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SALON DU LIVRE DE PARIS 2013
Foreign Rights Catalogue
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Editions Grasset & Fasquelle
Paris Book Fair 2013
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LITERATURE Highlights JEAN-LUC COATALEM
Nouilles froides à Pyongyang
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DIDIER DECOIN
La pendue de Londres
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FRANÇOIS SAINTONGE
Dolfi et Marilyn
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SYLVIE AYMARD
C’est une occupation sans fin que d’être vivant
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SAMUEL BLUMENFELD
Au nom de la loi
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PASCAL BRUCKNER
La Maison des Anges
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STEPHANE DENIS
Les Dormeurs
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PIERRE DUCROZET
La vie qu’on voulait
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CLAIRE LEGENDRE
Vérité et amour
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ROGER MAGINI
Ilitch, mort ou vif
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STÉPHANE OSMONT
Éléments incontrôlés
15
ANNE SIBRAN
Dans la montagne d’argent
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JACQUES TOURNIER
Le marché d’Aligre
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PHILIPPE VILAIN
La Femme infidèle
18
TANCRÈDE VOITURIEZ
L’Invention de la pauvreté
29
SAPHIA AZZEDINE
Comment épouser une millionnaire
20
GÉRALDINE MAILLET
J’ai vécu de vous attendre
21
CLEO LE TAN
Une famille
22
MUTT-LON
Ceux qui sortent dans la nuit
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Notre espion d’Amérique
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Literary fiction
Commercial fiction
Premiers romans/First Novel
Roman historique/Historical Novels ARNAUD DELALANDE
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Ceci n’est pas un fait divers/True crime JEAN-BAPTISTE HARANG
Bordeaux-Vintimille
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Les couplets
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L’Inédit
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JACQUES CHESSEX
Hosanna
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THADEE KLOSSOWSKI DE ROLA
Vie rêvée
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LORETTE NOBECOURT
Patagonie intérieure
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La clôture des merveilles : Une vie d'Hildegarde de Bingen
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DELPHINE RENARD
Tu choisiras la vie
32
MATHIEU TERENCE
La Belle
33
MARIE CARDINAL
Les Mots pour le dire et autres romans
34
FRANTZ FUNCK-BRENTANO
La Cour du Roi-Soleil
35
JEAN-AUGUSTE-DOMINIQUE INGRES
Ecrits sur l'art
36
FRANCOIS MAURIAC
La Pharisienne
37
PAUL MORAND
Champions du monde
38
CHRISTIANE ROCHEFORT
Le Repos du guerrier
39
PIERRE SCHOENDERFFER
L’adieu au roi
40
AMIN MAALOUF
Les Désorientés
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COLOMBE SCHNECK
La Réparation
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CEDRIC VILLANI
Théorème Vivant
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Nouvelles/Shorts Stories CLAIRE CASTILLON Inédits/Unreleased writings MARIE CARDINAL Récits/Narratives
Cahiers Rouges/Backlist
Recent Backlist
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NON FICTION Highlights BERNARD-HENRI LEVY
Les aventures de la vérité : Art et philosophie, une histoire.
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BRUNO PATINO ET JEAN-FRANCOIS FOGEL
La condition numérique
45
BENOITE GROULT
Ainsi soit Olympe de Gouges
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MAURIZIO SERRA
Italo Svevo ou l’antivie
47
ELSA CONESA
Margarita Louis-Dreyfus : Enquête sur la femme la plus secrète de France
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VALERIE FIGNON, MICHEL CYMES, PATRICE ROMEDENNE
Laurent
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PIERRE SCHOENDERFFER ET PATRICK FORESTIER
La guerre dans les yeux
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NICOLAS GRIMALDI
Les théorèmes du moi
51
FRANCOIS JULLIEN
De l’intime : Loin du bruyant Amour
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EMMANUEL LEVINAS
Œuvres complètes, tome 3 Eros, littérature et philosophie
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MICHEL ONFRAY
Les Freudiens hérétiques Les Consciences réfractaires
54
ANDREI VIERU
Eloge de la vanité
55
DELPHINE HORVILLEUR
En tenue d'Eve : Féminin, Pudeur et Judaïsme
56
ANTOINE SFEIR
L’Islam contre l’Islam
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Adresses Fantômes
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Les Proies 3
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Biographies
Documents / Memoirs
Philosophie/Philosophy
Religion
Illustré/Illustrations MICHEL LONGUET Recent Backlist ANNICK COJEAN
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Editions Grasset & Fasquelle
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JEAN-LUC COATALEM
Nouilles froides à Pyongyang Cold Noodles in Pyongyang 240 p. January 2013 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 for previous titles: Italian (Touring Editore), English (United Kingdom: Weidenfeld & Nicolson), Chinese (Taiwan: Marco Polo Press)
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DIDIER DECOIN
La Pendue de Londres The Hanged Woman of London Ceci n'est pas un fait divers Collection 336 p. May 2013 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 ?: Russian (Geolos), Spanish (Spain: Alianza), German (Arche), Korean (Golden Bough). 6
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FRANCOIS SAINTONGE
Dolfi et Marilyn Dolfi and Marilyn 300 p. January 2013 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. Foreign rights sold: German (C. Bertelsmann)
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SYLVIE AYMARD
C’est une occupation sans fin que d’être vivant The Endless Occupation of Living 220 p. February 2013 What’s the best way to live one’s life? This book attempts to answer the question through the touching character of Anna, a woman on the lookout for a happiness she’s unable to grab a hold of and who refuses the life imposed on her. Anna dies at forty years old, strangled on a jogging path during her morning run – a violent death that goes unsolved. Just what did this young woman’s life comprise? When she was a child, Anna’s parents owned a restaurant and paid her little attention; and as she was left to herself, she grew up on her own. Her desire to escape this life leads to dramatic events that bring her family to the brink of ruin. Anna understands nothing of the world of adults, of their cowardice before reality. After her little brother Noé accidentally drowns, an incident for which her mother holds her responsible, Anna is sent off to live with a distant cousin in Paris. Anna makes a fresh start with Luce, a childless man-eater, an insatiable smoker, and a chaotic, joyful optimist who oversees the young girl’s education. For some years, the two of them become very close. In the ’70s, Anna finds a job, moves into her own apartment, and looks after Edgar, her second brother, a pianist she barely knows who one day shows up in her apartment. Anna also builds a rewarding friendship with Lilly, who asks for nothing in return. Anna awaits the miracle that will allow her to truly begin her life: the love of a man. Literature is a kind of treasure hunt for Sylvie Aymard: she tracks her characters – from the humblest to the most vile – in order to give us this book in the form of a musical fugue, a novel about family and the meaning of life. Sylvie Aymard was born in 1954. She writes stories, studies Fine Arts, and exhibits her visual work. In 2006, she wrote her first novel, Courir dans les bois sans désemparer, which won the Prix Librecourt, then wrote Du Silence sur les mains in 2008 and La vie lente des hommes in 2010. C’est une occupation sans fin que d’être vivant is her fourth novel.
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SAMUEL BLUMENFELD
Au nom de la loi Wanted: Dead or Alive 180 p. April 2013
In November 1980, Steve McQueen succumbed to cancer. He was 50 years old. Nothing destined this violent brawler and inveterate skirt-chaser to become an actor, but he did, and then left a mythology intact… as well as thousands of fans, orphans of their idol. Among them is a young man from the Parisian suburbs, the author’s alter ego, whose life flickers at the same moment. Who wouldn’t have wanted to be Steve McQueen? Who wouldn’t have wanted to have the allure of the man nicknamed “The King of Cool”? Remember the panoramic shot in The Thomas Crown Affaire when the actor and Faye Dunaway share a long, sensual kiss. Remember Michel Legrand’s music (The Windmills of your Mind), the race on the beach and Josh Randall’s blue eyes in Wanted: Dead or Alive (1958-1961), the television series that launched Steve McQueen to stardom, and from which Samuel Blumenthal’s novel takes its title in several senses. An angry only child, having never known his father, a champion driver behind the wheel of a Jaguar or a Porsche, a lover of speed and danger, women and alcohol, martial arts and drugs – The King of Cool happily disregarded the law, even the law of Hollywood. And here he is, reincarnated. In November 1980, the son of Isaac and Hannah Bergelson, a bespectacled young Jewish man living an adventureless life in the suburbs of Paris, hears Roger Gicquel announce the actor’s death in Ciudad Juárez following his battle with cancer and the world falls apart. This novel tells of the reconstitution of a blended family – that of the Bergelsons, caught between failures and the destinies they desired, and that of Steve McQueen – in an acerbic nostalgia and humor equaling Philip Roth’s first books. Born in 1963, Samuel Blumenfeld became a journalist and film critic for the magazine Les Inrockuptibles and then reporter for Le Monde after earning a doctorate in Linguistics in the United States. Au Nom de la Loi is his second book, following L’Homme qui voulait être Prince. Rights sold for L’Homme qui voulait être Prince: Polish (Swiat Ksiazky) 9
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PASCAL BRUCKNER
La Maison des Anges House of Angels 300 p. January 2013 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. Well, almost normal. 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, and no one can proclaim himself the avenger of cleanliness, at war with misery and those who incarnate it. Antonin gets himself hired by Isolde de Hauteluce, a female version of Abbé Pierre and all-around 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. Foreign rights sold: Romanian (Trei), Russian (Limbakh) Rights sold for previous titles : German (Aufbau, Beltz, Siedler), Arabic (Saudi Arabia: Obeikan), Portuguese (Brazil: Bertrand Brasil, Rocco; Portugal: Noticias Editura, Europa America), Bulgarian (Gloria Mundi, Liubomadrie), Chinese (China: East China Normal Up, Sea Sky; Taiwan: Athena Press), Korean (Arte Books, Dongmoonsun, Jakkajungsin, Mujintree Co. Ltd, Munhakdongne, Vega Books Co), Croatian (Algoritam D.O.O, Dhk, Nakladni Zavod Matice), Spanish (Spain: Anagrama, Ariel, Tusquets), English (United States: Algora, Princeton University Press; United Kingdom: Dedalus, Polity Press), Greek (Patakis), Hungarian (Europa Konyvkiado), Italian (Ugo Guanda), Japanese (Hosei University Press), Lituanian (Tyto Alba), Norwegian (Arneberg, Vidarforlaget), Dutch (De Bezige Bij, Uitgeverij Boom), Polish (Jagiellonian University.Press), Romanian (Trei, Nemira), Russian (Inostrannaya Literatura, Ivan Limbakh, Zao Machaon, Text), Serbian (Beobook, Sluzbeni Glasnik), Slovak (Kalligram), Slovene (Studentskz Zalozba), Czech (Mlada Fronta, Motto), Turkish (Ayrinti Yayinlari, Yapi Kredi Kultur Sanat), Ukrainian (Ecem Media Ukraine Office, Grani-T)
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STEPHANE DENIS
Les Dormeurs The Sleepers 144 p. March 2013 What do we know about Switzerland? Well, it remains one of the largest and most seductive financial centers in the world – it is also one of the most opaque and now finds itself under mounting pressure from its European neighbors as well as the United States. Stéphane Denis’ latest novel offers us a ferocious, gripping portrait of this paradise for the “super rich”. Philip Julius, having settled in Geneva after leaving Paris in a hurry, is a specialist in wealth management and the transferring of funds. He is on the verge of obtaining a Swiss passport thanks to friends in high places when the director of the Beau Rivage Hotel makes him an offer: occupy the house on the lake belonging to the mysterious Anton Beucle in exchange for a hefty sum. Meanwhile, the renowned old lawyer René Simon, with whom Philip has partnered, wants to secure one of those anonymous accounts called “the sleepers of the lake”… In a Switzerland burdened by doubt and international pressures, a great share of the French billionaire Charlotte Brune’s inheritance is at stake. And, going from Cyprus to Zurich, from Basel to Singapore, Philip will discover that he is being manipulated. Stéphane Denis has written over twenty books, including Les événements de 67 (Prix Roger Nimier), Sisters (Prix Interallié), a trilogy entitled Histoire de France, and several wildly successful essays and investigative books (La chute de la maison Giscard and Le roman de l'argent).
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PIERRE DUCROZET
La Vie qu’on voulait The Life We Wanted 220 p. April 2013 With this second novel, Pierre Ducrozet confirms his talent by painting the portrait of a generation – his own. In a Europe that hasn’t kept its promises, five friends in their thirties try to escape from reality. That is, until the death of one violent shakes the rest of them. La vie qu’on voulait depicts a romanticism that refuses to surrender to disappointment and renunciation. Théo, Éva, Lou, Manel and Camille were in their 20s in the 1990s. They dreamed of enchanting the world, and that the world would enchant them. Lautréamont and Rimbaud held no secrets for them, nor did the idea of changing society. The years passed. Scattered between London, Paris, Berlin, and Barcelona, each of them entered their thirties and dealt with failed dreams in their own way. They all adjusted, with the exception of Manel, the black angel of the group, who drifted into a violent life. The novel begins with the discovery of his bloody corpse on the banks of the Seine. The others try to figure out just what happened. Disappointments, memories, and fears repressed over the years reawaken. Here is the story of a group of friends – what it has become and what it will become as it revolves around a nihilistic hero who gives his former companions an opportunity to spend one last season in hell. Drugs, nightlife, travel, art, music, crime – all these ways to flirt with the infinite come together in a mad rush that carries with it the bitter taste of dead dreams. In a vivid, rhythmic, and mesmerizing prose, Pierre Ducrozet tells the story of five young Europeans as they undergo the last rite of passage of a generation that doesn’t want to let go of its youth. Pierre Ducrozet was born in 1982. His first novel, Requiem pour Lola Rouge (2010), was noted by critics and won him the Prix de la Vocation 2011. Author of three children’s books, he currently lives in Paris, after having lived in Barcelona, Madrid, and Berlin.
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CLAIRE LEGENDRE Vérité et Amour Truth and Love 304 p. March 2013 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 for previous titles: German (Deutscher Taschenbuch Verlag)
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ROGER MAGINI
Ilitch, mort ou vif Ilyich, Dead or Alive 140 p. March 2013 While a man lives his last hours, his best friend mitigates the difficulty of his dying by telling him a fantasized story of Lenin’s life. Ilitch, mort ou vif is a poignant story of friendship by a brilliant author of world literature, published in France for the first time here. Charlie Boy is suffering from a fatal disease. His best friend accompanies him in his last moments, not by consoling him with lies, but by telling him a story. And what a story it is – the story of Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov! Charlie Boy was a militant communist in his youth and Lenin remained a kind of old acquaintance for him, so his friend tells him a made-up story about the Communist leader, combining true events and revelatory fantastic capers. Who would have believed that Lenin was still alive in a dark room in the Kremlin in 1968? That a nurse brought him packets of chestnuts? That Lenin was told about the history of the USSR following his “death”? And that learning of Stalin’s absolute power, the Moscow trials, and the execution of his closest friends, the mortified Lenin decided to go visit his own mummy? A fantastic variation of a scenario in the vein of “Good Bye Lenin!” and written with brilliant style, the worlds of Charlie Boy and Vladimir Ilyich echo one another in this profoundly original novel that brings together historiographic virtuosity and deep emotion. While the resuscitated double in the Kremlin allows the author access to the intimacy of the figure who has been disfigured by myths, Ilitch, mort ou vif is before all else a novel about friendship. Its lesson, beyond its imagination and brio, is that of the evocative power of literature. Roger Magini, born in 1945, has long lived in Québec. He spent thirty-odd years as a publisher and has since devoted himself to writing. A lover of Mexican culture, he has published thirteen books in Québec since his first novel, Entre corneilles et Indiens (1972). His novel Quenamican, published in 2005, won the Prix des Écrivains Francophones d’Amérique (French-language Writers of America Prize).
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STÉPHANE OSMONT
Éléments incontrôlés Uncontrolled Elements 380 p. January 2013 A heartbreaking love story set against a backdrop of revolutionary ideals in Italy during the Years of Lead. Stéphane Osmont has written an engrossing novel around the most virulent and violent wave of terrorism in Europe in the past decades. In the early 2000s, the narrator receives a phone call from Fedora, his childhood love: she is getting out of an Italian prison after a twenty year sentence for terrorism. Flashback to 1968: the narrator is 8 years old. Raised in a libertarian “community” in the suburbs of Paris (where he met Fedora for the first time), he experiences 1968 and then the violent protests within the Left of the ’70s, while protected by a gang of neighborhood thugs a childhood friend has come to lead. As a student in a prestigious Parisian high school, he becomes more and more involved in “revolutionary action.” Beginning as a Trotskyist, he gradually moves toward “autonomous” splinter groups. Trained by Fedora in Italy, he participates in robberies, then becomes a liaison between the real trans-alpine armed revolution and the French “revolutionary comedy” scene, and only barely avoids becoming a murderer. In 1981, the ascension of the Socialist candidate to the Presidency of the French Republic and the moral support of a minister he has known since childhood help the narrator to reintegrate into society while his companions have a much more difficult time. This naturalist tale amazingly reproduces the flavor of an era: the cultural effervescence, the drugs, the gurus, music, fanzines, and all of those utopian aspirations which, while ultimately unsuccessful, participated in creating the world in which we now live. Stéphane Osmont has published a trilogy of novels with Grasset inspired by Marx (Le Capital, Le Manifeste, L'Idéologie), the first volume of which, Le Capital, was brought to the screen in November 2012 by CostaGavras. Rights sold for previous titles: Italian (Rizzoli) 15
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ANNE SIBRAN
Dans la montagne d’argent In the Silver Mountain 240 p. February 2013 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 titles: French (Belgium: Dupuis)
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JACQUES TOURNIER
Le marché d’Aligre The Aligre Market 80 p. March 2013 The great writer and translator Jacques Tournier finally returns to the novel. With modesty and emotion, Le marché d'Aligre analyzes the bonds that unite a man who sees death approaching and a young woman in the ambition of youth. Jacques Tournier, now over 80 years old, presents us here with his most autobiographical and most beautiful novella. Forty years separate them. Marie and the narrator share the same passion for music. She wants to become a costume designer. He is a writer. He meets Marie thanks to Vermeer. Little by little, through time and space, a special friendship unfolds and a sincere affection unites them. Over 60 years old, the writer finds in her a family – the one he never had. He becomes her confident, and accompanies her, silent as a shadow, in her sorrows and her joys. Jacques Tournier, translator of Carson McCullers and Francis Scott Fitzgerald, has published, among others, La maison déserte, Le dernier des Mozart, A la recherche de Carson McCullers, La maison de thé, and Zelda. Rights sold for Zelda: Romanian (Echinox Editura)
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Editions Grasset & Fasquelle
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Heidi Warneke –
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PHILIPPE VILAIN
La Femme infidèle The Unfaithful Wife 160p. January 2013 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 Book Gremese)
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TANCRÈDE VOITURIEZ
L’Invention de la pauvreté The Invention of Poverty 464 p. February 2013 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.
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Editions Grasset & Fasquelle
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[email protected] Commercial Fiction
SAPHIA AZZEDDINE
Comment épouser une millionnaire How to Marry a Millionaire Woman 240 p. May 2013 Following the highly acclaimed Confidences à Allah and Mon père est une femme de ménage, Saphia Azzeddine returns with a black romantic comedy. Comment épouser une millionnaire features a young, apparently ideal couple on the day of their wedding. Through their voices and the voices of their guests, we see their all too perfect image begin to crack… A novel written in a chorus of voices, Comment épouser une millionnaire depicts the flipside of outward appearances that are all glitter and pretense with vicious humor. What if you married a millionaire? On a magical beach on a private island in the Seychelles, Philip, a personable young man, mistakes a swimsuit belonging to a ravishing idler, Tatiana, for a parrot fish. And so begins the story of their romance, which has all the appearances of being a modern fairytale – he is handsome, she’s rich. But their fairytale soon turns into a theatrical comedy that wavers between glamor and social satire. Structured like a musical round, each character vividly describes the couple on their way to the altar. This novel dismantles an upper-upper-crust society that extends from Los Angeles to Paris, Italy, and Geneva – a society of selfishness, Botox, alcohol, women-only trips, shopping on the other side of the world, and above all, misleading appearances. Is happiness at the end of the road? Can the poor have romance, too? Can the ambitious manage to seize their dreams? Saphia Azzeddine is a writer and screenwriter. She has published, among others, La Mecque-Pukhet and the bestseller Confidences à Allah. Saphia Azzeddine also wrote and directed Mon père est une femme de ménage.
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[email protected] Commercial Fiction
GÉRALDINE MAILLET
J’ai vécu de vous attendre I Lived to Wait for You 242 p. January 2013 This novel tells the story of a mid-life crisis triggered by the eruption of the Icelandic volcano Eyjafjöll – it is the story of a man who let himself be swept up in the flow of life without ever thinking twice about it, and who suddenly finds himself forced to swim against the tide in a nostalgic chamber drama with a startling climax… In 2010, the eruption of the Icelandic volcano Eyjafjöll blocked all air traffic over Europe. This is the backdrop of the story in which our English hero, George Swington, finds himself stuck in Paris when he is supposed to be celebrating his fiftieth birthday with his friends in Great-Britain. An overworked realtor with two children, George has fallen into and out of love, but has never really taken the time to think on himself. Holed up in a hotel room for three days, his life, his memories, and all his personal chaos roll past him in a jumble interwoven with humor and drollery. For the first time, he remembers his childhood, his bygone ambitions, his father’s infidelity, and his mother’s resignation without the weight of unhappiness. But more important still, he also remembers the women he has known – those he left and those he failed to hold onto. In three days, George Swington undoes and rebuilds himself. And, at the moment his distress reaches its climax, someone knocks at the door… Hence the title of this novel, borrowed from a line of verse by Paul Valéry: “J’ai vécu de vous attendre.” Géraldine Maillet ended her modeling career to begin writing in 1998. She has since penned nine novels, including Presque Top Model, Le Monde à ses pieds (adapted for television), and Il ferait quoi Tarantino à ma place? Her first feature film, After, is slated for release in early 2013. Rights sold for previous titles: Russian (Ripol Classic)
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[email protected] First novel
CLEO LE-TAN
Une famille A Family 180 p. May 2013 With this first and largely autobiographical book praised by her elders Frédéric Beigbeder and Simon Liberati, Cléo le Tan has written a well-mannered Bildungsroman in style and content which, nonetheless, isn’t without malice or cruelty. The Du-Vrês, an unusual Parisian family, have always lived in “a kind of unbalanced balance.” Between a famous illustrator father who prefers bringing his children to the antique shop than to the park and a selfish and capricious mother, Homère, Pénélope, and Wilo have to go through all sorts of acrobatics. Until the day when the eccentric father announces that he is leaving his wife of 27 years to live with an African woman… who is exactly 27 years old. From then on, Wilo lingers about, searching for some semblance of balance: from the apartment on the Rue des Filles Saint-Thomas, which her mother chases her out of with letters of attorney after having dragged her on the ground by her hair, to the Rue Fizeau, where she and her sister take refuge, and from the immense empty bedroom that her father lets her use in his new African-styled home on the Place du Palais Bourbon to the cupboard in London where she goes to school… But she’s seen worse, after all. A bittersweet chronicle of a curious, unstable family, a map of privileged Paris, an un-settled young girl’s confidence – this family pulled between love and hate sucks us into their madcap world. Cléo Le-Tan, 27 years old, grew up in Paris before moving to London to continue her studies. She speaks five languages and directs documentaries.
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[email protected] First novel
MUTT-LON
Ceux qui sortent dans la nuit Those Who Come Out in the Night 160 p. April 2013 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.
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Editions Grasset & Fasquelle
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[email protected] Historical novel
ARNAUD DELALANDE
Notre espion d’Amérique Our American Spy 416 p. February 2013 The third installment of the adventures of the Venetian secret agent Pietro Viravolta a.k.a. the Black Orchid, Notre Espion d’Amérique is a great, colorful epic. A cocktail of humor, action, and adventure, this historical thriller teeming with spies and theatrical twists recounts the secret history of the birth of America from an exceptionally original angle – that of the “cold war” taking place between the French and British secret services from 1776 to 1783, when the American people had just begun to take their fate into their own hands. This is the story of Viravolta, a veritable “18th century James Bond” who reported to the King of France, as he is thrown into the turmoil of the American Revolutionary War alongside La Fayette, George Washington, and the other American revolutionaries. Here, we’re transported to a revolutionary moment that, even before the French Revolution, would go on to change the world by establishing – for the first time ever – the greatest principles affirmed by humanity: the universal right to life, liberty, and equality. From the anterooms of Versailles to the Great Plains, the King of England’s entourage to the inner circles of Washington, and the war of the spies to the epic battles on American soil, it’s as though you’re there to witness the birth of a nation – and perhaps of a new world: our own. Arnaud Delalande is forty years old and the author of eight novels, including Le Piège de Dante, les Fables de Sang and Le Jardin des Larmes. He has also published a dozen comic books and is currently working on writing several films. Often compared to Arturo Perez-Reverte, his work has been translated in twenty countries. Rights sold for previous titles: German (Droemer Knaur Verlag, Lubbe Verlag), Portuguese (Brazil: Distribuidora Record; Portugal: Edicoes Asa), Bulgarian (Uniscorp Printing), English (Canada: Penguin Books Canada; United Kingdom: Weidenfeld & Nicolson), Chinese (China: Citic Publishing House; Taiwan: Crown Publishing), Korean (Hwang-Mae Publishers), Croatian (AGM), Spanish (Random House Mondadori Sa), Greek (Harlenic Hellas), Hungarian (Gabo Konyvkiodo), Hebrew (Kinneret Zmora Dvir), Italian (Garzanti Libri Spa), Dutch (De Bezige Bij), Romanian (RAO International), Russian (AST Publishing Group, Hemiro Limited), Serbian (Laguna), Czech (Albatros) 24
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[email protected] True Crime
JEAN-BAPTISTE HARANG
Bordeaux-Vintimille Bordeaux-Ventimiglia Ceci n’est pas un fait divers 140 p. January 2013 One November evening in 1983, a young Algerian is beaten by three legionnaires and thrown out of the window of the train that is carrying him toward the South of France. Did no one see it or did they just not do anything? In this short and forceful novel published in the Ceci n’est pas un fait divers collection, Jean-Baptiste Harang retraces the story of this dark episode and plunges us into the heart of the French Foreign Legion. On the night bridging the 13th and 14th of November 1983, a man is thrown alive from a moving train as it travels from Bordeaux to Ventimiglia. The man is Rachid Abdou, a young Algerian on his way to Marseille and then on to Oran. But three men on their way to Aubagne, where they will sign up for the French Foreign Legion, savagely attack him, stabbing him and throwing him from the window. Was what happened a racist crime? Gratuitous violence? Uncontrolled drunkenness? From the facts to the criminal court, Jean-Baptiste Harang narrates the victim’s final hours, the assassins’ personal histories, everything that was known before judgment, and the questions that remain unanswered – why did three young men who did not know each other lynch a stranger of their own age? Why did nobody on that packed train intervene? Why did Rachid Abdou die? The author, who covered the trial for the newspaper Libération, where he was working at the time of the affair, passes no moral judgment and delivers a striking text that raises some similar questions to another title in the collection, Est-ce ainsi que les femmes meurent by Didier Decoin. Born in 1949, Jean-Baptiste Harang was long employed as a journalist for the newspaper Libération. He is currently an editorialist for Le Magazine littéraire and has published Le Contraire du coton (1993), Les Spaghettis d’Hitler (1994), Gros chagrin (1996), Théodore disparaît (1998), La Chambre de la Stella (2006) and Nos cœurs vaillants (2010, Prix Jean Giono) with Grasset.
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Editions Grasset & Fasquelle
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[email protected] Short stories
CLAIRE CASTILLON
Les couplets Couplets 220 p. April 2013 Eminently skilled in the art of sketching our little lives and our great smallnesses, Claire Castillon returns with a new collection of short stories that sound out and dissect the mechanics of the couple, many of which echo the time-worn songs we ourselves have lived. It’s funny, corrosive, and delicious! Claire Castillon’s characters speak for themselves. Do we know the tune? Here are a few verses. The refrain of marriage has already punctuated our lives, did we want not to hear it? Between suffocation, collective solitude, break-ups, virtual sex, sexless love, large families, and exemplary flaws, Claire Castillon has written a song of truths. Claire Castillon is the author of several novels and short story collections, including Le Grenier (2000), Insecte (2006), On n'empêche pas un petit cœur d'aimer (2007), Dessous, c'est l'enfer (2008), Les cris (2010), Les Bulles (2010), and Les Merveilles (2012). Rights sold for Les Merveilles: Dutch (Ambo Anthos) Insecte has been translated into 18 languages (Catalan, Chinese, Czech, Danish, Dutch, English, Finnish, German, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Polish, Portuguese – Brazilian and Portuguese – Romanian, Russian, Swedish)
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[email protected] Unreleased Writings
MARIE CARDINAL
Inédits Unreleased Writings 262 p. April 2013
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 titles by Marie Cardinal: Danish (Lindhardt Ringhof), English (The Women’s Press), German (Deutscher Taschenbuch Verlag, Maeir Otto Verlag, Rowohlt Verlag), Greek (Kedros), Italian (RCS LIBRI), Norwegian (Gyldendal Norsk Forlag), Romanian (Trei), Swedish (Trevi).
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[email protected] Récits/Narratives
JACQUES CHESSEX
Hosanna 128 p. April 2013 Between narrative and meditation, Hosanna gives us the best of Jacques Chessex: a magnificent text on death, forgetting, faith, and God’s presence in everyday life. The narrator attends a neighbor’s funeral and describes the range of emotions that take hold of him over the course of the ceremony. The writer’s spiritual and prose talents are in full force as a flood of thoughts flow through his meditation on the happiness and shame of surviving, and the certainty of this survival’s all too brief extent. He also writes in dazzlingly superb images of the return of the past – of a madman who haunts the streets of Ropraz, the face of a young man who committed suicide, a lover and consolation to the narrator, and more… A superbly written posthumous novel in which we find the author of L’Ogre at the height of his talent. Jacques Chessex was a novelist, poet, and painter who ranks among the greatest writers in the French language. Among other works, he wrote L'Ogre (1973, Prix Goncourt), Monsieur (2001), Le vampire de Ropraz (2007), Un juif pour l'exemple (2008), Le Dernier Crâne de M. de Sade (2010) and L’Interrogatoire (2011). Rights sold for previous titles: Bulgarian (Sonm), Dutch (Meulenhoff), English (US: Bitter Lemon Press), German (Hanser / Nagel & Kimche, Lenos Verlag), Hebrew (Hakibutz Hameucad), Italian (Fazi), Romanian (Lider Editura).
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THADEE KLOSSOWSKI DE ROLA
Vie Rêvée Dreamed Life 284 p. March 2013 Vie rêvée, or the discovery of a dream world: in this journal at once worldly and poetic, Thadée Klossowski de Rola, son of the great painter Balthus, tells of his golden youth spent in the company of the most iconic figures of the 1970s. 1965: a breathtakingly beautiful young man begins to keep a journal. He loves literature and parties. One of Yves Saint Laurent’s close friends, he enjoys the smart set that surrounds him – the famous, the warm, and the funny: Günther Sachs, Ezra Pound, Andy Warhol, Helmut Berger, Hélène Rochas, Mick Jagger, and more. And then there are the impossible girls – his heart beats for one in particular: Loulou de la Falaise, soon to become Yves Saint Laurent’s famous muse. Thadée Klossowski de Rola was born in Switzerland in 1944. Having supervised the six volumes of the Œuvres complètes de Georges Bataille, he has also published his parents’ correspondence (Balthus, Correspondance amoureuse avec Antoinette de Watteville). Vie rêvée is his first book.
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LORETTE NOBECOURT
Patagonie intérieure An Inner Patagonia 112 p. May 2013 Lorette Nobécourt leads us to Patagonia with the unique, sensual, and poetic writing for which she is known. This voyage to the edge of the world is also an occasion for introspection at the far reaches of an unknown region that lies within each of us, it is an occasion for a rediscovery of what the author calls her “inner Patagonia.” In December 2010, Lorette Nobécourt set out on her own for Chili in order to realize an old dream of one day going to Patagonia. Is there a world at the end of the world? Is there a secret to be discovered in these untamed lands where man does not so much live in nature as nature tolerates man? Does such a mystery reveal itself in the silence of thousand-year-old glaciers, on the deserted roads that pose the true question of travel? Is it about creating an “elsewhere” in order to re-enchant the “here”? What quest involves this need to depart? From Valparaiso to Ushuaia, through the Patagonian fjords and Tierra del Fuego, by boat, by foot, and by bus, from Puerto Natales to Puerto Williams, the last inhabited village before Cape Horn, Lorette Nobécourt brings us to the edge of the world, where the contours of this inner Patagonia within us all begin to reveal themselves through unbelievable landscapes – a wild and open space whose access roads and intimate geography the author gracefully reveals. 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)
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LORETTE NOBECOURT
La Clôture des merveilles: Une vie d’Hildegarde de Bingen The Enclosure of Marvels: A Life of Hildegard of Bingen 160 p. May 2013 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)
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DELPHINE RENARD
Tu choisiras la vie You Will Choose Life 336 p. March 2013 February 1962, a photo in a French newspaper deeply moved the entire country – a little girl with a disfigured face, Delphine Renard, was the victim of an attack targeting André Malraux, a minister in General de Gaulle’s government when France was in the process of ending its 130year-long colonization of Algeria. This touching book is her testimony, a stupefying and exemplary story of resilience. The author remembers: fifty years ago, a bomb in her bedroom. She was barely five years old. The bomb, planted on her window sill by OAS dissidents, was meant for the writer André Malraux, with whom she shared the house. Malraux was not at home that day. But Delphine Renard was, playing as she waited to go back to school after lunch. Wounded by the bombing, she was disfigured – lost one eye, then the second. The child became a woman who worked to rebuild herself, to move forward, and to become engaged in life – and this thanks to painting and music, but above all, psychoanalysis and writing. Without anger and without resentment, Delphine Renard tells us her story in this poignant and strangely optimistic book, a tremendous lesson of hope for us all. Delphine Renard is a psychologist and psychoanalyst.
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MATHIEU TERENCE
La Belle The Beauty 112 p. March 2013 The Beauty, yes, but which beauty? Death, who has haunted the author from a very young age. The temptation of death came back last year, and so he decided to leave for Granada. By taking his distance and by writing, Mathieu Terence succeeds in looking Death in the face – taunting it, even. And he is reborn in this forceful and magnificently written story, this hymn to life. Mathieu Terence asks the question “who is my death?” in this short and original autobiographical text. He answers by sketching the different faces that have chased and tormented him since childhood. He narrates a youth, a passage into manhood, a melancholy period, and how art and love proved the surest means of negotiating these times. This is the magnificent, luminous story of a rebirth. Mathieu Terence has published novels, essays, and poems, including Fiasco, Journal d’un cœur sec, Maitre-chien, Technosmose, and L’Autre vie.
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MARIE CARDINAL
Les Mots pour le dire et autres romans The Words to Say It and Other Novels 1984 p. April 2013 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 titles by Marie Cardinal: Danish (Lindhardt Ringhof), English (The Women’s Press), German (Deutscher Taschenbuch Verlag, Maeir Otto Verlag, Rowohlt Verlag), Greek (Kedros), Italian (RCS LIBRI), Norwegian (Gyldendal Norsk Forlag), Romanian (Trei), Swedish (Trevi).
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FRANTZ FUNCK-BRENTANO
La cour du Roi-Soleil The Court of the Sun King 340 p. June 2013 La Cour du Roi Soleil recounts the origins, establishment, and workings of the most prestigious court in Europe: Versailles. A work of reference on the Grand Siècle. To understand the splendor, the hysteria even, of Versailles, Frantz Funck Brentano goes beyond the simple description of its workings – he studies origins and side-issues: etiquette under Louis XIII, the evolution of manners, the hierarchy of the nobility… He shows how the abstraction formed by codes as arbitrary as they were venerated invaded the intimacy of courtesans to the point where couples would follow the rules of precedence! La Cour du Roi Soleil is the work of a truly talented and thoroughly imaginative writer. The testimonies and anecdotes are plentiful and at each page we wonder whether it will be the Duke of Orleans, Voltaire, or Saint-Simon we’ll meet next. Welcome among the ghosts of Versailles. Frantz Funck Brentano (1862-1947), a graduate of the Ecole des Chartes, worked as a librarian at the Bibliothèque de l'Arsenal and a professor at the Collège de France. He was a leading expert on the history of the French Ancien Régime and also authored La Prise de la Bastille (1899) and L'Affaire du collier (1901).
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JEAN-AUGUSTE-DOMINIQUE INGRES
Ecrits sur l’art Writings on Art Preface by Adrien Goetz 240 p. May 2013 Ingres’ genius jumps off the page in this collection of writings from the 19th century. Having inspired some of the greatest artists from Degas to Picasso, these texts are prefaced here by author, art historian, and Ingres specialist Adrien Goetz. Ingres, the great painter, was also a teacher, and the maxims recorded by his students tell us of his doctrine and of those he admired. Indeed, “Monsieur Ingres” had an immense influence. This book contains praise for the line’s purity, for drawing, and for drawing exercises as well as less anticipated considerations on color and emotion in painting, and a more nuanced “Ingrist” philosophy than posterity has retained. Ingres was also a musician, and he highly praised Mozart and Haydn, an ardent admirer of Raphael. Does his attempt to synthesize the pure beauty of the Greeks and the masters of the Renaissance make him modern? Reading this collection, we get to share in the spirit, culture, references, and enthusiasm of the students of the 19th century’s greatest artist’s workshop. Adrien Goetz has published two books devoted to Ingres: Ingres Collages (2005) and La Dormeuse de Naples (2004). He is also the author of Intrigue à l’anglaise (2007), Intrigue à Versailles (2009) Le Coiffeur de Chateaubriand (2010) and Intrigue à Venise (2012). Jean-Auguste Dominique Ingres (1810-1867) is one of the greatest French painters of the 19th century. His Grand Odalisque, his Napoleon I on his Imperial Throne, his portrait of Louis-François Bertin, and his Turkish Bath number among the masterpieces of Western painting.
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FRANCOIS MAURIAC
La Pharisienne The Pharisee 224 p. April 2013 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 UK), Russian (AST publishers)
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PAUL MORAND
Champions du monde World Champions 180 p. May 2013 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 Le Repos du guerrier The Warrior’s Repose 220 p. June 2013 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 (Anagrama,), Czech (Motto), Dutch (Contact), German (Surhkamp), Greek (Patakis Publications), Japanese (Shincho-sha), Romanian (Albatros)
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PIERRE SCHOENDERFFER L’Adieu au roi Farewell to the King 280 p. March 2013 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
Les Désorientés The Lost 544 p. September 2012 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. The milk-white mountains of his homeland are unchanged. 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 Naïm, Bilal, Albert, and Ramez; he remembers 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, having averted his gaze for quarter of a century. 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). Major international literary voice, he was granted the prestigious Prince of Asturias Award for Literature in 2010. “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 “His new book, Les Désorientés, marks his return to the novel with fanfare. It is a very endearing book.”Lire “A big, exquisite novel about friendship, betrayal, nostalgia, ideals, politics, and the world as it is…” Page des Libraires Foreign rights sold: Portuguese (Brazil: Bertrand), Greek (Patakis), Hungarian (Europa), German (Arche), Italian (Bompiani), Lebanese (Dar Al Farabi), Dutch (De Geus), Norwegian (Pax), Serbian (Laguna), Castilian and Catalan (Alianza), Turkish (Yapi Kredi).
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COLOMBE SCHNECK
La Réparation Reparation 224 p. August 2012 Longlisted for Prix Femina/ Longlisted for Prix Interallié 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). “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 Foreign rights sold: Chinese (simplified: Shanghai 99), German (Random House for Luchterhand/BTB), Italian (Einaudi), Polish (Prószyński Media).
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CÉDRIC VILLANI
Théorème Vivant Living Theorem 288 p. August 2012 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. “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 Foreign rights sold: German (Fischer Verlag), Italian (Rizzoli), Japanese (Hayakawa), Korean (Bookhouse), Dutch (Arbeiderspers), Romanian (Humanitas), Serbian (Center for the Promotion of Science), English: UK, Australia and NZ (Random House for The Bodley Head), USA (Farrar, Straus & Giroux).
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BERNARD-HENRI LEVY
Les Aventures de la veritié : Art et Philosophie, une histoire. Forms of Thought: Painting and Philosophy, A Narrative 440 p. May 2013 For a year and a half, Bernard-Henri Levy 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 Levy 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 Levy explored private collections and museums in France and abroad to dig up masterpieces – often littleknown and virtually unseen by the public – that will be 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: its theoretical principles and Bernard-Henri Levy’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: aesthetic and technical problems, portraits of artists and collectors, moments of amazement and of deception – everything. The final part of the book 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 titles: 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 Publishing Co), Korean (Golden Owl, Sungkyunkwan University), Norwegian (Press), Polish (Wydawnictwo Sic), Portuguese (Brazil: Companhia das Letras, A Girafa; Portugal: Asa, Livros do Brasil), Romanian (Nemira), Turkish (Alkim).
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BRUNO PATINO AND JEAN-FRANCOIS FOGEL
La Condition numérique The Digital Condition 240 p. April 2013 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 (Oficina del autor)
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BENOITE GROULT
Ainsi soit Olympe de Gouges Such Was Olympe de Gouges 228 p. January 2013 Why should we revisit and reconsider Olympe de Gouges now? What makes her a contemporary figure? Benoîte Groult offers answers with this beautiful homage. In 1791, Olympe de Gouges was the first person in France to formulate a “Declaration of Women’s Rights,” which advanced all the points implied by the principal of equality between the sexes. She dared to call for all the same liberties (sexual liberties included), the right to divorce and free love, as well as the defense of teenage mothers and bastard children, understanding that the attainment of civil rights would be impossible without simultaneously launching an attack on patriarchal law. She paid for her devotion to this ideal with her life. Indeed, the Revolutionaries performed a symbolic act in 1793, when they led her to the guillotine: her death was equally the temporary death of feminist ideas. Born in 1920, Benoîte Groult is the author of a large body of work and a founder of modern feminism. Among her many publications, she has written Ainsi soit-elle (1975), Les Trois quarts du temps (1983), Les Vaisseaux du cœur (1988), La Touche étoile (2006) and Histoire d’une évasion (1997). Rights sold for previous titles: German (Berlin Verlag, Droemer Knaur Verlag), Portuguese (Brazil: Distribuidora Record), Bulgarian (Gutenbergova Galaksija), Chinese (China: Shangai 99, Shangai Sanhui; Taiwan: Aquarius Pub. Co, Business Weekly), Korea (Munidang Publishing Co), Danish (Forum), Spanish (Spain: Alianza Editorial, Suma De Letras), English (United States: Other Press LLC; United Kingdom: Penguin Group), Greek (Livani Publishing Organiz, Modern Times), Hungarian (Magyar Konyvklub), Icelandic (Frodi Boka & Bladautgafa), Hebrew (Kinneret Zmora Dvir), Italian (Longanesi & C. S.P.A.), Lithuanian (Tyto Alba), Norwegian (Arneberg Forlag), Dutch (Uitgeverij Arena), Polish (Foksal Oficyna, Ksiaznica Wydawnictwo), Romanian (Editura Trei), Russian (Makbel Editions), Serbian (Laguna), Swedish (Forum Publishing House), Czech (Praca Editions), Turkish (Varlik Yayinlari)
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MAURIZIO SERRA
Italo Svevo, ou l’antivie Italo Svevo, or Anti-life April 2013 360 p. 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 : Italian (Marsilio Editori), Castilian (Tusquets Editores)
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ELSA CONESA
Margarita Louis-Dreyfus : Enquête sur la femme la plus secrète de France An Investigation into the Most Secretive Woman in France 384 p. March 2013 What is your life like when you are a Russian orphan raised in Leningrad, when you’ve met your husband, the billionaire Robert Louis-Dreyfus, in an airplane flying from Zurich to London, and when nothing has prepared you to inherit a mysterious global empire? From Leningrad to Zurich, from Davos to Paris, from the trading floor to the halls of power, journalist Elsa Conesa has led an investigation into one of the best-kept secrets of the economic world. How could a discreet housewife take the reins of a century-old multinational – a veritable institution in the raw materials sector – and best the barons of the financial establishment? Margarita inherited the strategic intelligence and the visceral sense of her interests from Robert LouisDreyfus, a formidable businessman who bought Adidas and owned the French football club Olympique de Marseille. The orphan become Tsarine, who is inseparable from her little dog, keeps order, but at what price? What is the secret to her success? Elsa Conesa reveals the answers in this thorough and thoroughly exciting investigation. Journalist for Les Echos over the past ten years, 35-year-old Elsa Conesa now heads the budget and tax columns for the newspaper. This is her first book.
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VALERIE FIGNON with MICHEL CYMES and PATRICE ROMEDENNE
Laurent 250 p. June 2013 The summer of 2009 saw the publication of Nous étions jeunes et innocents, the captivating autobiographical book in which Laurent Fignon brought us behind the scenes of cycling. One year later, the famous athlete died from a cancer he had been battling for months with the support of his wife Valérie. Here, she tells of their struggle, their suffering, their feelings of helplessness, and delivers a magnificent homage to the man she loved. This book is a love story. It begins like many love stories do, with an encounter. Laurent Fignon is an emblematic figure in the history of French sports, Valérie is a ravishing young woman. They seduce one another, they fall in love, they get married. But years later, a cancer forms. Laurent decides to fight it. Valérie helps him – how could it be any other way? For 15 months, she is right by his side, at the forefront. She now tells of her emotions and the harsh battle they fought side by side. The story opens with a frightening scene: Laurent Fignon gets a phone call telling him that he is sick while he is driving his car on the highway at 80mph! No matter, he’s solid as a rock… But his initial confidence withers and gives way to doubt. Written by a wounded woman, this deeply felt testimony returns to the things the couple had to face: the illness, the brutality of the treatment, the predatory media, and ever-present fear. The book also gives concrete answers to the questions we all ask ourselves and which we will all have to face one day. Why do doctors make mistakes? What role should a patient’s friends and family play? Is it necessary to have a psychiatrist? Is it imperative to tell one’s family the truth? Alongside Valérie, Michel Cymes, a doctor and well-known television host, presents things in his own way Valérie Fignon was Laurent Fignon’s partner and wife for seven years. Doctor Michel Cymes hosts famous television shows on health. He is also the author of many books, the most recent of which, L'après-cancer, was written with Marina Carrère d'Encausse and Gilles Freyer. Patrice Romedenne is a former senior reporter, an ex-correspondent in Berlin, and a television newscaster. He is also the author of several books. Patrice Romedenne and Michel Cymes have already published two books together: Complètement malades ! (2010) and La sexualité, que d’histoires ! (2011).
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PIERRE SCHOENDERFFER AND PATRICK FORESTIER
La Guerre dans les yeux War in Their Eyes 500 p. March 2013 This book by two great figures of war journalism offers us an enthralling journey into important conflicts of the 20th century. Between the two of them, they have traveled the entire world, covered the major conflicts of the 20th century, and experienced the everyday life of the most important wars. Sent into the Indochinese jungle when he was 24-years-old, Pierre Schoendoerffer has traveled the globe and captured its battles with a movie camera on his shoulder in order to recount war in his books and films. Journalism and photography have enabled Patrick Forestier to follow the same path. Separated by twenty-six years, they are forever bound by their lives under fire. In this posthumous testimony, they confide in one another, share their experiences, and compare two ways of living and writing History-in-action to show what war is and what man is when at war. From the battle of Diên Biên Phu, where Schoendoerffer was taken prisoner, to Argentina, where Patrick Forestier began his career in the fervor of the Falklands War, the two reporters return to their first experiences and their youth, illuminated by the figure of Joseph Kessel, who inspired them to take off in search of adventure: one by sea, one by air. They transport us to the four corners of the world – under the fire of the Afghan Taliban, beneath the Somali sun, and dangerously close to bombs in Lebanon – so we can relive the wars of our times through their eyes; they tell stories of the encounters that changed their lives, the stories of anonymous guides, of the forgotten dead and of loved colleagues; they share their daily lives with us, as well as their analyses and their memories, to communicate the passion of a profession in the service of storytelling. Pierre Schoendoerffer (1928-2012) was a great writer and director whose literary oeuvre includes L'Adieu au roi (Prix Interallié 1969) and Le Crabe-tambour (Grand Prix du Roman de l'Académie française en 1976). Patrick Forestier is a senior reporter for Paris-Match. He is the recipient of a Mumm Prize and a Lazareff Prize. He has already published several books, including Hôtel Palestine - Chronique inattendue de la guerre à Bagdad (2003). Rights sold for previous titles by Pierre Schoendoerffer: Dutch (ECI voor Boeken en Platen), English (Reed International Books), Thai (Namnee Books Co.), Turkish (Telos Publishers)
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NICOLAS GRIMALDI
Les Théorèmes du moi Theorems of the Self 200 p. March 2013 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.
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FRANCOIS JULLIEN
De L’intime: Loin du bruyant Amour On the Intimate: Far from the Clamor of Love 256 p. March 2013 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: from the Iliad to Six Records of a Floating Life by Shen Fu, from Augustine to Montaigne, Madame de La Fayette, and Rousseau, and later Nerval and Stendhal. 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 titles: Arabic (Lebanon: Sud Editions), Bulgarian (Iztok Zapad, LIK), Chinese (Peking University Press), English (UK: Seagull Books), Estonian (Université de Tallin), German (Sequenzia, Merve, Passagen, Turia Kant), Italian (Giulio Einaudi Editore, Il Mulino, Luca Sossella, Raffaelo Cortina), Japanese (Kodonsha Ltd), Korean (Hanul, Dongnyok), Portuguese (Brazilian: Discurso Editorial, Editora 34; Portugal: Instituto Piaget), Russian (Progress-Tradition, Moscow Philosophy Foundation), Spanish (Castilian: Siruela, Arena Libros, Libros Perfil, Bellaterra, El cuenco de Plata, El Hilo de Ariadna), Vietnamese (Editions de Danang). 52
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EMMANUEL LEVINAS
Oeuvres completes Complete Works, Vol. 3 Eros, Literature and Philosophy 416 p. April 2013 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. While Levinas never became a writer, strictly speaking, 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. Written from the early 1920s on, these previously unpublished writings 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. This third volume of the Complete Works of Emmanuel Levinas, composed of his unpublished writings, is published under the supervision of Rodolphe Calin and Catherine Chalier. The academic committee, directed by Jean-Luc Marion, is the same as that which oversaw the first volume, published in October 2009. Rights sold for previous volumes: Italian (Bompiani), Japanese (Hosei UP), Spanish (Castilian: Editorial Trotta)
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MICHEL ONFRAY These two new volumes of La Contre-Histoire 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 8 384 p. January 2013 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 9 448 p. January 2013 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: Korean (Ingan Sarang), Spanish (Spain: Anagrama), Italian (Fazi), Dutch (Mets & Schilt), Portuguese (Brazil: Martins Fontes), Romanian (Nemira), Swedish (Nya Doxa). Rights sold for Le Crépuscule d’une idole : Catalan (Taurus), Czech (Host), German (Knaus), Greek (Exandas), Italian (Ponte Alle Grazie), Korean (Geulhangari), Romanian (Humanitas), Polish (Jacek Santorski And Co), Portuguese (Portugal: Constancia Editores; Brazil: Ediouro Publicacoes), Turkish (Sel Yayincilik). 54
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ANDREI VIERU
Eloge de la vanité In Praise of Vanity 272 p. May 2013 The pianist Andrei Vieru, internationally known for his interpretations of Bach, is also a man of letters. A Romanian writing in French, Vieru’s Eloge de la vanité is a book of moralism that would have been embraced by Cioran himself (who he knew well). Is vanity an evil? The simple act of posing this question is inherently corrosive in an era when the media tries to impose a posture of modesty on artists so as to further diminish them. Supported by numerous illustrations from music, literature, and personal experience, Andrei Vieru delivers a profoundly original essay. From Cioran to Rostropovich, from Bach to Mircea Eliade, from Mozart to Salieri, from the Romanian dissidence to the greatest performers in the world, let us look upon the mirror of our vanities in his lucid company… Pianist and writer Andrei Vieru was born in Bucharest. He settled in Paris shortly before Ceausescu’s fall. His interpretations of Bach’s great works, such as The Well-Tempered Clavier, The Art of Fugue, and The Goldberg Variations, are already mythic recordings. He has published a collection of aesthetic essays, Le gai ecclésiaste (2007). Eloge de la vanité is his second book.
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DELPHINE HORVILLEUR
En tenue d’Eve: Féminin, pudeur et Judaïsme In Eve’s Attire: Modesty, Judaism, and the Feminine 192 p. May 2013 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.
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ANTOINE SFEIR
L’Islam contre l’Islam Islam Against Islam 260 p. January 2013 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. Foreign rights sold: Italian (Enrico Damiani) Rights sold for his previous title: Arabic (Algeria: Sedia) 57
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MICHEL LONGUET
Adresses fantômes Phantom Addresses 110 p. April 2013 Here is a beautiful, unique object: the drawings of illustrator Michel Longuet. These are off-thecuff sketches from walks to forgotten addresses that housed the great artistic figures of Paris at one time or another. Who still believes in ghosts in today’s day and age? Who believes in those white sheets fluttering in the hallways of Walter Scott novels? Who believes in those Ouija boards Victor Hugo used to speak to his dead daughter? And yet any number of times as he walked through Paris, Michel Longuet believed, stopping in front of a plaque affixed to a building to indicate that a painter, a writer, or a famous artist of another sort had once lived there. Knocking at the door of Méliès, Lautrec, Marquet, Gauguin, Atget, Calder, Beckett, Michaux, Follain, and all those who have departed without leaving a forwarding address, Michel Longuet finds himself confronted by ghosts. There’s nothing left for him to do but to make them talk. After studying architecture, Michel Longuet began his career as an illustrator, working with the review Minuit and the magazine Télérama, among others. As a filmmaker, his short animated films have won awards in Berlin (Golden Bear) and Annecy. He is the author of Chassés-croisés (1972), the illustrations of Abécédaire de l'Odéon (2008), and since 1993 has kept an illustrated journal from which the illustrations of Adresses fantômes have been collected.
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ANNICK COJEAN Les Proies : Dans le Harem de Kadhafi Easy Prey: Inside Gaddafi’s Harem 300 p. September 2012 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. Foreign rights sold: Brazil (Record-Verus), Bulgaria (Enthusiast), China (Beijing Zhongpu), Germany (Aufbau), Italy (Piemme), Lithuania (Metodika), Netherlands (Meulenhoff), Poland (Prozynski), Portugal (Porto), Sweden (Lindskog), USA world English (Grove Atlantic).
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