Literature and Fiction

An international literary superstar since the publication of her “fascinating and original” (The New York Times Book Review) first novel, Pig Tails, and her “tender, extraordinarily nuanced” (Publishers Weekly) follow-up novel, My Phantom Husband—an immediate number one bestseller in France—Marie Darrieussecq now gives us her greatest triumph to date.

InUndercurrents, a mother and daughter mysteriously disappear to a deserted seaside town in France, as the novel poetically evokes the varied moods and rich palette of the ocean. From seemingly simple events, Darrieussecq deftly plunges the reader into a sensual, surrealistic literary experience grounded in—yet worlds away from—day-to-day reality.

Called “truly inspired” by Le Pointe and “gripping” by Le Monde, Undercurrents fulfills and exceeds our expectations of this talented young author.

In Literary Debate, the second volume in The New Press’s Postwar French Thought Series, editors Denis Hollier and Jeffrey Mehlman present a selection of texts, many available in English for the first time, that together offer an illuminating and provocative overview of the last half-century of French literary criticism.

Combining examination of literature as an institution and in historical context with path breaking interpretations of writing by such authors as Stephan Mallarmé and Sigmund Freud, Literary Debate presents the seminal work of figures such as Roland Barthes, Gilles Deleuze, Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault, Julia Kristeva, and Jean’Paul Sartre. These selections represent one of the most fertile periods the field has known. Including original essays by its editors, this volume brings together the important threads of one of the most influential movements in Western intellectual history.

The premise is simple, but the story quickly becomes surreal: the narrator’s husband leaves to buy a loaf of bread and never returns. Searching for him day and night, forced to explain his absence to friends and family, the unnamed narrator withdraws into a mysterious universe ruled more by image than language. In the wake of her husband’s disappearance, the world becomes a strangely immaterial place, shapeless, devoid of sentiment. Once-familiar territories become terrifying: the supermarket, the beach, the bedroom. Even the wedding album has changed: her husband’s face now appears altered in every shot.

An innovative, daring book on the physicality of absence, My Phantom Husband explores familiar reactions to sudden loss and the disruption of daily routine. Weaving an intricate web of exquisite metaphors and mesmerizing visions, Marie Darrieussecq once again astounds readers with her exceptional imagination and stylistic genius.

Already hailed as “intricate and compelling” by the Times Literary Supplement, The Sandglass is a striking novel by Sri Lankan author Romesh Gunesekera, a 1994 Booker Prize finalist for his first novel, Reef.

Set in London where the Sri Lankan narrator lives, The Sandglass tells the story of two feuding families whose lives are interlinked by the changing fortunes of postcolonial Sri Lanka. In a beautifully constructed work that moves back and forth between two physical and temporal poles, Gunesekera brings to life Prins Ducal and his search for answers about his family’s past in Sri Lanka, including his father’s rise to wealth, rivalry with the Vatunas family, and a suspect death—a mystery that further unfolds upon Prins’s arrival in London for his mother’s funeral.

Weaving together themes of memory, exile, and postcolonial upheaval, Gunesekera has written a book Marie Claire calls “utterly engaging. . . . Romantic, mysterious, and laced with a sense of yearning. . . . A heady mix of 1990s London and postwar Sri Lanka.”

Pig Tales is the story of a young woman who lands a position at Perfumes Plus, a beauty boutique/“massage” parlor. She enjoys great success until she slowly metamorphoses into . . . a pig. What happens to her then overturns all our ideas about relationships between man, woman, and beast in a stunning feminist fable of political and sexual corruption.

Irène Némirovsky’s posthumous Suite Française has become a publishing phenomenon, selling more than half a million copies since its publication in 2006. As those who know it are keenly aware, Némirovsky was killed by the Nazis before she had a chance to write the last three sections of what she intended to be a five-part work. As Claire Messud wrote in Bookforum, Némirovsky’s “hope in the midst of hopelessness . . . is a rare gift.”

As they were being deported to concentration camps, Némirovsky and her husband, like so many other German Jews, sent their two young daughters, then five and seven, to live under assumed identities—in this case in a Catholic boarding school in the south of France—which enabled them to survive the war. The younger daughter, Elisabeth Gille, became a well-known French publisher, and chronicled her wartime experiences in her own novel, Shadows of a Childhood.

Originally published long before the manuscript of Suite Française was discovered, Shadows of a Childhood is now available for Némirovsky fans who want to know more about the circumstances of her death and her daughters’ survival. Gille’s haunting novel is a moving sequel to her mother’s masterpiece and an important part of an extraordinary family’s literary legacy.

A philosophical mystery novel populated with artists, criminals, and drug addicts, Lines of Fate is one of the most extraordinary novels to emerge from the last years of the Soviet Union. Written at the height of Gorbachev’s power in 1985 but not published in Russian until 1992, the novel is a profound meditation on Russia’s past and present, and a subtle examination of the crippling effects of Soviet power on the nation and on the Russian psyche.

The story follows the young researcher Anton Lizavin’s efforts to piece together a biography of the provincial writer Simeon Milashevich from the bits of candy wrappers Milashevich wrote on during the early period in Soviet history, when paper was scarce. As Lizavin becomes immersed in Milashevich’s life (and presumed death), the two begin a metaphysical conversation across time, and the book becomes a kind of postmodern detective story, painting a broad, fascinating picture of Russian society throughout the century.

Widely hailed in Europe as a new classic of modern Russian fiction, Lines of Fate is an exploration of the Russian soul in the grand tradition of Pasternak and Gogol.

Antoine Volodine has been hailed as one of the most innovative and accomplished writers in France today. Compared by critics to Franz Kafka and Lewis Carroll, Volodine weaves an unusual novel of political and psychological intrigue in a lush, exotic setting. The publication of Naming the Jungle marks his American debut and the first translation of his work into English.

Puesto Libertad could be any Latin American city torn by the strife of civil war. In this isolated capital buried in the jungle, the revolutionary secret police have started digging into Fabian Golpiez’s past. In order to avoid brutal torture and interrogation, he decides to feign madness. Led by a local shaman/psychiatrist in a bizarre talking cure, Golpiez must use indigenous names to prove both his innocence and his true Tupi Indian identity. To name is to conquer. He names the monkeys, the plants, and the insects all around him as he names his fear, his paranoia, and his pathologies.

A masterful storyteller, Volodine speaks to us about the slow and fatal agony of revolution in a haunting and intense novel, one of the most dazzling pieces of fiction to come out of France since the early novels of Robbe-Grillet and Duras.

Tibor Fischer’s first novel Under the Frog was one of the most widely praised books in England in 1993. That book followed the fortunes of two young men in the pursuit of sex and the avoidance of work as part of a traveling basketball team in the Hungary of the 1950s, and everyone from Salman Rushdie to A.S. Byatt responded with unbridled enthusiasm.

Now comes his eagerly awaited follow-up, another hilarious chronicle of an unusual dynamic duo—this time chasing after something quite different—and the London papers are even more enthusiastic. The Thought Gang is an unabashedly comic novel of ideas and uncertainty. It is a philosophical novel (or perhaps just a novel about a philosopher). It is also an unusually cinematic novel. As the Sunday Telegraph said, “There are novels which are crying out so loudly to be made into films that you cannot read them without a cinematic version taking shape in your mind, frame by frame, as you turn the pages. Tibor Fischer’ The Thought Gangis one of them.” Perhaps it could best be described as Quentin Tarantino’s Pulp Fiction crossed with Woody Allen’s classic comedy Love and Death.

The setting is France; our hero, a washed-up middle-aged British philosopher named Eddie Coffin. Broke and unsure as to his next meal, he meets Hubert, an incompetent, freshly released, one-armed robber, and the “thought gang” is born. Applying philosophy to larceny, these unlikely bandits question the meaning of life, the value of money, and the role of banks as they wind their way from Montpellier to Toulon in search of the greatest heist in history. Unexpected and volatile, The Thought Gang is the hilarious and thought-provoking story of their travails.

Widely read in Europe, the Estonian novelist Jaan Kross is considered one of the most important writers of the Baltic region, and is an often-named candidate for the Nobel Prize.

His new historical novel, Professor Martens’ Departure, is written in a classic elegiac style reminiscent of Giuseppe di Lampedusa’s The Leopard, and it evokes the complex world of czarist Russian society at the turn of the century. The character of Professor Martens is based on an actual official of the czarist reign, a distinguished Estonian jurist curiously reminiscent of Henry Kissinger.

Faced with a dire financial crisis in Russia, Professor Martens orchestrates a major loan from the French government to stave off famine; as time passes, however, he realizes that he has managed to perpetuate a brutal regime that keeps its political prisoners in chains.

This fictional memoir, written at the end of Martens’ life, finds him reliving his past and questioning the degree to which he has sacrificed himself to maintain a corrupt regime, one that ultimately disdains both him and his people. Considered an outsider by the czar’s adviser, Martens is nonetheless needed for his skills. Still, he is marginalized and kept in the shadows.

Far more than just a political or philosophical novel, Professor Martens’ Departure is an astonishing reconstruction of czarist Russia.