Jordan Stump
Author
Language
English
Description
"A moving, unforgettable tribute to a Tutsi woman who did everything to protect her children from the Rwandan genocide, by the daughter who refuses to let her family's story be forgotten. The story of the author's mother, a fierce, loving woman who for years protected her family from the violence encroaching upon them in pre-genocide Rwanda. Recording her memories of their life together in spare, wrenching prose, Mukasonga preserves her mother's voice...
2) Cockroaches
Author
Language
English
Description
"Imagine being born into a world where everything about you--the shape of your nose, the look of your hair, the place of your birth--designates you as an undesirable, an inferior, a menace, no better than a cockroach, something to be driven away and ultimately exterminated. Imagine being thousands of miles away while your family and friends are brutally and methodically slaughtered. Imagine being entrusted by your parents with the mission of leaving...
Author
Language
English
Formats
Description
"This special 10th-anniversary hardcover edition of Marie NDiaye's genre-defying classic restores photographs that appeared in the original French edition alongside Jordan Stump's dazzling translation, revealing in English, at last, the complete vision of NDiaye's influential masterpiece"--
Author
Publisher
Two Lines Press
Language
English
Formats
Description
"After his wife and child disappear at the end of their vacation in a small French village, Herman sets out to find them, only to find that his urgent inquiry immediately recedes into the background and he wittingly and not, becomes one with a society defined by its strange traditions, ghostly apparitions, hospitality that verges on mania, and a nightmarish act of collective forgetting"--
5) Igifu
Author
Language
English
Description
"Scholastique Mukasonga's autobiographical stories rend a glorious Rwanda from the obliterating force of recent history, conjuring the noble cows of her home or the dew-swollen grass they graze on. In the title story, five-year-old Colomba tells of a merciless overlord, hunger or igifu, gnawing away at her belly. She searches for sap at the bud of a flower, scraps of sweet potato at the foot of her parent's bed, or a few grains of sorghum in the floor...
Author
Language
English
Formats
Description
"There is something very wrong with Nadia and her husband Ange, middle-aged provincial schoolteachers who slowly realize that they are despised by everyone around them. One day a savage wound appears in Ange's stomach, and as Nadia fights to save her husband's life their hideous neighbor Noget--a man everyone insists is a famous author--inexplicably imposes his care upon them. While Noget fattens them with ever richer foods, Nadia embarks on a nightmarish...
7) Ladivine
Author
Language
English
Formats
Description
After a woman, Clarisse, is murdered on a trip to visit her mother in Bordeaux, her daughter tries to uncover what happened to her with the help of a brown dog who appears to have taken in the spirit of the deceased.
Clarisse's husband and daughter know nothing of her mother, Ladivine, and Clarisse has hidden nearly every aspect of her adult life from this woman, a housecleaner. After more than twenty-five years of deception the middle-class existence...
Author
Language
English
Description
The Mysterious Island was published in 1874, and it is one of Verne's longest novels. The plot depicts a group of men who have become castaways stranded on an island in the Pacific during the American Civil War. The novel describes their attempts not only to survive but also, with the aid of the scientific and technological know-how, to rebuild their world from the meager resources of the island. At the end, however, it is realized that Captain Nemo,...
Author
Language
English
Formats
Description
"We think of Honore Balzac as the author of long and fully upholstered novels, stitched together into the magnificent visionary document called The Human Comedy. Yet along with the full-length fiction within The Human Comedy stand many shorter works, and it's here that we get some of his most daring explorations of crime, sexuality, and artistic creation. As Marcel Proust noted, it is in these tales that we detect, under the surface, the mysterious...
Author
Publisher
Alfred A. Knopf
Pub. Date
[2019]
Language
English
Description
"A novel about a legendary French female chef--the facts of her life, the nearly ineffable qualities of her cooking, and the obsessive, sometimes destructive desire for purity of taste and experience that shaped her life. Continuing her tradition of writing provocative fiction about fascinating women, here Marie NDiaye gives us the story of a Great Female Chef--a chef who was celebrated as one of the best in a world where men dominate, and the way...
Author
Publisher
University of Nebraska Press
Pub. Date
[1998]
Language
English
Description
A young Frenchman's romance with a woman who lives off men. After stealing some money from a dentist, they go to London where she sleeps with various characters while he writes his first novel. One day she disappears for fifteen years. A study in character.
13) Television
Author
Series
Publisher
Dalkey Archive Press
Pub. Date
2004.
Language
English
Description
"The self-possessed protagonist and narrator of Jean-Philippe Toussaint's novel is an acedemic on sabbatical in Berlin. He plans to write a groundbreaking study of Titian, but after a couple of months, all he's completed is "When Musset." He blames his obsession with watching TV for preventing him from writing more, so he decides to stop watching television all together (after the end of the Tour de France, of course). Still unable to write his book,...
Author
Publisher
Modern Library
Pub. Date
2004.
Language
English
Description
"The compelling story of Godefroid, an abject failure at thirty, who seeks refuge from materialism by moving into a monastery-like lodging house in the shadows of Notre-Dame. Presided over by Madame de La Chanterie, a noblewoman with a tragic past, the house is inhabited by a remarkable band of men--all scarred by the tumultuous aftermath of the French Revolution--who have devoted their lives to performing anonymous acts of charity. Intrigued by the...
Author
Publisher
University of Nebraska Press
Pub. Date
[1997]
Language
English
Description
A novel of the absurd about a man seeking to know who he is. As he sees it the problem is that he cannot remember his birth, so he cannot really be sure who he is.
"The Crab Nebula (La Nébuleuse du crabe) is comprised of fifty-two vivid chapters that provide startling insights into the existence of this nebulous man named Crab: his nightmarish--and none too solid--physique, his mysterious absence from the pages of history, his birth in prison, his...
Author
Publisher
New York Review Books
Pub. Date
[2018]
Language
English
Description
"Two very intelligent, very idealistic young women leave the convent school where they became the fastest of friends to return to their families and embark on their new lives. For Renee de Maucombe, this means an arranged marriage with a country gentleman of Provence, a fine if slightly dull man for whom she feels admiration but nothing more. Meanwhile, Louise de Chaulieu makes for her family's house in Paris, intent on enjoying her freedom to the...