creating a work of great magnitude with L’Invention de nos vies. It envelops the complexity of our world, mixes it around, describes it, dissects it, and, finally, helps us to understand it. We often rave about great foreign writers – as we well should –, but France has a truly talented author in this young novelist […]. In terms of literary merit, L’Invention de nos vies is simply full of ideas (…), a singular voice, and a feverish, convulsive tone.” Le Fig aro “From [...] her first novel […], Karine Tuil has built a powerful and unique body of work that has gone far too unnoticed. In 2013, applause is now bursting forth – this is her resurgence.” Elle
10
Frankfurt 2013
Editions Grasset & Fasquelle
Heidi Warneke
[email protected]
PASCAL BRUCKNER
Novel
La Maison des Anges / House of Angels January 2013 300 pp. In this new novel, Pascal Bruckner once more looks to dishevel our decorum by addressing the issues of exclusion and social demotion with raw realism and exultation. Antonin Dampierre is a normal, well-groomed thirty-year-old. He is a luxury realtor dedicated to his work, who loves cleanliness and a job well done, and everything goes along smoothly until the day two hirsute bums cause him to lose a prestigious sale and the bonus that comes with it. Antonin loses his cool and beats one of these two ill-fortuned men to death. And then it hits him like a revelation: what if he were to rid Paris of all of these creatures that lurk in the shadows? But the path to crime isn’t so easy. Antonin gets himself hired by Isolde de Hauteluce, a female version of Abbé Pierre and allaround Valkyrie of Goodness, in order to get closer to his potential victims. Pascal Bruckner did more than delve into his imagination, fertile in both horrific and comic scenes, to bring us this story. He did research in the bowels of Paris alongside doctors and workers for the municipal humanitarian emergency service SAMU Social in order to present us with a powerful and politically incorrect novel that’s sure to spark debates. Born in 1948 in Paris, Pascal Bruckner is a philosopher and novelist. He is the author of, among others, La Tentation de l’innocence (Prix Médicis de l’essai, 1995), Les Voleurs de beauté (Prix Renaudot, 1997), L’Amour du prochain (1998), Misère de la prospérité (Prix du Meilleur livre d’économie, Prix Aujourd’hui, 2002), La Tyrannie de la pénitence (2006), and Le Paradoxe amoureux (2009). His work has been translated in over thirty countries. Rights sold: Romanian (Trei) Rights sold for previous works : Arabic (Obeikan), Castilian (Ariel, Tusquets), German (Aufbau, Beltz, Siedler), Bulgarian (Gloria Mundi, Liubomadrie), Chinese (simplified: East China Normal UP, Sea Sky; Complex: Athena Press), Croatian (Algoritam, Dhk, Nakladni Zavod Matice), Czech (Mlada Fronta, Motto), Dutch (De Bezige Bij, Uitgeverij Boom), English (US: Algora, Princeton UP; UK: Dedalus, Polity Press), Greek (Patakis), Hungarian (Europa Konyvkiado), Italian (Ugo Guanda), Japanese (Hosei UP), Korean (Arte Books, Dongmoonsun, Jakkajungsin, Mujintree, Munhakdongne, Vega Books), Lithuanian (Tyto Alba), Norwegian (Arneberg, Vidarforlaget), Polish (Jagiellonian UP), Portuguese (Brazil: Bertrand Brasil, Rocco; Portugal: Noticias Editura, Europa America), Romanian (Trei, Nemira), Russian (Inostrannaya Literatura, Ivan Limbakh, Zao Machaon, Text), Serbian (Beobook, Sluzbeni Glasnik), Slovak (Kalligram), Slovene (Studentskz Zalozba), Turkish (Ayrinti Yayinlari, Yapi Kredi Kultur Sanat), Ukrainian (ECEM, Grani-T)
“La Maison des anges is a despairing, quick-paced, occasionally jubilant, and – in the end – absolutely merciless parable […] at home in the posterity of the great 19th century naturalist novels.” Livres H ebdo “La Maison des anges, a comic and unsparing novel, drives to the heart of our common anxieties with virtuosity.” Elle
11
Frankfurt 2013
Editions Grasset & Fasquelle
Heidi Warneke
[email protected]
DELPHINE COULIN
Novel
Voir du pays / To See the World September 2013 272 pp. Longlisted for Prix Médicis Delphine Coulin delivers a violent, modern, and fascinating new novel: it’s the story of two women who left to fight in Afghanistan and who, upon returning from the war, discover that you never really come back. Two girls, Aurore and Marine, return from Afghanistan, where they lived through six months of tension, horror, and fear. They leave for a three day stay at a five star hotel in Cyprus – what the army calls a “decompression chamber” – and relearn how to live normally and how to forget the war, through collective debriefings and aqua gym classes, nights of drinking and visits to the archeological sites of old Europe. But while in the middle of all of these tourists on vacation, Aurore and Marine come to realize just how profoundly the war has broken them. They have become adults, their youth and their friends have disappeared somewhere between Kabul and Cyprus. Voir du pays is a novel about the end of illusions – the illusions of those who believed in a just war or fled a future without promise. Against the backdrop of girls in swimsuits and parties on the beach, Aurore and Marine gradually come to see that they don’t have much left to lose and go to the extremity of violence. Delphine Coulin presents an exceptionally powerful and moving book in strikingly visual prose. Delphine Coulin is the author of several novels, including Les Traces (2004), Les Mille-Vies (2008), and Samba pour la France (2011), as well as of a collection of short stories, Une seconde de plus (2006). She is also a film director. The film rights to her precedent novel have been bought by Eric Toledano and Olivier Nakache, directors of the feature film “The Intouchables”.
“It would be an understatement to say that this fifth novel by Delphine Coulin addresses big taboos: the physical and psychological consequences faced by French soldiers returned from Afghanistan; women’s relationship to war and violence; and, above all, the abuses committed against them by their coreligionists […]. Staggeringly intense, with a beautiful sensibility and sober style. […] A beautiful hymn to the friendship between women.” L’Express “Voir du pays fulfills a very different mission than the one you might imagine. It’s chock-full of action, but is also a sensitive, sweet book that asks terribly pertinent questions, such as ‘is there a specifically feminine brand of violence?’ and ‘how is it possible to live with this intimate, visceral ‘girlish fear’ ingrained in us from childhood?’” Vogue
12
Frankfurt 2013
Editions Grasset & Fasquelle
Heidi Warneke
[email protected]
FRANÇOISE HENRY
Novel
Sans garde-fou / Without a Guardrail October 2013 224 pp.
In this sensitive and touching novel, Françoise Henri tells the story in reverse of the attachment that blossoms between a social worker and the man she will never be able to keep from falling into marginality. Sonia is a tall, attractive blonde in her forties. For years, she has lived alone and out of contact with her son. Her career as a social worker leads her to see André on a regular basis. André is a diver and harebrained bachelor who tells his neighbors everything that goes through his head. He loves Sonia’s visits, as she expresses a genuine affection for him. But little by little, a series of misfortunes befall him: his father dies, his mother moves away to be taken care of by his sister who despises him, and – the last straw – he gets fired. In just a few months, André comes to wallow in misery and madness. The book opens with a phone call: Sonia has an intuition that it’s André, but there’s no voice on the other end. Why did he hang up? Did something happen to him? Sonia decides to go out looking for him. A flow of images and memories come springing up from the past months they have spent time together, come to know each other, and maybe even come to love each other… Françoise Henri has published seven novels, including Le Rêve de Martin (2006, Prix Marguerite Audoux) and Juste avant l’hiver (2009). She also worked for Radio France as both an actress and author of radio scripts.
Rights sold for previous works: Vietnamese (Savina)
13
Frankfurt 2013
Editions Grasset & Fasquelle
Heidi Warneke
[email protected]
GASPARD KŒNIG
Novel
La Nuit de la faillite / The Night of the Bankruptcy June 2013 240 pp.
This detective novel, where fiction is never that far from reality, plunges us into the downward spiral of the financial markets one crazy night when France went bankrupt… Rue Cauchy, Paris, 2 a.m. The man they call “the Big Man”, none other than the President of the French Republic, François Hollande, gets an urgent phone call. West Village, New York, 2:30 a.m. (Paris time). Saïd, an ambitious trader without scruples can’t take his eyes off his screens. There are shocking rumors spreading about the French financial system. Will France be forced into bankruptcy? These two principal actors of this politico-financial thriller are joined by the Minister of Finance, the Director of the Treasury, the President’s companion, and many other characters during the night of the last chance. The market’s turmoil confronts everyone with their own small cowardices and great passions: it’s time to decide. What will happen at 9 a.m.?
Gaspard Kœnig is a liberal in his thirties. He is the founder of the think tank “Génération Libre” and the author of several novels (Octave avait vingt ans, 2004, Un baiser à la russe, 2006) and essays (Les discrètes vertus de la corruption, 2009, Leçons de conduite, 2011). Rights sold for previous works: Italian (RCS Libri)
14
Frankfurt 2013
Editions Grasset & Fasquelle
Heidi Warneke
[email protected]
CLAIRE LEGENDRE
Novel
Vérité et Amour / Truth and Love March 2013 304 pp.
A novel about expatriation, but strangeness as well. What does a young, politically active and idealistic French woman experience when she moves to a country that suffered under Communism? Claire Legendre presents us with an ironic and bittersweet book about utopia and separation. “Truth and love must prevail over lies and hatred.” Václav Havel encapsulated the spirit of the Velvet Revolution with this slogan. In this book, Claire Legendre attempts to make these words resonate within the intimacy of our own lives. Francesca is a French history and geography teacher. During a brief period of her adolescence, she was a member of the Communist Youth. She leaves France to follow her diplomat husband to Prague. From one day to the next, she finds herself having to slip into the role of the lazy, idle “expat wife.” The feeling of strangeness that overcomes her in Prague is doubled by an intimate vertigo. Foreign to the Czechs, their language, and the political context that puts her own convictions and identity into question, Francesca becomes a stranger in her marriage, isolated in a new silence – that of disenchantment. This novel depicts the difficult path to be taken toward the other and gives us a story of emancipation, both of a country and of a woman… Claire Legendre was born in 1979. She is the author of, among others, the novels Viande (1999), La Méthode Stanislavski (2006), and L'Ecorchée vive (2009). She lived in Prague from 2008 to 2011. Since then, she has been a professor of Creative Writing at the Université de Montréal. Rights sold: Czech (Argo) Rights sold for previous works: German (DTV)
Claire Legendre returns as endearing and astounded as ever – as torn and solemn. A powerful and vibrant new novel.” Le Canard Enchainé
15
Frankfurt 2013
Editions Grasset & Fasquelle
Heidi Warneke
[email protected]
MUTT-LON
Novel
Ceux qui sortent dans la nuit / Those Who Come Out in the Night April 2013 160 pp.
A fascinating, enchanted tale about the mysterious world of African witchcraft, Ceux qui sortent dans la nuit plunges us into the arcana of the world of the ewusus – beings of the night endowed with fantastic powers such as invisibility, levitation, and the ability to go back in time. Alain Nsona wants to avenge his sister, and in order to do so, to become an ewusu himself – to become someone who leaves his body at nightfall and has the gift of omnipresence. He goes to see the old ewusu, Jean-Paul Ada, who becomes his guru. Ada gives him a mission which requires that he go back in time to 1705 in an African village where he will look for a certain Jam-Libe, an ewusu of yore who is said to have had the power to dematerialize objects. Ada and a few other ewusus desire to possess this power in order to provoke a revolution that would liberate all of Africa. And so the action takes place in 1705. Alain Nsona, who thought himself the only person from his era, is surprised to meet Tikyo, his contemporary who has been sent back in time on the same mission. Through these two young men – Nsona, the modern African and Tikyo, the conservative – we see the confrontation of two perspectives on Africa. Mutt-Lon, a Cameroonian national, was born on November 21, 1973. He was a student at the Université de Yaoundé and worked as an editor for CRTV (Cameroon Radio & Television). He has also taught mathematics. Ceux qui sortent dans la nuit is his first novel.
“A shamanistic and literary tale.” Lire
16
Frankfurt 2013
Editions Grasset & Fasquelle
Heidi Warneke
[email protected]
YANN MOIX
Novel
Naissance / Birth September 2013 1300 pp. Longlisted for Prix Goncourt, Prix Renaudot, Prix Médicis and Prix Décembre
This book is a crazy bet. Yann Moix raises the question that precedes all others – that of birth and filiation. According to him, we aren’t born just once, but life is rather a perpetual rebirth. This is a colossal book, both in page count and ambition. Yann Moix tells us how he came into the world and into a family that didn’t want him. His character is born and becomes a scapegoat. He writes of the child become writer, his mentors, and his inspirations, like the hilarious oddball collector of… collections. Here, we find everything that makes Yann Moix such a talent, the themes he loves and that weave through his work: childhood, madness, the provinces, mysticism, Judaism, and Christianity. Naissance is also an absolute homage to literature. It contains chapters on Stendhal, William Faulkner, André Gide, Georges Bataille, Charles Péguy, and Brian Jones. A hilarious, serious, metaphysical and zany book, just like it’s author. Born in 1968, Yann Moix has published La meute, Cinquante ans dans la peau de Michael Jackson, Mort et vie d'Edith Stein, Panthéon, and Partouz with Grasset.
Rights sold for previous works: Greek (Kedros, Empeiria Ekdotiki), Italian (Messaggero Padova)
“This birth isn’t only the longest in literary history, but also the funniest and most out of control.”
Le Magazine Littéraire
“An absolute tribute to literature and a remembrance of the publishing world of the ’70s. A most happy event.” Service Littéraire
17
Frankfurt 2013
Editions Grasset & Fasquelle
OLIVIER POIVRE D’ARVOR
Heidi Warneke
[email protected]
Novel
Le Jour où j'ai rencontré ma fille / The Day I Met My Daughter August 2013 256 pp. Longlisted for Prix Femina In this autobiographical book of moving sincerity, Olivier Poivre d’Arvor takes on a serious and important subject that has received little attention. Discovering that he is sterile, the author tells of his battle to adopt a little Togolese girl and the way this child transformed his life. It all starts when the narrator reaches fifty and learns that he is sterile. At the same time, he realizes that he wants nothing more than to be a father. But what to do when the body refuses? Everything starts again in Togo, a few months later, when he meets a little seven year old girl named Amaal who he decides to adopt. But how can a single man become a father? From the Parisian labs where he learns of his sterility to the fertile land of Africa where hope is reborn, and from administrative labyrinths to the Lomé-Paris flight that will finally bring his daughter to their home, Olivier Poivre d’Arvor tells us of the initiatory path of two years that changed everything. For the first time, this modest man lifts the veil on a taboo subject. He also pays vibrant homage to Africa, and above all to his daughter, who gave him the strength necessary to take on the law, break through borders, and outplay fate. Olivier Poivre d’Arvor has published several essays and novels, including Le Voyage du fils (2008). A diplomat specialized in international cultural exchanges, he has served as director of the public radio station France Culture since 2010.
“Olivier Poivre d’Arvor shows how, far from the exercise in self-pity that one might expect, his book is above all a love song from a father to his daughter.” Lire “Between melancholy confession and intimate confidence, Olivier Poivre d’Arvor offers a personal answer to the universal question of how to raise an adopted child on one’s own. […] The emotions of a father-to-be expressed in this brilliant, love-filled story are a punch to the face of determinism, both social and biological.” Le Magazine Littéraire “A deeply moving book.” France Dimanche
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Frankfurt 2013
Editions Grasset & Fasquelle
Heidi Warneke
[email protected]
FRANÇOIS SAINTONGE
Novel
Dolfi et Marilyn / Dolfi and Marilyn January 2013 300 pp.
Are clones the future of humanity? Advances in biotechnology and cloning suggest that may just be the case. Dolfi et Marilyn paints a picture of a fantastic near future where man revisits his history and clones mythical figures at the risk of resurrecting his darkest hours... This novel is set in France, the year is 2060. The country hasn't changed, or only barely. Human clones are produced and marketed as gadgets or housekeepers. The subjects cloned are often celebrities from the past. Making clones of the deceased is authorized 70 years after their death, but cloning the living is prohibited. Tycho Mercier is a specialist in 20th century history and is obsessed with the Second World War. One day, he becomes the reluctant owner of two problematic clones. The first one, Dolfi, is the last copy in a banned series of clones of Adolf Hitler in circulation; the second is a bootlegged clone of Marilyn Monroe. An unofficial secret service called the 'Control Center' is tasked with eliminating defective and otherwise anomalous clones. But Tycho refuses to hand Dolfi over to them, seeing him as a companion innocent of the original Hitler’s crimes. Nor does he have any plans to dispose of Marilyn, with whom he has a curious ancillary relationship. But when clones are reported to the authorities, they must escape together. As the clones’ adventure begins, the historian follows in their footsteps, to the heart of some kind of Nazi Disneyland created by a billionaire who is over a century old and nostalgic for the Third Reich. An ambitious novel, an iconoclastic fable about history, and a love story staged between two historical icons – one embodying absolute evil, the other fragile and impossible happiness – Dolfi et Marilyn poses the question about clones, the “unexpected variant of the human condition.” Beyond the provocative plot, this novel powerfully resonates with our fear of a past that comes back to haunt us, a dehumanized present, and an uncertain future. Who is the author? We may never know – François Saintonge is a pseudonym. Rights sold: German (C. Bertelsm ann /Carl’s Books)
“Writing this book so finely as to make mankind’s inhumanity palpable, François Saintonge has at the very least revealed something about himself: that he is a great novelist.” Le Monde des Livres “An intriguing, palpable fable about our history […] funny and disquieting.” Marianne “A complete success. A quick-fire story full of twists and surprises, underpinned by a flawless documentation of the Second World War and held aloft by a humor that alternates between the fierce and the tender.” La Cause Littéraire
19
Frankfurt 2013
Editions Grasset & Fasquelle
Heidi Warneke
[email protected]
ANNE SIBRAN
Novel
Dans la montagne d’argent /In the Silver Mountain February 2013 240 pp.
Anne Sibran transports us to the heart of the Bolivian mountains, whose gold has fed European economies for decades and cost the lives of millions of natives. Here is a powerful and moving novel that reveals the secrets of the silver mountain of Potosí and the lives sacrificed to it. For Agustin Osorio, a Bolivian miner, the devil really does exist. He is the one hidden in the bowels of the silver mountain, trapping men, terrifying and killing them. Since the Spanish began exploiting the mine over 450 years ago, eight million natives have died within Potosí’s Cerro Rico (the “rich mountain”). What drives this man to descend into the most dangerous part of the mine on the night of All Saints’ Day? How does he still find the force, though injured with his leg trapped under a rock, to summon the devil? What has he done that no native before him would have dared? Over the course of the night, Osorio takes us into the heart of the mountain to witness this ruthless and fascinating confrontation where, beyond the devil, we are presented with the fantastic life of this highlands people that was sacrificed for centuries in exchange for the precious ore that fueled European economies for decades. Beyond the mystery of this encounter, the tale is told by the voice of a man from the antipodes who invites us to delve into a universe where magic is closely interwoven with reality. The silver mountain is a journey backwards, where we go to the other side and get lost in the unthinkable. Anne Sibran splits her time between France and Equator. She is the author of Bleu-Figuier, Ma vie en l’air, Je suis la bête, Les Bêtes d'ombre and Le Monde intervalle. Rights sold for previous works: French (Belgium: Dupuis)
“Anne Sibran writes a tribute to Indian spirituality with bursts of cosmic poetry.” Livres
H ebdo
20
Frankfurt 2013
Editions Grasset & Fasquelle
Heidi Warneke
[email protected]
PHILIPPE VILAIN
Novel
La Femme infidèle / The Unfaithful Wife January 2013 160 pp.
Philippe Vilain returns with a novel reminiscent of Alberto Moravia: it is the story of a cuckolded man who, upon discovering the betrayal, chooses to remain silent. This is the story of a couple like many others: a man and a woman whose love has worn thin over the years. One evening, she goes out on an errand and carelessly leaves her cell phone on a shelf. Her husband takes a look and discovers a text message in all likelihood sent by a lover. Upon his wife’s return, he chooses to remain silent rather than to confront her. Nothing in his behavior changes whatsoever, there is just the simple fact that he now knows that the woman who shares his bed has been unfaithful. Has she always been so? Is she even the woman he thought he knew? Will the decision to keep the secret save their relationship? And, at bottom, hasn’t a man who has been deceived in fact deceived himself? La Femme infidèle is a masterfully crafted novel that wavers perpetually between farce and drama. Philippe Vilain is the author of, among others, Faux-père (2008), Confession d'un timide (2010), and Pas son genre (2011). Rights sold: Italian (New Books Gremese)
“By the end of this finely crafted and loving introspection that plays with clichés, Philippe Vilain has renewed the figure of the cuckold with panache and style.” Le Monde des Livres “Philippe Vilain is a methodical writer when it comes to introspection and obsession. […] He believes in the power of literature, capable of transforming a hackneyed story into a brilliant treatise on disenchantment in musical language.” Le Nouvel Observateur “A brilliant variation on the eternal theme of falling out of love and the twists and turns of desire.” Le Magazine Littéraire
21
Frankfurt 2013
Editions Grasset & Fasquelle
Heidi Warneke
[email protected]
TANCRÈDE VOITURIEZ
Novel
L’Invention de la pauvreté /The Invention of Poverty February 2013 464 pp.
In this brilliant and biting novel, Tancrède Voituriez presents an unvarnished portrait of a pair of academics consumed by ambition, money, and women. The invention of poverty , or rather, love in the time of capital… Rodney has just turned fifty. A world-renowned economist and Special Advisor to the Secretary General of the United Nations, he spends his life between flights, presenting his theories on poverty at conference upon conference. Not only is he a specialist on poverty, he’s married to it – his wife Vicki, a woman he met in Vietnam and who followed him all the way to New York. But the arrival of Jason will soon upset this perfect balance. Jason is an oceanographer. While life had spared him up to the present, he finds himself wifeless, jobless, and penniless overnight. He has a chance encounter with Rodney, who hires him to count the homeless as he would ordinarily do with schools of fish. Jason does his utmost to help Rodney make the statistics comply with the wishes of the Secretary General – placing the poor in Africa, some in Asia, and making sure to keep the numbers down in the United States – but he is an inveterate ladies’ man and begins finding himself attracted to Vicki… A brilliant, funny novel reminiscent of Philip Roth. Tancrède Voituriez is an economist. He directs a research program on the effects of globalization in a think-tank and a center for international cooperation. His last novel published by Grasset was Les Lois de l'économie.
“An exceptional book […] The adventure, which is written with a cynicism that will ruffle your feathers, is also the story of an deeply moving romance. This book is pure caviar.” Paris Match
22
Frankfurt 2013
Editions Grasset & Fasquelle
Heidi Warneke
[email protected]
LAURE ADLER
First Novel
Immortelles / Immortals September 2013 300 pp.
Renowned journalist and biographer Laure Adler returns with a very personal first novel. An homage to three women, friends she has met over the course of her life, and a fascinating journey through the France of the 1970s, where we cross the paths of some of the period’s great figures. “Florence, Suzanne, Judith. Together in my head, they form a saraband. Their friendship built me and it made me indifferent. By their side, I felt something we never think about – what it means to live.” One summer night, the narrator awakens overwhelmed by a flood of memories she had thought buried and forgotten. She sees the lives of three friends with whom she grew up, three women with poignant fates, pass before her eyes. There’s Florence, the “collector” of men, who she met at the Avignon Theater Festival. And then there’s Suzanne, the free spirit with whom she went to Barcelona to taste the pleasures of a dangerous life. Finally, there’s Judith, the girl from Buenos Aires whose past goes all the way back to the Warsaw ghetto, and who destiny brought to Paris – Judith the lover, the timid and studious one met at university. A novel about youth, its hopes, illusions, whims, and loves at first sight, Immortelles is above all a hymn to friendship between women. Laure Adler, a journalist, historian, and writer, is the author of a novella, A ce soir, and of several biographies: Marguerite Duras (Prix Fémina de l'Essai, 1998), Dans les pas de Hannah Arendt (2005), L'Insoumise, Simone Weil (2008), and Françoise (2011), a biography of Françoise Giroud. Immortelles is her first novel.
“Immortelles is a dazzling explosion of memories: three unique and universal paths through the 20th century (the Holocaust, war, and Israel, as well as feminism, abortion rights, and drugs).” Lire “A novel that magnifies the exercise of remembering through the moving evocation of childhood friendships. […] hymn to youth in which three young women embody the last sixty years of French history.” L’Express
23
Frankfurt 2013
Editions Grasset & Fasquelle
Heidi Warneke
[email protected]
JULIEN DELMAIRE
First Novel
Georgia September 2013 256 pp.
This first novel reads as if you were listening to it. It is the bittersweet story of two magnificent lovers, lost souls on the fringe of society. A poignant novel, a hymn to love served up by dazzling prose. Georgia is, of course, Georgia on My Mind, that “old sweet song” immortalized by Ray Charles, but she is also one of this novel’s two main characters, a young drug-addicted prostitute who has been banged around by life and for whom Venance, an illegal African immigrant, falls head over heels. Venance is candid as well as large-hearted. After a painful childhood in Africa, the young man decides to settle in France, where he enrolls in college. But the administration doesn’t give him a chance and Venance is forced to live on the margins of society, with an under the counter job at a terrible restaurant, and an apartment he sublets. Venance has had a fear of birds ever since he was a baby, when a flock of fierce birds of prey attacked him. Their shadow continues to glide over him in Paris, but this particular bird is made of metal: Venance knows that an airplane will bring him back to his homeland one day. One evening, Venance meets Georgia. She needs a cigarette and a roof. Venance offers both, and his love. In the drunkenness of alcohol and drugs, Georgia tells him her confused memories. But the night will soon take her once more. Georgia is a tragic story. This first novel by Julien Delmaire, a poet and charismatic figure of the slam movement, is simply incandescent. These powerful and graceful characters are men and women that people don’t see – that people don’t want to see – hidden in kitchens of our restaurants and the tenements of our streets. Who knows what they endure, who knows their daily struggle? Julien Delmaire tells us their story without sordidness. This book overflows with generosity, anger, and hope. It is a character-driven text delivered in a sumptuous prose that pulsates, vibrates, and opens our eyes. Julien Delmaire was born in 1977. He is a slam poet and playwright who does creative writing workshops in schools, prisons, and psychiatric hospitals. He is also an editorialist for the Institut Français and the review Cultures Sud. “A superbly sensual and multifarious style.” Le Point “Far from the season’s frenzied trends and editorial tricks, Julien Delmaire’s first novel, Georgia, offers the guaranteed yield only afforded by great books. Indeed, Georgia is a magnificent meander among misfits, a probe into the grooves of an emaciated humanity crippled by a surfeit of being. […] Jack Kerouac’s Tristessa comes to mind at points, with its shared ability to transform words into music and to find splendor in a foretold decline.” L’H umanité “A very beautiful first novel in which poetry embodies the story’s urgency and humanity.”
La Page des libraires
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Frankfurt 2013
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Heidi Warneke
GEORGES-OLIVIER CHÂTEAUREYNAUD
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Short Stories
Jeune vieillard assis sur une pierre en bois/ Young Greybeard Sitting on A Wooden Stone October 2013 240 pp. This collection of fantastical short stories displays the talent and the sensitive, unerring pen of one of France’s greatest short story writers. These eight fantastical short stories take root in daily life. The protagonist is an ordinary man faced with extraordinary situations. The hero of Intermittent Icarus is given the opportunity to fly for a few moments three times in his life. In The Lost Face, which takes place in the time of sword fighting swashbucklers, German students slash the face of a young man who refuses to fight and quite literally loses face. Lovers under Glass, tells the tale of two lovers trapped by a couple of old sorcerers who plan to drain their youth – an undreamed of night of love…
Born in Paris in 1947, Georges-Olivier Châteaureynaud is a short story writer and novelist. His publications include La Faculté des songes (Prix Renaudot, 1982), Singe savant tabassé par deux clowns (Prix Goncourt de la Nouvelle, 2005), L’Autre Rive (2007), and Le corps de l’autre (2010).
Rights sold for previous works: Arabic (Arab Scientific Publishers), Czech (Mlada Fronta), English (Small Beer Press), Estonian (Kultuurileht), German (Klett Cotta), Hungarian (Nagyvilag), Korean (Chaek Se Sang Publishing)
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Frankfurt 2013
Editions Grasset & Fasquelle
Heidi Warneke
DIDIER DECOIN
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Ceci n'est pas un fait divers / Crime
La Pendue de Londres /The Hanged Woman of London May 2013 336 pp.
After Est-ce ainsi que les femmes meurent ? , which was published in this same collection and adapted for the cinema in 2011, Didier Decoin now takes on a scandal that shook post-war England: the tangled story of a young woman sentenced to death after having killed her physically abusive partner and her executioner, Albert Pierrepoint, the most famous British hangman of the time. A fascinating read. Germany, 1945. The head executioner of the United Kingdom is sent on a mission to hand thirteen Nazi war criminals including the warden of the Bergen-Belsen women’s section, Irma Grese. Even though he is disgusted by having to execute women, especially if they’re young and pretty, the executioner does his duty: he’s an ace in the art of rope lengths, an expert at timing executions. And yet, the rest of the time, he’s a man like any other, a good citizen and a model husband. London, immediately after the war. Ruth Ellis looks like Betty Boop, cheerful and desirable – men go wild for her and, without a doubt, she chooses them poorly. But what is she hiding behind her smile and overly lipsticked mouth? In the sooty post-Blitz London, Ruth became a prostitute. And one day, unhappy, yearned-for, abused but still beautiful, and now a mother, she kills her lover at point-blank range. She is sentenced to hang. Hangman, get to work! And what if the hangman has a soul? In this captivating novel, a cinemascopic reconstitution of London glowing in the fog and rain, a theater of hidden vices in a well-meaning society, Didier Decoin takes turns between the executioner’s song and the victim’s. Gripping. Didier Decoin, member of the Académie Goncourt, is the author of, among others, John l’Enfer (1977, Prix Goncourt), L’enfant de la mer de Chine (1981), La femme de chambre du Titanic (1991), La promeneuse d’oiseaux (1996), Madame Seyerling (2002), Avec vue sur la mer (2005), Henri ou Henry, le roman de mon père (2006), and Est-ce ainsi que les femmes meurent ? (2009), made into a feature film by Lukas Belvaux (38 Témoins). Rights sold for Est-ce-ainsi que les femmes meurent ? : Castilian (Spain: Alianza), German (Arche), Korean (Golden Bough), Russian (Geolos)
“Both chilling and deeply moving.”Le Magazine Littéraire “It’s a scathing little book, like a door slamming. One of those short books that burn into your memory like a hot iron. (…) He takes a sordid news story and makes an opera from it. Gripping, chilling, relentless.”L’Express
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Frankfurt 2013
Editions Grasset & Fasquelle
Heidi Warneke
[email protected]
MARIE CARDINAL
Narrative / Journal
L’Inédit /Previously Unpublished Writings April 2013 262 pp.
Here are the diaries of Marie Cardinal, never before published – a truly poignant creation. These writings comprise fragments from diaries, personal reflections, memories, interviews, and variants on her novels that allow us to better understand Marie Cardinal’s work. She speaks of Algeria, of her adolescence, of her insomnia, her marriage, her children, and, of course, her writing. This striking, moving collection is deeply touching. Marie Cardinal (1928 - 2001). From 1953 to 1960, she taught philosophy in Salonika, Lisbon, Vienna and Montréal before going on to work with a number of weekly magazines such as L’Express and Elle. Her novels have been translated and are read all over the world. Rights sold for previous works: Danish (Lindhardt Ringhof), English (The Women’s Press), German (DTV, Maeir Otto, Rowohlt), Greek (Kedros), Italian (RCS), Norwegian (Gyldendal Norsk Forlag), Romanian (Trei), Swedish (Trevi)
“L’Inédit isn’t only an exceptional document on a writer’s recesses, inner folds, and intimate thoughts, it establishes itself as a writer’s last available space, her last possibility to set anchor – and ink. A terrain to land, to recapture the past, and to live in a house that has finally been built, literature was Marie Cardinal’s space. L’Inédit is the door to it.” Le Magazine Littéraire “A real, strong, fine, and coherent book in which we have the pleasure to find her firm style once more.” Le Journal du Dimanche
27
Frankfurt 2013
Editions Grasset & Fasquelle
Heidi Warneke
[email protected]
JEAN-LUC COATALEM
Narrative / Journal
Nouilles froides à Pyongyang /Cold Noodles in Pyongyang January 2013 240 pp. Entering North Korea is a nearly impossible task, and yet Jean-Luc Coatalem succeeded. He returns here to satisfy our curiosity with a fascinating book that throws light onto this opaque world of silence and restriction. No one goes in or comes out of North Korea, the most secretive country on the planet. And yet, joined by his friend Clorinde, who prefers Valéry Larbaud to modern travel, and disguised as a representative from a tourism agency, our writer leads us through the country of the Kims in his own offbeat tone. There are parades and ceremonies, propaganda in all directions, mud baths and model farms, as well as countryside rambles and depressive crises on lakes and streams. In short, Coatalem brings us to discover both the face and the underbelly of this closed yet fissured country. Here we have a travelogue that is attentive but distant, occasionally amused, and never beguiled – where we are led through an enigmatic kingdom that one American diplomat recently said we are less familiar with than distant galaxies… Jean-Luc Coatalem is the deputy editor in chief of Géo magazine. Grasset has published his Mission au Paraguay (1996), Le Fils du fakir (1998), Je suis dans les mers du Sud (Prix des Deux-Magots, 2002), La Consolation des voyages (2004) and more recently, Le Dernier roi d'Angkor (2010). Rights sold: Chinese (Complex: Business Weekly) Rights sold for previous works: Chinese (Complex: Marco Polo Press), English (UK: Weidenfeld & Nicolson), Italian (Touring Editore)
“The great Coatalem’s writing takes on an original and grandiose picaresque dimension as he writes about his Tintin-esque adventures in the craziest of the communist countries.” Le Figaro
Magazine
“Coatalem brings us on a joyful road trip that’s unbelievable but true. A remake of 1984 and Fahrenheit 451 directed by a psychopathic Kim Jong-Il – a mad scientist who could spark a war with one of his rockets while his oppressed people die of starvation, misery, and consumption, entirely cut off from the world.” Livres H ebdo “Jean Luc Coatalem tells the chilling and farcical tale of a holiday in the country of ‘fiction become reality’ (…) a mind-blowing, harrowing, farcical story (…). A winning success.” Le Monde des
Livres
28
Frankfurt 2013
Editions Grasset & Fasquelle
Heidi Warneke
[email protected]
ALEXANDRE JARDIN
Narrative / Journal
Mes trois zèbres / My Three Zebras October 2013 320 pp. Alexandre Jardin loves to tell stories about his family, be they funny or tragic. This time around, he has chosen not to go into his biological genealogy, but rather his spiritual one, through the three figures of Sacha Guitry, Charles de Gaulle, and Giacomo Casanova; all of whom he convenes in this book that is simultaneously a triple biography, a piece of autofiction, and a jubilant manifesto on how to live in our morose times. Of course, we all know Alexandre Jardin’s father (the “Zubial”), his grandfather (“the yellow dwarf”), and his uncles and aunts (picturesque in their way) – but this time he returns to write about his “imaginary” family. Beyond his biological father, Pascal Jardin, Alexandre has three spiritual fathers: Sacha Guitry, General de Gaulle, and Giacomo Casanova. These three, for him, make an ideal. Guitry encourages him to play with the real, de Gaulle teaches him to defy it, and Casanova shows how to take pleasure in it… Alexandre Jardin presents us with multiple anecdotes about Sacha Guitry, who never made the distinction between the world and the theatre – his wives, his humor, his wit, and his genius of the everyday. He embodies the place Alexandre dreams of: taking nothing seriously, quick to be enchanted, and prone to deep fits of laughter… Through the tutelary figure of Charles de Gaulle, Jardin revives his nostalgia for a country that “sees the big picture”. Of course, it’s above all the War Constable who is called forth here. According to the author, to be French is to have one’s feet on the ground and one’s head in the clouds. As for Casanova, who wrote his “Memoirs” in French, he teaches the art of enjoying every moment of life. He is the gentleman par excellence, the opposite of a Don Juan, who looks to fill his time with a science of pleasure without which all civilization would wither. Here again, we’re treated to anecdotes and brilliant metaphysics… Alexandre Jardin has already published several novels, including Le Zèbre, Fanfan, Le Zubial, Le Roman des Jardin and Quinze ans après, all of which have been bestsellers. Rights sold for previous works: Dutch (De Bezige Bij, Meulenhoff), German (Random House), Greek (Modern Times), Italian (RCS Libri), Romanian (Humanitas), Russian (AST), Turkish (Can)
29
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Editions Grasset & Fasquelle
Heidi Warneke
[email protected]
DANY LAFERRIÈRE
Narrative /Journal
Journal d'un écrivain en pyjama / The Journal of a Writer in Pajamas September 2013 320 pp.
Dany Laferrière delights, surprises, and moves us with this new book written in his unique and funny prose. Here, he tells us of a writer’s life writing. “Pajamas are a strange uniform,” says Dany Laferrière, who, after thirty years of publications, has decided to speak directly to his readers. What follows is a sequence of scenes where reflections, stories, and meditations mingle with the offhandedness that characterizes his style. Here is the “advice to a young writer” from an author for whom life is an exalting adventure that rhymes with reading and writing. He writes of his favorite authors, both classic and contemporary, as though speaking of old friends he sees regularly at the neighborhood café. From “The Blank Page” to “Does Life Come Before Writing”, by way of “The War of the Words”, and not to forget “The Correct Use of Plagiarism”, this journal contains all the experience and humor of the author who wrote L’Enigme du retour. Dany Laferrière was born in Haiti in 1953. He is the author of several novels, including Vers le Sud (made into a feature film by Laurent Cantet), L'énigme du retour (2009, Prix Medicis) and Tout bouge autour de moi (2011). Rights sold for previous works: Canadian (Douglas and McIntyre, Arsenal Pulp Press), Castillian (Spain: Alianza), Chinese (simplified: Shanghai 99), English (UK: MacLehose Press), German (Das Wunderhorn), Japanese (Fujiwara Shoten, The Open Books), Korean (Thinking Tree), Polish (Swiat Ksiazki), Romanian (Echinox), Serbian (Laguna)
“The humor and meticulous observation of reality, as well as of the everyday strangeness (…) of a resolutely masterful writer.”Livres H ebdo “Journal d’un écrivain en pyjama is a very humorous little manual for aspiring writers.”Le Mag azine
Littéraire
30
Frankfurt 2013
Editions Grasset & Fasquelle
Heidi Warneke
LORETTE NOBÉCOURT
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Narrative / Journal
La Clôture des merveilles : Une vie d’Hildegarde de Bingen/ The Enclosure of Marvels : A Life of Hildegard of Bingen May 2013 160 pp.
12th century nun Hildegard of Bingen truly made a mark on her era. It wasn’t just her writings, her scientific and botanical knowledge, her legend and her prestige that got Lorette Nobécourt interested in the abbess, but the radical disobedience that made her an incarnation of unparalleled freedom in the Middle Ages. In this book we find an intimate, literary, and mystic encounter between two women separated by ten centuries. More than a life story, this short book testifies to an affective experience – the experience of the sacred that the young Hildegard, offered as an oblate at eight years old, felt deep within herself, the experience of her feelings, and that of the awe-inspiring intuition with which she would dazzle as she grew older. In taking on such a great figure, Lorette Nobécourt doesn’t so much intend to honor the fourth woman ever made Doctor of the Church (by Benedict XVI in 2012) as she does to reveal her vibrant, vivacious character and its exemplary dimension. Lending her tongue to Hildegard, the novelist places herself in the service of the word, reminding us one thousand years later that this “lively life’s” subversive essence is still intact and inviting us to dare to enter “the enclosure of marvels” in which we find the space of our true freedom. Lorette Nobécourt was born in Paris in 1968. She has written several novels, including La Conversation, Horsita, En nous la vie des morts, La Démangeaison, L’Usure des jours and Grâce leur soit rendue. Rights sold for previous titles: German (Liebeskind), Italian (King Kamehameha), Korean (Yeolimwon), Romanian (Leda Editserv, Est Editura)
“Far from a romanticized biography, La Clôture des merveilles is a song where two tones intermingle, celebrating the beauty that makes life larger and deeper.”Le Monde des Livres
31
Frankfurt 2013
Editions Grasset & Fasquelle
Heidi Warneke
[email protected]
MARIE CARDINAL
Les Cahiers Rouges
Les Mots pour le dire et autres romans / The Words to Say It and Other Novels April 2013 1984 pp.
The entire novelistic work of a world-renowned figure in French literature is gathered together here in one volume. Ecoutez la mer, (1962) won the Prix International du Premier Roman. After which came La mule de corbillard (1963), adapted for the cinema in 1995 by Claude Vajda, La Souricière (1965), and Cet été-là (1967), in which Marie Cardinal writes about her experiences during the shooting of Jean-Luc Godard’s Deux ou trois choses que je sais d’elle. Her autobiographical novel, La clé sur la porte (1972), which recounted her daily life with her children in the tumult of Parisian life, was Cardinal’s first great success in bookstores. It went on to be adapted for the cinema by Yves Boisset, featuring Annie Girardot and Patrick Dewaere. Les Mots pour le dire (1976) sold nearly 3 million copies and was translated into some twenty languages. The story of eight years of psychoanalysis, it drew the ire of certain psychoanalysts and brought her international recognition (the English translation was prefaced by Bettelheim, and this book, too, was adapted for the cinema). Autrement dit (1977) is a dialogue with Annie Leclerc in response to the multitude of letters received by readers, after which were published Une vie pour deux (1978) and Au pays de mes racines (1980), which evokes her return to Algeria. Then came Le passé empiété (1983), Les grands désordres (1987), Comme si de rien n’était (1990) – a political book inspired by her many trips to the East and the fall of the Berlin Wall –, Les jeudis de Charles et Lula (1993), and Amour Amours (1998). Marie Cardinal (1928 - 2001). From 1953 to 1960, she taught philosophy in Salonika, Lisbon, Vienna and Montréal before going on to work with a number of weekly magazines such as L’Express and Elle. Her novels have been translated and are read all over the world.
Rights sold for previous works: Danish (Lindhardt Ringhof), English (The Women’s Press), German (DTV, Maeir Otto, Rowohlt), Greek (Kedros), Italian (RCS Libri), Norwegian (Gyldendal Norsk), Romanian (Trei), Swedish (Trevi)
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MAURICE GENEVOIX
Les Cahiers Rouges
October 2013
La Boîte à pêche / The Tackle Box 210 pp. La boîte à pêche (1926) draws readers into a secret, colorful world of marvels. On the banks of the Loire, between sky and reeds, Maurice Genevoix’s writes his memories, his off-the-cuff impressions, and his musings on fishing and fishermen. La Boîte à pêche is a lyrical celebration of a special kind of happiness.
Raboliot 252 pp. Raboliot exultingly tells the tale of a poacher’s freewheeling life in Sologne. This book, considered to be Maurice Genevois’ masterpiece, received the Prix Goncourt in 1925. In the fields and woods of Sologne, the lumberjack Raboliot has made poaching his art and his passion, as well as the symbol of an unbearable freedom that defies authority. He loves setting traps for Bourrel the policeman, who curses his humiliating defeats. Soon, the nocturnal hunting parties turn toward hatred, and a duel to the death… Maurice Genevoix (1890-1980) was a French poet, novelist, and heir of Realism.
Rights sold for previous works: English (UK: Medlar Press)
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FRANCOIS MAURIAC
Les Cahiers Rouges
La Pharisienne / The Pharisee April 2013 224 pp.
This is the reissued edition of a well-known novel by François Mauriac first published in 1941. It is the story of a woman who persecutes her entourage in the name of morality to a point where the sight of the torment she has caused finally leads her to doubt… François Mauriac draws the portrait of a bilious woman from Maintenon, Brigitte Pian, who, thanks to a state of grace of which she claims to be the beneficiary, assumes the right to interfere in the lives of others with ferocious, bigoted authority. She has no second thoughts about destroying the happiness of those she thinks she is saving. Her pride is matched only by her lack of altruism and ignorance of forgiveness. It takes a long time for Brigitte Pian to finally understand that she has erred on a path which seemed to lead to God, but which in fact leads to evil. The story, told by Louis, the stepson of this wicked stepmother disguised in piety, is a cruel satire of the desire for holiness admirably. Through his craft, Mauriac loves to analyze dual characters, to expose ambiguous souls, to reveal – even violently reveal – people’s inner secrets.
François Mauriac (1885–1970) was a novelist and journalist who received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1952. His most famous works include novels (Thérèse Desqueyroux, Le Baiser du lépreux, Le désert de l’amour Grand Prix de l’Académie Française 1926, Le Nœud de vipères) and poetry collections (Les Mains jointes), as well as essays and memoirs.
Rights sold: Bulgarian (Communitas Foundation), English (UK: Random House), Russian (AST)
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PAUL MORAND
Les Cahiers Rouges
Champions du monde / World Champions May 2013 180 pp.
This is one of Grasset’s truly mythic titles, and one of Paul Morand’s great successes: a novel about America and sports. Published in 1930, this text offers unforgettable portraits of athletes together with a tableau of American manners, where puritanism and innocence, naiveté and nationalist fervor come together in a strange blend. It is also a portrait of New York as it builds itself up, erecting towers for the greatest dreams of mankind. A modern classic.
Paul Morand (1888-1976), a friend of Marcel Proust, who wrote the preface for his first collection of short stories, Tendres stocks, was a diplomat and ambassador. A member of the Académie Française, he was one of the best French short story writers of the 20th century and the author of novels such as Lewis et Irène (1924).
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CHRISTIANE ROCHEFORT
Les Cahiers Rouges
Le Repos du guerrier / The Warrior’s Repose June 2013 220 pp.
Le Repos du guerrier portrays the relationship of a young bourgeois woman and the man she saved from suicide. Unfortunately, the two lovers don’t seem to be after the same thing: she longs for love, he wants carnal ecstasy…
Le Repos du guerrier (1958) is Christiane Rochefort’s first novel. And what a first novel it is! Geneviève Le Theil goes to the country to deal with inheritance issues, then mistakes the door to her room and discovers Renaud Sauti, who has decided to commit suicide. She saves him, she loves him. He is cynical and uncouth. When he moves into Geneviève’s place in Paris, he spends his time drinking and reading detective novels. Rochefort writes of love – especially physical love – with the same crudeness as a man. François Mauriac later wrote in his Bloc-Notes how horrified he was by it. Christiane Rochefort’s career as a novelist was launched. And in 1962, Roger Vadim made a famous film starring Brigitte Bardot from this no less famous novel (over one million copies sold).
Christiane Rochefort (1917-1998) is a major 20th century French writer. Free, utopian, and irreverent, her life was a reflection of her work. In May ’68, when working as the press secretary for the Cannes Film Festival, she was thrown out for insolence. She received the Prix Medicis for La Porte du fond (1968).
Rights Sold: Castilian (Spain: Anagrama, Latin America: Monte Avila), Czech (Motto), Dutch (Contact), German (Surhkamp), Greek (Patakis), Italian (Barbes), Japanese (Jimbun Shoin), Portugal (Presenca), Romanian (Albatros)
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PIERRE SCHOENDOERFFER
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Les Cahiers Rouges
L’Adieu au roi / Farewell to the King March 2013 280 pp.
An unforgettable cult sensation that led to a famous film adaptation. During the Pacific War, two English officers parachute into the jungles of Borneo with the aim of securing the help of the indigenous tribes in their fight against the Japanese army. They are captured by a tribe of headhunters and brought before the chief only to discover that, to their astonishment, he is an American soldier named Learoyd who deserted the army and proclaimed himself the tribe’s king. A friendship grows between the men, but Japanese attacks lead to the tribe having to fight to survive.
Pierre Schoendoerffer, who passed away on March 14, 2012, was a member of the Académie des BeauxArts, but was also, and above all, a great writer, director, and documentarist. His literary oeuvre also includes Le Crabe-tambour (Grand Prix du Roman de l'Académie française 1976). L'Adieu au roi (Prix Interallié 1969) was brought to the silver screen by John Milius in 1988 (Farewell to the King).
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AMIN MAALOUF
Reminder
Les Désorientés / The Lost September 2012 544 pp. 100.000 copies sold Amin Maalouf’s long-awaited new novel marks his return to the land of his birth and to the themes he has long held dear – exile, identity, and the clash of cultures and beliefs. It builds a bridge between two distant shores, two very different worlds, that come together in his writing: East and West. Adam is a much-admired historian. He is living in exile in Paris, far from the homeland that he fled twenty-five years ago. He has fought long and hard to forget his childhood memories, but one night, one phone call, is all it takes to bring them rushing back. Mourad, his closest childhood friend, is dying. His final wish is to see Adam and heal the rift that has arisen between them since an argument decades before. Adam immediately throws a few clothes in a suitcase and takes the first flight out. A few hours later, he is back home after decades of absence. Adam rediscovers the people and places he loved, yet that he chose to leave without a backward glance when he went into exile. Gradually, his past catches up with him: he remembers his old friends and sparring partners and the war that tore them apart. Adam takes lodgings with Sémiramis, drawn by her beauty, while he takes stock of the past. What has become of his childhood friends? One is a moderate Muslim, another an engineer turned monk; a third is a successful businessman, while a fourth has become a corrupt politician. They have all taken different paths in life, and some have blood on their hands. But who is Adam to judge? Were his choices any wiser? Was exile a luxury that allowed him to remain aloof from the difficulties his friends had no choice but to face? Adam learns that courage is not always to be found where he thinks it is. Life, love, and friendship, ideals and compromises, politics, desire, and betrayal – Adam can no longer avoid staring these issues in the face. Amin Maalouf was born in 1949. His novels include Le Rocher de Tanios (Goncourt 1993), Le périple de Baldassare (2000), and Origines (2004); he has also published works of non-fiction including Les identités meurtrières (1998) and Le Dérèglement du monde (2009). He was granted the prestigious Prince of Asturias Award for Literature in 2010. Rights sold: Bulgarian (Paradox), Castilian and Catalan (Alianza), Chinese (Simplified: Shanghai century literature), Czech (Garamond), Dutch (De Geus), German (Arche), Greek (Patakis), Hungarian (Europa), Indian (DC Books), Italian (Bompiani), Lebanese (Dar Al Farabi), Norwegian (Pax), Portuguese (Brazil: Bertrand Brazil), Serbian (Laguna), Turkish (Yapi Kredi)
“Amin Maalouf, gives us a perfect look at the thoughts and feelings that can lead to emigration. One can only be impressed by the magnitude and the precision of his introspection.”Le Monde des
Livres
“A big, exquisite novel about friendship, betrayal, nostalgia, ideals, politics, and the world as it is…”Page des Libraires
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COLOMBE SCHNECK
Reminder
La Réparation / Reparation August 2012 224 pp. Longlisted for Prix Femina and Interallié in 2012 The title of this book could equally have been A Secret. Colombe Schneck thought long and hard before writing it. But some stories cry out to be dug up from the past where they have long lain buried. La Réparation is one such story. When Colombe Schneck gave birth to her daughter Salomé soon after the turn of the millennium, she had no idea that the name suggested by her late mother a few years previously masked a terrible secret – the story of another little girl who died during the war, a family tragedy set in the Kovno ghetto in Lithuania – a tragedy shared by countless other Jewish families across Eastern Europe. What really happened in the Kovno ghetto in 1943? Colombe Schneck set out to find the answer, travelling to the States and Israel to talk to the older women in her family, who had kept the secret for over seventy years. Further details were gleaned from her uncle, the author Pierre Pachet, and from old photographs and archives. She eventually travelled to Kovno, where her grandmother was born, where her great-aunts lived, loved, and raised their families before the war. She explored the very streets of the ghetto where her mother’s family was forced to gather together before being deported. With echoes of Daniel Mendelsohn’s The Lost, William Styron’s Sophie’s Choice, and Jonathan Safran Foer’s Everything is illuminated, La Réparation is a deeply affecting book that forges an unbreakable bond between the Salomé whose life was cruelly cut short and the Salomé now growing up surrounded by love and laughter. Colombe Schneck, born in Paris in 1966, is a journalist and author. Her works include L’increvable monsieur Schneck (2006), Sa petite chérie (2007), Val de Grâce (2008, grand prix de l'héroïne Madame Figaro), and Une femme célèbre (2010, prix Anna de Noailles de l'Académie Française). Rights sold: Chinese (simplified: Shanghai 99), Dutch (Cossee), German (Random House for Luchterhand/BTB), Italian (Einaudi), Polish (Prószyński Media)
“Powerful, swift, and ruthless (…) La Réparation is her ‘true novel.’”Le Figaro “This moving book full of elegance and restraint echoes David Grossman’s assertion that we are no longer victims, even of the worst things, of what destroys life, of the arbitrary, when we describe it in our own words.”Le Nouvel Observateur “A poignant tale. If you had to pick from Colombe Schneck’s five books, this would be the one to keep.”Paris Match
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COCTEAU
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JEAN COCTEAU To mark the occasion and to celebrate the 50th anniversary of Jean Cocteau’s death, on October 11, 2013, two previously unpublished works and several re-editions of his most famous titles will be published in Grasset’s Cahiers Rouges collection. Jean Cocteau is also honored in the work his biographer Claude Arnaud has dedicated to the friendship tinged with rivalry that existed between the author of Les Enfants Terribles and the author of La Recherche du Temps Perdu : Proust contre Cocteau.
Previously Unpublished Writings
Démarche d'un poète / A Poet’s Process October 2013 128 pp.
In this critical and autobiographical work never before published in France (though published in Germany in 1953), Jean Cocteau offers us a series of reflections on the diverse forms of art, including literature, painting, drawing, films, and even needlepoint. The author wonders about what makes a work of art. Is the author it’s sole point of origin? And what about “that passion you can see in the faces of children as they paint, fiercely sticking our their tongues – that passion there from the very beginning”? Cocteau describes himself in what is also a charming autobiography. He talks about his encounters with Stravinsky (who “taught [him] that insult to habit without which art stagnates and remains nothing more than a game”) and with Picasso (who taught him “to run faster than beauty”), his fascination for Radiguet, his visits to Marcel Proust’s bedside as he wrote À la Recherche du Temps Perdu in his pajamas, his “hide and go seek of quarrels and reconciliations” with André Gide, and his break with the surrealists. Here is a book filled with the thoughts and confessions of a great poet, but also of a man wounded by the vulgarity of his time, which took dreams for lies. It is Cocteau at his best. Edited by David Gullentops, professor at the University of Brussels (V.U.B.), co-editor of the Complete Poetic Works of Jean Cocteau (Bibliothèque de la Pléiade, 2005) and director of Cahiers Jean Cocteau.
Paris, suivi de Notes sur l'amour / Paris, followed by Notes on Love October 2013 74 pp.
Nobody talks about the great Parisian Cocteau was. A leading light of arts and letters from his youth to his death, he was so involved with Parisian mythology that he became one of its key figures. He made Paris the frame and the subject and several of his books (Les Enfants Terribles, L’Impromptu du Palais-Royal, etc.) 41
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In his texts written before and during the Second World War, and only ever published in very small reviews, Cocteau’s sometimes mocking passion for his city jumps off the page. The Paris he speaks of and which enchants him is sometimes colorful, sometimes fantastical, and always poetic. Trying to understand it, Cocteau relies on the power of dreams and poetry: “Paris, like poets, is the most conspicuous and the most invisible of the world’s cities.” This collection is followed by Notes sur l’amour, a compilation of handwritten notes that have never before been published. Previously unpublished cover illustration by Jean Cocteau.
Les Cahiers Rouges
La Machine infernale / The Infernal Machine 180 pp. Oedipus, Jocasta, Antigone and Creon: Sophocles’ characters are run through Cocteau’s filter, which modernizes the famous tragedy of Oedipus and transforms the gods into infernal machines bringing misfortune to the world. In this play published in 1934, Cocteau amuses and surprises with his stylistic diversity.
Les Enfants terribles / The Holy Terrors 140 pp. First published to critical acclaim as Jean Cocteau’s fiction masterpiece in 1929, Les Enfants terribles tells the story of a brother and sister, Paul and Elisabeth. Leaving his high school, the lycée Condorcet, Paul is wounded by a rock hidden in a snowball thrown by his classmate, Dargelos. He recovers in his room, where Elisabeth takes care of him. This room becomes the scene of what they call “the game”–a story they make up each evening, in which they are the heroes. Their make-believe begins to dangerously merge with reality. Paul wants to stop “the game”, but Elisabeth wants to continue. The fun ends and tragedy ensues…then resolves in the enchantment of adolescence. The book was adapted into an immensely successful feature film by Jean-Pierre Melville in 1950.
Portraits souvenir / Souvenir Portraits 180 pp. Portraits souvenir (1935) was the occasion for Cocteau, who had always refused to write his memoirs, to speak of the literary, artistic, and social world of Paris before 1914. The brilliance of his poetic ellipses animates the portraits of Empress Eugénie in Antibes, of Mistinguett on stage at the Eldorado, and of other mythic figures of the early 1900s.
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Reines de la France / Queens of France 180 pp. Isabeau of Bavaria, Joan of Arc, Marie de’ Medici, Madame de Pompadour, Marie-Antoinette, and Sarah Bernhardt were not all crowned royalty, but they were all possessed of nobility, wit, and courage. In this gallery dedicated to the Eternal Feminine, Cocteau sketches twenty portraits of heroines who made history in the world, in literature, in theater, fashion…and love.
La Corrida du 1er mai / The Bullfight, May 1st 222 pp. Picasso, Manolete, Lorca, the spirit of flamenco and gypsy rhythm all make up the Spanish genius that Cocteau reveals here as a visionary guide who can uncover the deep reality of cities, peoples, and landscapes with just a glance and phrase.
Jean Cocteau (1889-1963). His first collection of poems was published in 1909 and he quickly became a central figure of the Parisian literary world, crossing paths with François Mauriac, Proust, Tristan Tzara, Raymond Roussel, and artists such as Diaghilev, Stravinski, Satie, and Picasso. He is the author of acclaimed novels such as Thomas l’Imposteur, of essays such as Essai de critique indirecte and Portraits souvenirs, of plays such as La Machine infernale, of poetry collections such as Plain-chant, and of many films, including La Belle et la Bête.
Rights sold for previous works: Arabic (Franklin Book Program), Castilian (Catedra), Catalan (Parsifal), Croatian (Hrvatsko filološko društvo), Czech (Dilia Agency, Orbis), English (UK: Penguin; US: New Directions, Paragon), German (JC Cotta’Sche, Fischer), Hungarian (Magyar Konyvklub), Italian (Rizzoli, Marsilio), Chinese (Shanghai 99), Romanian (Editura Paralela), Japanese (Shogakukan), Korean (PYY), Norvegian (Tiden Norsk), Portuguese (Livros do Brasil), Russian (Ivan Limbakh, Agrafe, AST), Serbian (NNK Internacional), Slovakian (Kalligram), Slovenien (književno), Turkish (Turkuvaz Kitapcilik)
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CLAUDE ARNAUD
Heidi Warneke
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Essay
Proust contre Cocteau / Proust versus Cocteau September 2013 208 pp.
2013 is the centenary year of the publication of the first volume of Proust’s La Recherche du Temps Perdu and the fifty year anniversary of Jean Cocteau’s death. Claude Arnaud looks at the friendship of these two artistic giants: Proust was twenty years older than Cocteau, but the two came from the same social background, they were both prolific creators who embodied two literary strategies and two histories – the one becoming the sanctuary we all know, and the second, the young prodigy who would come to see his elder betray him… Few writers loved, desired, and envied one another as much as Proust and Cocteau. Like a brother who grew up one generation earlier, Proust showed boundless admiration for the younger Cocteau, who made him tear up with laughter and who, at 20 years old, already showed a brilliance and power that Proust had not yet gathered up as he approached his 40s. More troubling yet is that Cocteau contributed to the publication of the first volume of La Recherche, which had initially been refused by all publishers. How did the situation turn around? Why, a century later, does Proust weigh so heavily on the literary landscape while Cocteau seems a relative lightweight? From Cocteau’s blazing debuts under the admiring gaze of his elder to his fall muted by the triumph of La Recherche, Arnaud inspects the mixed terrain treaded by these two exceptional writers. Here, we discover the impossible, pathological, and jealous love that Proust felt for the young Cocteau and was widely cheered. From Parisian salons to the cork-lined room on the Boulevard Haussmann, we relive the painful friendship that bound them to the point of separation. Claude Arnaud is a novelist, essayist, and critic. Author of a biography of reference on Jean Cocteau, Claude Arnaud has also published Qu'as-tu fait de tes frères ? (2010) and Brèves saisons au paradis (2012). His latest essay, Qui dit je en nous ? (2006), received the Prix Femina de l’Essai.
“The most beautiful book among the plethora coming out this year to celebrate the centenary of the publication of Du Coté de chez Swann and the fifty year anniversary of Cocteau’s death. […] magnificent.” Les Inrockuptibles “The book is engrossing. Claude Arnaud’s sensual and scholarly finesse brings life to these quiet exchanges between two maestros of the inkwell.” Le Point
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NON FICTION
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EMMANUEL LEVINAS
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Non Fiction Highlight
Œuvres Complètes /Complete Works Emmanuel Levinas’s complete works are brought together for the first time in a scholarly edition overseen by an international committee of specialists.
Complete Works, Vol. 3 Eros, Literature and Philosophy October 2013 416 pp.
While Emmanuel Levinas’ interest in literature is known through his writings on Proust, Blanchot, and Celan, you may not have suspected he had his own “literary practice.” The drafts of novels (Eros ou Triple opulence and La Dame de chez Wepler), notes, and poems that constitute this new volume of Levinas’ previously unpublished work – accompanied by a magnificent preface by Jean-Luc Nancy – show evidence of such a practice. Levinas never became a writer, strictly speaking, but literary passion was always intimately enmeshed in his philosophical project. Levinas considered literature to be the place perhaps best suited to situate the intrigue of the other and the relationship, of the approach and contact. The third volume of the Complete Works of Emmanuel Levinas, composed of his unpublished writings written from the early 1920s on, give us access to the genesis of the great philosopher’s work. We also get to encounter touching poems written in Russian, Yiddish, and Hebrew, when Levinas was still an adolescent, and two sketches of novels written later, which testify to his experience of the war in a fictional mode.
Complete Works, vol. 2 Word and silence and other conferences from the Collège Philosophique February 2011 401 pp.
These nine conferences have been found in Emmanuel Levinas’s archives and identified as having been presented at the Collège Philosophique. Never before published, they reflect Levinas’s intellectual development between 1947 and 1964 and foreshadow his first major work, Totalité et Infini. The conferences are a significant step in the development of Levinassian thought.
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Complete Works, vol. 1. Captivity notebooks, Writings on captivity, and various philosophical notes October 2009 500 pp.
This first volume consists exclusively of previously unpublished texts: the Carnets de captivité, Ecrits sur la captivité, and Notes philosophiques diverses. They cover the period from Levinas’s earliest work to the immediate post-war years, together with a few later developments. Sartre’s influence on the intellectual climate of the day is apparent in these plots for novels, the initial outline of Levinas’s major work on the concept “there is”, and his first work on Jewish identity in the crisis of war and captivity. It is fascinating to trace the development of ideas that Levinas was to develop in his post-war essays, as well as other potential avenues to which he did not return.
The project is led by Jean-Luc Marion, successor to Emmanuel Levinas as Chair in Metaphysics at the Sorbonne and to Paul Ricoeur as professor at the University of Chicago, and member of the Académie Française.
Rights to previous works sold: English (Stanford UP, Chicago UP, Columbia UP), German (Hanser, Passagen, Karl Alber), Italian (Bompiani), Japanese (Hosei UP), Polish (ZNAK), Portuguese (Brazil: Vozes; Portugal: Livraria Almedina, Joaquim Machado), Serbian (Zorana Stojanovica), Castilian (Catedra Ediciones, Pre Textos), Turkish (Dost)
“Fifteen years after his death, there is finally an edition of Levinas’ complete works that is deserving of his immensely important thought, which performed a fundamental shift in philosophy by making ethics the ‘first philosophy’.” Le Fig aro Magazine “This publication is an indisputably important event. […] With the Carnets de Captivité (1940-1945) and the previously unpublished work in this first installment, the reader holds not just a new book in his hands, but a major one.” Le Monde des Livres
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RITHY PANH
Heidi Warneke
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Non Fiction Highlight
WITH CHRISTOPHE BATAILLE
L'Image manquante / The Missing Image October 2013 72 pp. After L’Élimination , Rithy Panh returns with this extremely personal story read as a voice-over for his film that won the Prix Un certain Regard at the 2013 Cannes Film Festival. A poetic quest into childhood and an intimate and deeply moving historic testimony. “There are so many images in the world that we believe we’ve seen them all, that we’ve thought of everything.” For years, Rithy Panh has searched for a missing image – a photograph taken by the Khmer Rouge between 1975 and 1979, when they ruled Cambodia. Of course, a single image doesn’t prove a genocide, but it does provide food for thought…for reflection…for building history. Rithy Panh scoured archives and the countryside in vain. Now he knows: the image has to be missing; he wasn’t actually looking for it – wouldn’t it have just been obscene and meaningless? And so he creates it. What he presents us with now is not an image, or even the quest for an image, but the image of a quest: that which allows films to exist. “Certain images have to go missing forever, forever being replaced by others: life exists in this movement, as does struggle, pain and beauty, the sadness of lost faces, the understanding of what once was. Sometimes nobility, and even courage, but never oblivion.” Rithy Panh is a filmmaker who has directed, among others, Les gens des rizières, Bophana, S21 – La machine de mort khmère rouge, and Duch, le maître des forges de l'enfer. He wrote L’Élimination with Christophe Bataille (2012, Prix Joseph Kessel, Prix Aujourd'hui, Prix de la SGDL, Prix de l'Essai France-Télévision, Grand Prix des lectrices de ELLE), which has been translated into several languages. Born in 1971, Christophe Bataille is a writer and editor. He is the author of several novels, including Annam (1993), Quartier général du bruit (Grasset, 2006), and Le rêve de Machiavel (2008). Rights sold for L’Élimination (see p. 70) : Castillian (World: Anagrama), Chinese (complex and simplified: Shanghai 99), German (Hoffmann & Campe), English (US: Other Press; UK: Clerkenwell press), Italian (Feltrinelli), Romanian (Corint), Ukranian (ECEM)
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SANDRINE TREINER
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Non Fiction Highlight
L'Idée d'une tombe sans nom /The Idea of an Unmarked Grave Our Heroines (Collection directed by Caroline Fourest and Fiammetta Venner)
October 2013 192 pp. 1937 or 1938? A young Jewish revolutionary leaving Kishinev for Bessarabia disappears in the Ukraine during Stalin’s Great Purge. Before disappearing, she sends one last message to her loved ones: “Do not come. We were mistaken.” L’Idée d’une tombe sans nom is the story of her immense hope, her tragic obliviousness, and her admirable lucidity in the end. It’s the story of an early emancipation in the 1910s and ’20s, when leaving one’s religion, one’s family, the ghetto and the city to contribute to building socialism on the other side of the river meant adventure and heroism. Beginning with nearly no leads, Sandrine Treiner’s fascination with a unique path lost in the relentless accounting of a collective disaster led her to try to fix the anonymity of a death by writing everything she could find out about her heroine. The idea of an unmarked grave did not sit well with her, and so she insisted on writing the name Manya Schwartzman in a book. But what can we find out about someone of whom we know nothing? The answer comes to us through historical research, readings of a few novels, a taste for improbable maps, lost territories, and a sea that isn’t only black in name. It also comes through journeys to Moldavia, to Odessa, and all the way to the non-existent country of Transnistria. The revolution wasn’t simply an idea for Manya Schwartzman, it was a necessity.
Sandrine Treiner is an historian by training who has published several books on the conditions of women. A literary critic steeped in the history of ideas, she is the author of an anthology of texts about Odessa, the Black Sea, and revolutionary Yiddishland.
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Frankfurt 2013
Editions Grasset & Fasquelle
Heidi Warneke
[email protected]
LAURENCE BENAÏM
Biography
Le Prince des lignes, Azzedine Alaïa / Azzedine Alaïa, The Prince of the Lines October 2013 96 pp. Laurence Benaïm, author of the authoritative biography of Yves Saint Laurent (adapted for film), returns with his attention turned to another key figure of fashion: Azzedine Alaïa. Combining workshop secrets, testimonies, and things seen in Paris, Tunis, and in-between, this book recounts the unusual journey of this son of the desert become indispensable fashion designer. Couturier Azzedine Alaïa redraws the silhouette over the course of a season, freely and according to his own rules. Black leather, white poplin–he draws and sculpts obsessively. Instinctual, singularly extreme, starkly erotic. No effects, no frills. His concern: “that it revolves around the body, in profile and in back.” From the neck to the beginnings of a leg, he reconstructs a master class on the body–his blackboard and blank page. Arriving in Paris in the mid-’50s after having studied at the school of Fine Arts in Tunis, Azzedine Alaïa swiftly became the noble artisan of himself, pushing Parisian refinement to perfection. His progression is intimately linked to the clients he was able to seduce with bespoke clothing in the great tradition of chic. Then, in the ’60s and ’70s, he began to design wardrobes for famous personalities such as Louise de Vilmorin, Arletty, and Greta Garbo. The design system he forged as he freed himself of all rules and conventions confirmed his visionary talent. His media recognition was solid fact by the ’80s. Alaïa, whose scissors touch nothing but muslin and leather, fashioned a new body. Inventing garment morphologies that had never before been seen with the simple play of complex seams, Alaïa became a couturier whose body of work transcends time. His influence on contemporary fashion and on all generations of fashion designers and couturiers is immense. After having worked for the newspaper Le Monde, Laurence Benaïm launched the quarterly art and fashion review Stiletto in 2003. She is the author of two cult biographies, Marie-Laure de Noailles (2001) and Yves Saint Laurent (2002), as well as of Requiem pour Yves Saint Laurent (2010) and Le Plus bel âge (2013).
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Frankfurt 2013
Editions Grasset & Fasquelle
Heidi Warneke
[email protected]
LAURENCE BENAÏM
Biography
Yves Saint Laurent June 2002 500 pp.
Adapted as a motion picture film to be released in 2014, directed by Jalil Lespert and casting Pierre Niney, Guillaume Gallienne, Moris Bleibtreu and Laura Smet. On January 22, 2002, the whole world’s eyes were on the catwalk as the greatest designer of his times gave his last show. He only had one regret, “not having invented blue jeans”. More than three hundred models were shown, created between 1962 – 2002, on the occasion of his house’s fortieth anniversary, for it was also on this occasion that Yves Saint Laurent chose to announce his retirement. The news spread around the world, reflecting the influence Saint Laurent exercised quite apart from the world of fashion. The man who spoke on January 7 to the press provoked emotion, when he mentioned “tranquilisers, those the false friends”. But the year 2002 marked the end of a process that had really begun in 1998, with the arrival of a new designer for the ready-to-wear collection Rive Gauche, then the sale of the House to François Pinault, the major shareholder of Gucci. Thus completing, refining this monumental biography – the only one that leaves no stone unturned, the shadows and highlights are presented with equal frankness – Laurence Benaïm reveals the quest of this obsessive man who was buried alive by reality. We see the role played by Pierre Bergé, his mentor since 1957, the arrival of such personalities as Albert Elbaz, Hedi Slimane, who has since left to join LVMH. After the fantastic show of July 1998 ( Yves Saint Laurent’s fashion show at the French Stadium on the occasion of the Football World Cup), the arrival of Tom Ford, artistic director of Gucci at the heart of the ‘holy of holies’, was to precipitate matters, revealing the tensions present in haute couture today, the combat between two worlds, Paris and New York, craftsmanship and marketing, haute couture and style. Laurence Benaïm tells the whole story with never-before published reports and interviews with YSL. After having worked for the newspaper Le Monde, Laurence Benaïm launched the quarterly art and fashion review Stiletto in 2003. She is the author of two cult biographies, Marie-Laure de Noailles (2001) and Yves Saint Laurent (2002), as well as of Requiem pour Yves Saint Laurent (2010) and Le Plus bel âge (2013). Her biography of Azzedine Alaia will be released in October 2013. Rights sold: Bulgarian (Colibri), Russian (Astrel)
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Frankfurt 2013
Editions Grasset & Fasquelle
Heidi Warneke
[email protected]
CATEL
Graphic Biography
Ainsi soit Benoîte Groult /Let There Be… Benoîte Groult October 2013 300 pp.
In this graphic biography, the comic writer/artist Catel pays tribute to one of the greatest feminist voices of the last fifty years: Benoîte Groult. Here is the occasion to discover – or rediscover – her in pictures, with freedom, truth, and humor. This book is first and foremost the story of a friendship between two women of two different generations – one is a pioneer of feminism and the other an adept of a spontaneous, natural feminism: Catel and Benoîte Groult, who participated in every stage of the creation of this graphic biography of which she is the fascinating subject. This book is filled with scenes in all the places most dear to Benoîte Groult, sketches of her family, of her three daughters, an exploration of nearly a century of feminism (Benoîte will be 94 in January 2014), and the most significant episodes of this politically active woman’s life: from her bourgeois but open family to feminism’s most famous battles, from abortion to divorce, from the feminization of job titles to love that reinvents itself every day, from the Breton sea to fishing in Ireland, from journalism to the novel. Ainsi soit Benoîte Groult is much more than a biography in drawings – it is a modern woman’s odyssey, an intimate, funny, tender and sweet story that coincided with the history of women and women writers.
Catel is one of France’s most well-known figures of graphic literature. She has written two other graphic biographies: one devoted to Kiki de Montparnasse (which received the Grand Prix RTL), and the other to Olympe de Gouges – both of which were great successes and have since been translated into several languages.
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Frankfurt 2013
Editions Grasset & Fasquelle
Heidi Warneke
[email protected]
ELIZABETH GOUSLAN
Biography
Grace de Monaco : Entre la glace et le feu / Grace of Monaco : Between Fire and Ice November 2013 300 pp.
What don’t we already know about Grace Kelly? Elizabeth Gouslan surprises us with this biography of the actress become princess, presenting her in a resolutely modern light as a biopic starring Nicole Kidman in the title role is prepared for release in the United States in December 2013. This book is not yet another biography of the princess, following her from her birth into an East Coast WASP family to the ravine in Monte Carlo. Of course, it tells the fairy tale story of her life, but with its blemishes – for Miss Grace, that “fire under the ice” as Alfred Hitchcock described her, was not simple and innocent. Elizabeth Gouslan writes in a resolutely modern prose about Grace Kelly as she was: a man-eater (from Ray Milland to Oleg Cassini) obsessed by her father who ceaselessly disparaged her, she always gave a cold image of herself despite a fiery temper, and became a princess following a takeover of the principality of Monaco, long coveted by the casino-running mafia. A fascinating and original book written in a free style and form that “modernizes” its subject and renders the fascinating life of an icon without a hint of conformism. Elizabeth Gouslan is a journalist for the magazine Madame Figaro. She is the author of a biography of JeanPaul Gaultier and a biography of Ava Gardner.
Rights sold for previous works: Chinese (Complex: Marco Polo Press), Russian (Palimpseste)
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Frankfurt 2013
Editions Grasset & Fasquelle
Heidi Warneke
[email protected]
MICHELLE PERROT
Biography
Mélancolie ouvrière / Worker’s Melancholy Our Heroines (Collection directed by Caroline Fourest and Fiammetta Venner)
October 2012 192 pp. So many women who have made history in the broad light of day, or in the shadows, have been forgotten. This first volume of a new series entitled “Our Heroines” revisits the fascinating and tragic life of the feminist Lucie Baud and pays magnificent tribute to the working class. Early in the last century, in a small town in Isère, Lucie Baud came to embody a nascent feminism. Baud, a young woman working in a silk factory for Christian and paternalist employers, created the first union organization within the factory, considering that political engagement requires action. Having led a strike in Vizille, she wrote an article that highlighted the struggles in which she was enmeshed for the review Le Mouvement socialiste in 1908. As she was also a widow and mother, Baud balanced her time between family life at home, factory work, and political action. But this revolutionary image conceals personal weaknesses and private pains. Lucie Baud was the victim of misogyny in an essentially masculine environment, suffering alone and in silence from the rough world to which she paradoxically yearned to belong. In this exploration, which is also an homage, Michelle Perrot resumes her continual struggle. Far from being a classic biography, Perrot is personally invested in the story of Mélancolie ouvrière. From intense archival work to meetings with family members and others, Perrot has exhumed an extraordinary amount of information to nourish this biography. Who was Lucie Baud? To what extent was she politically active? What difficulties did she face in her personal life? And how can the tragedy be explained when, at only 36 years old, Lucie Baud shot herself three times in the jaw? The first work in Caroline Fourest and Fiammetta Venner’s “Our Heroines” series, this personal text from a great historian truly brings the working class condition to life. Michelle Perrot is a French historian and feminist. She is also a writer, whose notable publications include Mon histoire des femmes (2006) and Histoire de chambres (2009, Prix Femina Essai).
In the process of being adapted for film, directed by Gérard Mordillat. Rights sold for previous works: Castilian (Fondo de Cultura, Siruela), Croatian (Ibis Grafika), English (Yale UP), Italian (Sellerio), Japanese (Fujiwara), Korean (Geulhangari), Polish (Pax), Portuguese (Brazil: Contexto, Paz e Terra; Portugal: ASA, Teodolito), Turkish (Yapi Kredi)
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Frankfurt 2013
Editions Grasset & Fasquelle
Heidi Warneke
[email protected]
MAURIZIO SERRA
Biography
Italo Svevo ou l’antivie / Italo Svevo or Anti-life April 2013 360 pp.
Following Malaparte , for which he received the Prix Goncourt for biography, Maurizio Serra returns with the first biography devoted to the great Italian writer Italo Svevo. A key protagonist of modernism, translated and read the world over, Italo Svevo (1861-1928) remains unknown. It’s true that the man practiced all paradoxes… A cosmopolitan, born in Trieste, subject of the Empire over the last three quarters of its existence, "he preferred to write poorly in Italian that which he could have written well in German” according to the acid tongue of his antagonist, the poet Umberto Saba. A prudent businessman and prosperous industrialist in the varnish factory belonging to his in-laws, he distanced himself from literature for a quarter-century. A Jew who converted to Catholicism upon marriage, he remained agnostic and vainly demanded a funeral service with “neither priest nor rabbi.” An exemplary husband and father, he dreamed of cutting women into pieces and eating their boots. Fundamentally apolitical, he greeted the flare-up of violence in 1914 unenthusiastically. Italian at heart and by conviction, he understood early on that the problems following the war would lead to the era of fascism. Extremely wary of psychoanalysis, he nonetheless wrote the first psychoanalytic novel, Zeno’s Conscience (1923). Discovered by the European elite thanks to his friendships with Joyce and Larbaud, he had little time to savor this belated recognition and died leaving his last masterpiece, Further Confessions of Zeno, unfinished. Italo Svevo remains mostly an enigma – a man who made his work the center of his life, but whose “antilife,” which he wished to be forgotten, is even more revelatory. Maurizio Serra is a diplomat, an Italian ambassador to UNESCO. Following his Les Frères séparés: Drieu La Rochelle, Aragon et Malraux, Marinetti et la révolution futuriste, and Malaparte: vies et légendes (Prix Goncourt for biography 2011), Maurizio Serra offers us an exciting new stage in his itinerary among the great iconoclasts of 20th century literature. Rights sold for Malaparte : Castilian (Tusquets), Italian (Marsilio)
“Following his masterful biography of Malaparte, Maurizio Serra began investigating the life and work of Svevo. Here, he offers us a meticulous, extensively documented monograph.” Le Figaro
Littéraire
“A masterful, poignant portrait of Ettore Schmitz, aka Italo Svevo, the great Triestino author of Zeno’s Conscience.” Le Monde des Livres
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Frankfurt 2013
Editions Grasset & Fasquelle
Heidi Warneke
[email protected]
NICOLAS GRIMALDI
Philosophy
Les Théorèmes du moi / Theorems of the Self March 2013 200 pp.
In this new essay, Nicolas Grimaldi questions the self: the conscience we have of it, or more exactly, the conscience we don’t have of it – it’s objective inconsistency, and the means to resolve it. Fascinating and jubilant. The way we see and feel about ourselves has nearly nothing in common with the way others see and feel about us. What connection is there between what others can see of us and the vague impression we have? We have to accept the facts: all those objective determinations that render us recognizable to any policeman – that is how we are identified by those who see us. Our body always precedes us. Before anyone can glean the smallest hint of our sensibility, our tenacity, or our tastes, our body has already spoken for us. Of everything people attribute to us and immediately make us seem more or less likeable, nothing depends on us. Everything is involuntary. We need to recognize this fact: we belong much more to our bodies than they do to us. The relationship between what we are and what is ours is thus much less ontological than it is linguistic or stylistic. This is why snobbery and dandyism are two figures of the effort everybody makes: attempting to appear as we would like to be and to hide what we unwillingly are. Nicolas Grimaldi has devoted the majority of his works to elucidating our experiences of subjectivity. Let us highlight, among others, his Essai sur la jalousie: l’enfer proustien, Les Métamorphoses de l'amour and L'effervescence du vide.
“In his latest essay, Les théorèmes du moi, the philosopher continues his investigative and pedagogical work (whose elegant clarity is more than welcome) on the nature of consciousness.” Livres H ebdo
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Frankfurt 2013
Editions Grasset & Fasquelle
Heidi Warneke
BERNARD-HENRI LÉVY
[email protected]
Philosophy
Les Aventures de la vérité : Art et Philosophie, une histoire/ Forms of Thought : Painting and Philosophy, A Narrative May 2013 440 pp. (illustrated) For a year and a half, Bernard-Henri Lévy traveled the world in search of… art! Traveling from museums to private collections, the philosopher found himself entrusted with the organization of the fortieth anniversary exhibition of Malraux’s Musée Imaginaire by the legendary Maeght Foundation, which first set out to realize Malraux’s idea in 1973. This unique book, neither exhibition catalogue nor coffee-table book, is a work at the crossroads of the literary, the artistic, the aesthetic, and philosophic. It is also the first time that every episode involved in the creation of an exhibition, both the serious and the comedic, is put on display and narrated – we find works by Véronique de Murillo, a monochrome by Warhol, and even Guy Debord’s still little-known Directives. It all started when Maeght Foundation director Olivier Kaeppelin requested that Bernard-Henri Lévy come up with an idea for a big exhibition at the Foundation for summer 2013. A theme: the relationships between painting and philosophy. A principle: treat the old masters, the modern artists, and the contemporary artists equally and create a dialogue around this theme. A main thread: A kind of “grand narrative” divided into six stations in which philosophy censors, restores, reeliminates, relays, and replaces the painters’ work. An adventure: in order to tell this story, Bernard-Henri Lévy explored private collections and museums in France and abroad to dig up masterpieces that are exhibited at the Maeght Foundation from 29 June to 12 November 2013. The book born of this adventure is divided into three parts. The first, a long “Letter to Olivier Kaeppelin”, lays the foundations of the exhibition: Bernard-Henri Lévy’s aesthetic principles. The second part is a journal kept from the summer of 2011 to the spring of 2013, which recounts the making of this atypical exhibition. The final part is composed of images of the 120 pieces chosen for the exhibition, each of which is accompanied by a literary and critical “information card.” Bernard-Henri Lévy, a renowned philosopher, has published several monographs on ancient and Renaissance art (Piero della Francesca), modern art (Mondrian), and contemporary art (Frank Stella) over the past 30 years. This new book belongs to this lesser known and hitherto deliberately discreet part of his work. Rights sold for previous works: Castilian (Ariel, Tusquets), Chinese (Simplified: Guangxi Normal UP), Czech (Host), Dutch (De Geus, Voltaire), English (Melville House, Random House), German (Campus, Heyne), Greek (Kedros, Scripta), Hebrew (Babel), Italian (Rizzoli), Japanese (Hayakawa, Nhk), Korean (Golden Owl, Sungkyunkwan University), Norwegian (Press), Polish (Sic), Portuguese (Brazil: Companhia das Letras, A Girafa; Portugal: Asa, Livros do Brasil), Romanian (Nemira), Turkish (Alkim)
“This enthusiastic, funny, and occasionally astounding story […] tells of BHL’s extraordinary journey visiting museums, private collections, and the studios of some of our greatest artists.” Le Nouvel Observateur “A gripping travelogue from the land of art.” Le Figaro
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Frankfurt 2013
Editions Grasset & Fasquelle
Heidi Warneke
[email protected]
FRANÇOIS JULLIEN
Philosophy
De l’intime : Loin du bruyant Amour / On the Intimate : Far from the Clamor of Love March 2013 256 pp. Don’t we give too much importance to love? asks François Jullien. In this new and very personal book, the sinologist philosopher answers this question by advancing his preferred concept of the intimate, which he explores with the virtuosity of a master craftsman. Attentive to the discreet development of the intimate, François Jullien offers us a definition that is meant to be “rending”: the intimate is not a state but a stage we access and which separates us from the other as it brings us closer together. The notion of the intimate was born in the Christian context that nourished it and allowed it to thrive. Jullien demonstrates this and launches into an exploration of the intimate through literature. His thinking leads him to situate the intimate as the starting point of morality, which presents a challenge for philosophy, as the intimate fiercely resists conceptualization. In counterpoint to the intimate, Jullien sees love as nothing other than a convenient spare subject that’s always a success in the marketplace of ideas. Jullien refuses the idea of a life shared with another where desire cedes its place to tenderness and affection. On the contrary, he says, the intimate slips in there and it requires upkeep. An exciting and erudite essay, François Jullien’s De l’intime elegantly shakes up our preconceived notions of love and the relationship to the other. François Jullien holds the Chair on Alterity at the Collège d’études mondiales of the Fondation de la Maison des Sciences de l’Homme. His work has been translated in some twenty-five countries. Rights sold for previous works: Arabic (Lebanon: Sud Editions), Bulgarian (Iztok Zapad, LIK), Castilian (Siruela, Arena, Libros Perfil, Bellaterra, El Cuenco de Plata, El Hilo de Ariadna), Chinese (Peking UP), English (UK: Seagull Books), Estonian (Université de Tallin), German (Sequenzia, Merve, Passagen, Turia Kant), Italian (Einaudi, Il Mulino, Luca Sossella, Raffaello Cortina), Japanese (Kodonsha), Korean (Hanul, Dongnyok), Portuguese (Brazilian: Discurso Editorial, Editora 34; Portugal: Instituto Piaget), Russian (Progress-Tradition, Moscow Philosophy Foundation), Vietnamese (Editions de Danang)
“This book obviously announces more to come. Which is why we can only simply admire when a prominent philosopher breaks ground (…) on new territory. The breadth and originality of his thought are sure to be felt for generations to come.” Le Monde des Livres “Faced with the all-powerful I and the unpacking of the ego, François Jullien proposes to return to the intimate in the footsteps of Saint Augustine and Rousseau. It is a journey where self-knowledge is not a question of narcissism, but of a subtle and silent sharing.” Philosophie Magazine
58
Frankfurt 2013
Editions Grasset & Fasquelle
Heidi Warneke
[email protected]
MICHEL ONFRAY
Philosophy
These two new volumes of La Contre-H istoire de la Philosophie continue the unusual enterprise in which Michel Onfray gives an enthralling historiographic rereading of all the thought which has come to shape our contemporary intellectual heritage.
Les Freudiens hérétiques - Tome 8 /The Freudian Heretics - Volume 8 January 2013 384 p. The entirety of Michel Onfray’s work revolves around what he calls the "Leftist Nietzscheanism" and, more specifically, all of the developments that a certain tradition of philosophy has devoted to the “Übermensch.” In this volume, Onfray focuses his analyses more particularly on the often ignored cases of Otto Gross, Wilhelm Reich, and Eric Fromm, who were each in their own way heirs to and rebels within the Freudian tradition – a tradition which, since the publication of Le Crépuscule d’une idole, we know to inspire Michel Onfray’s wrath.
Les Consciences réfractaires - Tome 9 /Refractory Consciences - Volume 9 January 2013 448 p. With Les Consciences réfractaires, Michel Onfray continues his counter-history of philosophy project for which he has several more volumes planned. In this volume, he concentrates his analysis on Georges Politzer, Paul Nizan, Albert Camus, and Simone de Beauvoir. He approaches Camus and Nizan gently, the Marxist psychologist Politzer with consideration, and Simone de Beauvoir with severity.
Michel Onfray was born in 1959. A Doctor of Philosophy, he taught for many years before devoting himself to the writing of his many books, including those published by Grasset: Théorie du corps amoureux (2000), Féeries anatomiques (2003), Traité d'Athéologie (2005), Le Crépuscule d’une idole ( 2010), and his monumental Contre-Histoire de la philosophie. Rights sold for previous volumes in this series: Castillian (Spain: Anagrama), Dutch (Mets & Schilt), Korean (Ingan Sarang), Italian (Fazi), Portuguese (Brazil: Martins Fontes), Romanian (Nemira), Swedish (Nya Doxa) Rights sold for Le Crépuscule d’une idole : Castillian (World: Taurus), Chinese (Simplified: Social Sciences Academic Press), Czech (Host), German (Knaus), Greek (Exandas), Italian (Ponte Alle Grazie), Korean (Geulhangari), Romanian (Humanitas), Polish (Jacek Santorski), Portuguese (Portugal: Constancia; Brazil: Ediouro), Turkish (Sel Yayincilik)
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Frankfurt 2013
Editions Grasset & Fasquelle
Heidi Warneke
[email protected]
MARTINE TORRENS-FRANDJI
Philosophy
Michel Onfray : Le principe d'incandescence / Michel Onfray : The Principle of Incandescence November 2013 500 pp.
This is the first biographical and philosophic study of Michel Onfray’s body of work, and it is illuminating. Michel Onfray has published some thirty books in disciplines as diverse as metaphysics, aesthetics, politics, theology, and the history of philosophy. Still, he’s often only lauded – or criticized – for one aspect of his body of work or another. And so it was necessary to have a book that would gather together the totality of his work, including the biographic elements likely to elucidate this Nietzschean’s convictions. In this respect, Martine Torrens-Frandji’s book is a trailblazing one. Add to this one particularity: Martine Torres-Frandji proposes that Michel Onfray’s aesthetics (such as he puts forward in his “hedonist journals” and his monographs on painters, musicians, and sculptors) is the center of his philosophy, forming a “system”. Written in limpid, pedagogical prose, this book provides a very useful tool for reflection for the evergrowing readership of the “most famous philosopher in France”.
Martine Torrens-Frandji lives and teaches philosophy in Spain and Israel. A specialist in aesthetics, she has long been an enthusiast of Michel Onfray’s work.
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MICHEL GUÉNAIRE
Heidi Warneke
[email protected]
Essay /Politics / History
Le Retour des États / The Return of States October 2013 288 pp.
Globalization didn’t come into being just yesterday, but it is now taking the form of a neo-liberal revolution where sovereign states have been pushed off the world stage. International business lawyer Michel Guénaire defends the idea that the people want more state governance. States don’t only have a role to play in their respective regions, but can and should influence the new world market. This book begins with a paradox: globalization “dissolves” states, yet the crisis brought on my this same globalization recalls their necessity. Peoples all over the world are demanding more state intervention to counter the deregulations created by other factors. Could what we took to be the agonizing death of the old nation-state really be its rebirth? Michel Guénaire writes that “States are coming back into the heart of the people’s political project” because they “aspire to defend their interests and want to find their identity in the world market once more.” In this historical and political epic of a book, the author analyzes the cultural types of large state groups that are reborn, along with their virtues and their risks (the return of souverainism, anti-European litanies, etc.). Above all, this book is intended to “set the record straight” on our intellectual debates, which are still praising globalization though the question is no longer pertinent.
Michel Guénaire is senior partner at the law firm Gide-Loyrette-Nouel. He has already published several essays.
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BERNARD MARIS
Heidi Warneke
[email protected]
Essay /Politics / History
L'Homme dans la guerre / Man at War Maurice Genevoix and Ernst Jünger October 2013 260 pp. As the centenary of the First World War approaches, Bernard Maris offers us two completely different visions of the war and man at war by way of two writers who fought and lived at a hair’s breadth from death: Maurice Genevoix and Ernst Jünger. They fought one another at the Calonne trench and were both wounded on the same day. These two very young men lived through the same conflict: the one a Germanophile, the other a Francophile, both of them in love with the enemy country’s literature. They showed inconceivable mettle in the battle, killed with their own hands, and saw others die. They became great writers under the bombs. Their works recount the same things, the same places, and the same wounds, yet somehow it is not the same war. The Frenchman, Maurice Genevoix, speaks of each man who dies; the German, Ernst Jünger writes of the soldiers, the army, and the nation. Why this war? Combined, their works shed an extraordinary light on the First World War one hundred years later. Examining the two greatest writers of the First World War together for the first time, Bernard Maris approaches a double mystery: that of the fighting’s relentlessness and that of the singularity of our two nations – France and Germany.
Born in 1946, Bernard Maris is a writer and journalist. He has published many books on economics, three novels, and is working on a play for the theater. He is also president of the association “Je me souviens de Ceux de 14” [I Remember Those Who Fought in WWI], dedicated to the memory of Maurice Genevoix, who was his father-in-law.
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ALAIN MINC
Heidi Warneke
[email protected]
Essay /Politics / History
Vive l'Allemagne ! / Long Live Germany! October 2013 140 pp.
Alain Minc feels at home in Germany, even despite the fact that his family was deported during the Second World War. Here, he pays tribute to the country he considers to be a veritable model democracy. The French don’t really know Germany. What do they know about the main currents of an extremely complex history for which Nazism was not an inevitable outcome? What do they know of the conditions of the miracle of 1945 that now make the Federal Republic the most democratic nation in Europe? What of its incredible ability to integrate 17 million East Germans without horrible repercussions during the reunification, at the same time France had such difficulty integrating 1 million Pieds-Noirs? What of the atypical operating rules of a consensual economy at the heart of this jungle that is globalized capitalism? What of the conditions for an economic rebound at a moment when the ship was on the brink of going under? The Federal Republic has just experienced its economic heyday and the rise of new competitors and a disastrous demography condemn it to a relative decline. Germany aspires neither to dominate the world nor Europe, but rather to be a “big Switzerland”–prosperous, peaceful, and as indifferent as possible to the upheavals of international realities. Is this good news for us Europeans? Because, contrary to popular belief, Berlin exercises the lightest influence possible on the European Union. François Mitterand and Helmut Kohl wanted a European Germany rather than a German Europe. What do we want today? A Federal Republic conspicuously absent from History or one that is ready to assume a tempered authority? Alain Minc is the author of several books. His latest essays include Dix jours qui ébranlèrent le monde (2009), Une histoire politique des intellectuels (2010), Un petit coin de paradis (2011), and L'âme des nations (2012).
Rights sold for previous works: Bulgarian (Panorama revue), Catalan (Duomo, Antoni Bosch), Chinese (simplified: Citic Publishing, Horizon Media), English (UK: Basil Blackwell), Greek (Livani), Italian (Orme, Utet, Spirali), Latin American (Paidos), Japanese (Shin Hyron), Korean (Nanam), Polish (University of Warsaw), Portuguese (Gravida Publicacoes), Serbian (SIC)
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Heidi Warneke
BRUNO PATINO JEAN-FRANCOIS FOGEL
[email protected]
Essay /Politics / History
La Condition numérique / The Digital Condition April 2013 240 pp.
In this engaging and illuminating book, two specialists take on the digital turn and explain how the age of permanent connectedness has transformed the human condition. The internet has changed. Two decades after its creation, the world wide web is no longer a component of the media, but a determining social space for the private, professional, and public life each of us leads. The internet’s last transformation, with the dominance of social networks and mobile connection, affects every dimension of human relations. Simply talking about the rise of the image and “real-time” would be a shortsighted take on the new uses of the digital that are emerging. We are now witnessing a change that is perceptible at every moment and in every context – a metamorphosis of that which constitutes the social framework of the human condition. A digital condition has been born. It can be described in each of the fields that define an individual: identity, activity, knowledge, participation, relationships, etc. And this digital revolution becomes comprehensible, even obvious, when it is read at the level on which it acts – less on technological change than on the transformation of the intimate nature of those who use it. Bruno Patino directs France 5 and France Télévisions Numérique. Jean-François Fogel conceived and developed lemonde.fr with Bruno Patino, creating a leading information website in the Francophone world. They have also written the highly acclaimed Une presse sans Gutenberg (Grasset, 2005). Rights sold for Une presse sans Gutenberg : Castilian (World: Oficina del autor)
“La Condition numérique sheds great light on the dizzying changes we are all living through today.” Le Monde des Livres “An anthropological work (…), a meticulously documented book that soars.” Le Point
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Frankfurt 2013
Editions Grasset & Fasquelle
Heidi Warneke
DELPHINE HORVILLEUR
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Religion
En tenue d’Eve : Féminin, pudeur et Judaïsme / In Eve’s Attire : Modesty, Judaism, and the Feminine May 2013 192 pp.
In this brilliant work, the liberal and intellectual rabbi Delphine Horvilleur revisits concepts monopolized by radical and mainstream discourse: modesty and the female body. Her writing is illuminating and convincing as she explores traditional hermeneutics from within and offers a new reading of sacred texts. Current fundamentalist religious discourses express a mounting obsession with the modesty of women. Reduced to the parts of her body liable to arouse desire, women are outrageously “genitalized” and modesty is invoked to cover her nudity. What’s more, this notion only applies to women. Can’t women represent something other than deceit and frustration? Is this the only image of women that religion offers? Delphine Horvilleur, one of only two female rabbis in France, analyzes the meanings of modesty and nudity, as well as the obsession with women’s bodies and women’s representation as “orificial beings,” in light of biblical stories and religious literature in order to propose another interpretation of religious tradition and to undermine the fundamentalist readings that define women as seducers and modesty as a means to dominate them. As such, she shows us how Adam and Eve’s covered nudity, and Noah’s too, belong to a culture of desire rather than to a drive to kill desire, how the veil was originally meant not to reject, but to bring us closer to the other, and how the feminine also concerns men who, in prayer and Judaic practice, assume feminine and maternal attributes. And so with this immersion into the heart of monotheistic traditions, we discover another side of women, of modesty, and of religion. “Delphine Horvilleur examines the great monotheistic religions and critically questions the most solid seeming dogmas in this remarkably conceived essay.” Pascal Bruckner Delphine Horvilleur, born in 1974, is a liberal female rabbi. She practices as part of the Liberal Jewish Movement of France (Mouvement juif libéral de France, or MJKF) and is editor in chief of the community magazine Tenou’a.
“A luminous essay” Le Nouvel Observateur “In her book, En tenue d’Ève, Féminin, pudeur et judaïsme, this former journalist points to the ‘era of demonstration’, which, in our times, has seen the emergence of fundamentalist discourses seeking to hide women, if not completely erase them.” Le Figaro
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Frankfurt 2013
Editions Grasset & Fasquelle
Heidi Warneke
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MAHMOUD HUSSEIN
Religion
Ce que le Coran ne dit pas / What the Qur’an Doesn’t Say October 2013 96 pp.
Mahmoud Hussein, author of the fascinating Penser le Coran , proposes here to reread the Qur’an freely, far from a fixed thought that leaves no place for criticism. This book attempts to re-introduce historicity into the Qur’an in a biting yet oh so convincing polemical style. For over a thousand years, the guides of Muslim thought have imposed the assumption on believers that the Qur’an is the Word of God and its verses are independent of both time and space. They embrace all possible contexts for all eternity. This assumption is based on the fallacy that the Word of God must be of the same nature as God himself, that because God is eternal, each of his Words could only possibly be eternal like him. The Qur’an, however, does not say this. It says the contrary, even, and very precisely so.
Mahmoud Hussein is the pseudonym shared by Bahgat El Nadi and Adel Rifat. They have already published Al-Sîra, le Prophète de l’islam raconté par ses compagnons (2 volumes, 2005 and 2007) and Penser le Coran (2009) with Grasset.
Rights sold for previous works: Dutch (Bulaaq), English (UK: Saqi Books), Italian (Messaggero Padova), Moroccan (Librairie Nationale)
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Frankfurt 2013
Editions Grasset & Fasquelle
Heidi Warneke
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ANTOINE SFEIR
Religion
L’Islam contre l’Islam / Islam Against Islam January 2013 260 pp. Prix Livre et droits de l'homme Is it possible to understand the Muslim world without confronting the question of religion? Of course not, replies Antoine Sfeir in this latest work that sheds new light on the ancient war between Shiites and Sunnis, as well as the way in which religion structures the Middle East and its relationship to the Western world. When Western observers consider the “complicated Middle East,” they make a mistake by reading the events in Egypt, Syria, Iran, and Iraq through the sole prism of “democrats versus fundamentalists.” According to Antoine Sfeir, this division is not pertinent. In truth, the real fault line dividing the Arab-Islamic world is the very old separation of the two branches of Islam: Sunnism and Shiism. But do we even know what distinguishes one from the other? And how should we understand this “religious war” that has gone on for thirteen centuries? In this popularized book, Antoine Sfeir describes the historic, theological, and political events that have cemented the conflict between a Sunni majority and Shiite minority since the death of the prophet Mohammed. He also shows us how this conflict – which began as a purely conceptual dispute – has gradually taken shape in the world, from the alliance formed by the United States and the Saud tribe in 1945 to the Suez Crisis, whose price is still being paid today, as it cut the West from the Levant. Illustrated with several maps and genealogical charts, this book allows us to better understand the sequence of events and the issues underlying them through the prose of one of the top specialists on the Middle East. A great connoisseur of the Arab-Islamic world and director of the Cahiers de l’Orient, Antoine Sfeir has already published another book with Grasset: Vers l'Orient compliqué. Rights sold for his previous work: Arabic (Algeria: Sedia), Italian (Enrico Damiani)
“An essential book to begin understanding the geopolitics of the ‘complicated Middle East.’” Livres
H ebdo
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Frankfurt 2013
Editions Grasset & Fasquelle
Heidi Warneke
ANNICK COJEAN
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Reminder
Les Proies : Dans le Harem de Kadhafi / Easy Prey : Inside Gaddafi’s Harem September 2012 300 pp. 100.000 copies sold Well-known journalist Annick Cojean has written a terrifying account detailing how women were abused at the highest level of the former Libyan regime. A shocking indictment of Muammar Gaddafi’s reign of terror and a sensitive exploration of the fate of the women who fell victim to it. Soraya was just fifteen when the Supreme Guide Muammar Gaddafi spotted her in class at her high school. He chose her for a dreadful fate, taking her as a sex slave. Soraya was beaten, drugged, and raped several times a week – for the next seven years. Soraya has now decided to speak out, whatever the risks. She shared her story with the journalist Annick Cojean, who published a heart-rending article about her experiences in the French daily Le Monde in November 2011. Annick Cojean has now decided to turn Soraya’s story into a book exposing a littleknown aspect of Gaddafi’s dictatorship – the drug addiction that fuelled his bloodthirsty megalomania and his cruel sexual abuse of the young Libyan women unfortunate enough to come to his attention. How many women underwent the same fate as Soraya? Hundreds, probably. We will never know for sure, so strong is the taboo surrounding the subject. Annick Cojean risked her life travelling to Tripoli to investigate Soraya’s story. She found a society rotten to the core, riven with prostitution, corruption, terror, rape, and murder. In this book, she gives Gaddafi’s victims a voice, bringing a little dignity back to women whose lives were ruined by a monster. Annick Cojean, foreign correspondent for Le Monde, is one of France’s most widely admired journalists. She chairs the committee for the Prix Albert Londres, having won the prize herself in 1996, and has published a number of books. Rights sold: Bulgarian (Enthusiast), Castilian (Spain: Anagrama, Latin America: Grupo Ilhsa), Chinese (simplified: Beijing Zhongpu), Dutch (Meulenhoff), English (US world: Grove Atlantic, ANZ: Harper Collins), German (Aufbau), Italian (Piemme), Lithuanian (Metodika), Polish (Prozynski), Portuguese (Brazil: Record-Verus; Portugal: Porto), Russian (Hemiro), Swedish (Lindskog)
“An impressive investigation […] an alarming story” L’Express “A shocking document” Le Figaro “Dans le harem de Kadhafi will stay with you for a long time. It is an exceptional investigation.” Elle
68
Frankfurt 2013
Editions Grasset & Fasquelle
Heidi Warneke
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Reminder
RITHY PANH
WITH CHRISTOPHE BATAILLE
L’Élimination/ The Elimination January 2012 320 pp.
Prix Aujourd’hui Prix Essai France Télévision Prix Livre et droits de l'Homme Prix Joseph Kessel Grand Prix des lectrices Elle
L’Élimination is the fascinating autobiography of the film director, Rithy Panh, who survived the Khmer Rouge camps. With this very personal story, he conveys the horror, attempts to understand the mechanisms of evil and, as in his movies, explores the painful history of his country, Cambodia. L’Élimination plunges into the origins of the Cambodian genocide. Rithy Panh leads a real fight against Duch, the executioner who headed the S21 Center from 1975 to 1979, in the heart of Phnom Penh emptied of its inhabitants by the Khmer Rouge. There, 12,380 people, horrifically tortured for days and weeks, confessed to fictitious betrayals, before being executed. Already in his film S21: The Khmer Rouge Killing Machine, Rithy Panh imagined the meeting of the executioners and survivors of this center, and he filmed Duch in his Criminal Court prison. Here again, in L’Élimination, he attempts to capture the persona of the organizer of these executions. He wants to understand this man, his personal journey, his ideology, and his methods. He evokes the recruitment of his squads, but also his passion for numbers, his "seminars" of torture, and his ties to Pol Pot. Neither demon nor ordinary person, Duch is a complex and cultivated man. Confronting him, Rithy Panh tells of his own anguish and artistic choices, but also his childhood: he was ten in 1975. He lost his parents and most of his brothers and sisters under the Khmer Rouge regime. He survived. He wants to understand. Rithy Panh, born in Cambodia in 1965, is a filmmaker. He brought us, among other things, Rice People (selected for the Cannes Film Festival), and The Sea Wall. His documentaries are famous worldwide, especially S21: The Khmer Rouge Killing Machine. Duch: The Master of the Forges of Hell, selected for the Cannes Film Festival 2012, was highly acclaimed by critics. Rights sold to : Castillian (World: Anagrama), Chinese (complex and simplified: Shanghai 99), German (Hoffmann & Campe), English (US: Other Press), Italian (Feltrinelli), Romanian (Corint), Ukranian (ECEM)
“Filmmaker Rithy Panh brings new pieces to the memorial of the Cambodian genocide. […]. In reading L’Élimination - a story that should immediately be placed alongside the works of Varlam Chalamov and Primo Levi in the canon of genocide and concentration camp literature - we become aware of the filmmaker’s superhuman approach.” L’Express “A moving testimony - and more than a testimony, an important book of ‘survivor’ literature.”Le Monde des Livres
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Frankfurt 2013
Editions Grasset & Fasquelle
Heidi Warneke
[email protected]
CÉDRIC VILLANI
Reminder
Théorème Vivant /Living Theorem August 2012 288 pp. 60.000 copies sold The brilliant young mathematician Cédric Villani recounts the gradual dawning of the theorem that earned him the 2010 Fields Medal – the equivalent of a Nobel Prize for mathematics. Can Cédric Villani do for maths what Brian Cox has done for physics? Cédric Villani is, without doubt, one of the most brilliant thinkers of his generation. It has taken him just a few years to become a foremost figure in the history of mathematics. He has been widely hailed as a genius by his fellow mathematicians. His foppish style and ease of manner in his numerous media appearances cut a dash in what might appear at first glance to be a rather austere field of endeavour. Théorème Vivant is an enthralling account of one man’s determination to solve a mathematical riddle that had hitherto stymied all those who had tackled it. Cédric Villani spent years working on the problem until finally, one day, he cracked it. This fictional account of the process follows the brilliant young researcher as he travels the world in search of the answer, from Tokyo to New York and from Berkeley to Hyderabad. The account is interspersed with feverish emails to his fellow researchers, lines from songs hummed as he works, and the fantastical tales of adventure that he makes up for his young children, who accompany him wherever he goes. Gradually, light begins to shine on the revolutionary theorem that is to earn Cédric Villani his place in history. Théorème Vivant is by no means a beginner’s guide to mathematics. It is a breathless, thrilling tale of adventure, interspersed with fascinating portraits of some of the greatest minds in mathematics. Villani explains his dazzling equations with a child-like enthusiasm that proves highly infectious. Forget the dull arithmetic lessons you had at school – Cédric Villani is about to convince you of the magic, beauty, and poetry of maths. Cédric Villani was born in 1973. He is professor of mathematics at the University of Lyon. He was awarded the Fields Medal in 2010 – the equivalent of a Nobel Prize. Rights sold: Bulgarian (Paradox), English: (UK, Australia and NZ: Random House for The Bodley Head; US: Farrar, Straus & Giroux), German (Fischer), Italian (Rizzoli), Japanese (Hayakawa), Korean (Bookhouse), Romanian (Humanitas), Serbian (Center for the Promotion of Science)
“Cédric Villani is, like all mathematicians, a poet of necessities (…) The subject of this life, of this fate, of this book, is freshness – perpetual inventiveness.” Le Figaro Littéraire “The prestigious French mathematician has published Théorème vivant, the story of an adventurer in equations, the novel of a researcher…who makes very frequent discoveries. A fascinating book.” Le
Nouvel Observateur
70
Frankfurt 2013
Editions Grasset & Fasquelle
Heidi Warneke
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