Non Fiction

A Man's Place recounts the story of a daughter coming to terms with her formative years as she writes an unflinching portrait of her father's life and death. A companion piece to Ernaux's powerful A Woman's Story.

Shortly after Albert Cohen left France for London to escape the Nazis, he received news of his mother’s death in Marseille. Unable to mourn her, he expressed his grief in a series of moving pieces for La France libre, which later grew into Book of My Mother . Achingly honest, intimate, and moving, this love song is a tribute to all mothers. Cohen himself expressed, "I shall not have written in vain if one of you, after reading my hymn of death, is one evening gentler with his mother because of me and my mother."

A mesmerising early novel by the author of the international bestseller The Lover, that explores the same terrains of Indochina and erotic obsession.

After his three-year exile to England (1726-9) following imprisonment in the Bastille for his satirical writings, Voltaire wrote a series of letters offering the French public a panoramic view of English culture. He was full of enthusiasm and freedom - as opposed to the tyrannical feudal society of his homeland. Letters on England discusses English religious sects, politics, scientists and writers with great admiration, yet the clever Voltaire also flattered his French readers with humorous references to the old-fashioned clothes and speech of the Quakers and to antics in the House of Commons. At first banned in France, this intriguing and often comic account of a culture viewed through foreign eyes was to prove highly influential in shaping French attitudes to England. Leonard Tancock's translation brilliantly captures Voltaire's ironic tone, and is accompanied by an introduction discussing his depiction of England and the events that led to his exile. This edition also includes notes, new further reading and chronology, and an appendix on Voltaire's verse translation of English works.

This book is a modern classic, finally available in English again—in a new translation—for a new generation of readers. This is a chronicle of Christiane’s life as she and other teenagers from West Berlin experienced it in the late 1970s. Her rapid descent into heroin abuse and prostitution is shocking, but the boredom, the longing for acceptance, the thrilling risks, and even the musical obsessions that fill out the rest of Christiane’s existence will be familiar to every reader. This enduring portrait of Christiane’s struggle is not just her battle with heroin addiction—it’s the story of a teenage girl trying to find herself and her place in the world. Originally published in Germany in 1979, the book was a runaway bestseller, and was made into a popular movie in 1981, also named “Christiane F.,” with a soundtrack by David Bowie, one of Christiane’s favorite musicians.

He thought I'd forged my mom's name on the slip. How stupid is that? On this thing Mom just made a kind of squiggly shape on the page. That jerk didn't even think about what he was saying, didn't even ask himself why her signature might be weird. He's one of those people who think illiteracy is like AIDS. It only exists in Africa. —from Kiffe Kiffe Tomorrow "A tale for anyone who has ever lived outside looking in, especially from that alien country called adolescence. A funny, heartfelt story from a wise guy who happens to be a girl. If you've ever fallen in love, if you've ever had your heart broken, this story is your story." — Sandra Cisneros, author of THE HOUSE ON MANGO STREET The Paradise projects are only a few metro stops from Paris, but here it's a whole different kind of France. Doria's father, the Beard, has headed back to their hometown in Morocco, leaving her and her mom to cope with their mektoub—their destiny—alone. They have a little help—from a social worker sent by the city, a psychiatrist sent by the school, and a thug friend who recites Rimbaud. It seems like fate’s dealt them an impossible hand, but Doria might still make a new life. She'll prove the projects aren't only about rap, soccer, and religious tension. She’ll take the Arabic word kif-kif (same old, same old) and mix it up with the French verb kiffer (to really like something). Now she has a whole new motto: KIFFE KIFFE TOMORROW. "Moving and irreverent, sad and funny, full of rage and intelligence. [Guène's] characters are unforgettable, her voice fresh, and her book a delight." — Laila Lalami, author of Hope and Other Dangerous Pursuits Faïza Guène, the child of Algerian immigrants, grew up in the public housing projects of Pantin, outside Paris. This is her first book.

Only a teenager when Delphine was born, Lucile raised two daughters largely alone. She was a former child model from a Bohemian family, younger and more glamorous than the other mothers: always in lipstick, wayward and wonderful. But as Delphine grew up, Lucile’s occasional sadness gave way to overwhelming despair and delusion. She became convinced she was telepathic and in control of the Paris metro system; she gave away all her money; she was hospitalized, medicated, and released in a kind of trance. Young Delphine was left to wonder: What changed her, or what shaped her all along? In this brilliant investigation into her own family history, Delphine de Vigan attempts to “write her mother,” seeking out something essential as she interviews aging relatives, listens to recordings, and reads Lucile’s own writings. It is a history of luminous beauty and rambunctious joy, of dark secrets and silences. There are untimely deaths and failures of memory. There are revelations and there is the ultimately unknowable. And in the face of the unknowable, personal history becomes fiction: De Vigan must choose from differing accounts and fill in important gaps, using her writer’s imagination to reconstruct a life. De Vigan writes her most expansive novel yet with acute self-awareness and marvelous sympathy. Nothing Holds Back the Night is a remarkable work, universally recognizable, and singularly heartbreaking.

From one of our most powerful writers, a work of stunning frankness about losing a daughter. Richly textured with bits of her own childhood and married life with her husband, John Gregory Dunne, and daughter, Quintana Roo, this book by Joan Didion examines her thoughts, fears, and doubts regarding having children, illness, and growing old. Blue Nights opens on July 26, 2010, as Didion thinks back to Quintana’s wedding in New York seven years before. Today would be her wedding anniversary. This fact triggers vivid snapshots of Quintana’s childhood—in Malibu, in Brentwood, at school in Holmby Hills. Reflecting on her daughter but also on her role as a parent, Didion asks the candid questions any parent might about how she feels she failed either because cues were not taken or perhaps displaced. “How could I have missed what was clearly there to be seen?” Finally, perhaps we all remain unknown to each other. Seamlessly woven in are incidents Didion sees as underscoring her own age, something she finds hard to acknowledge, much less accept. Blue Nights—the long, light evening hours that signal the summer solstice, “the opposite of the dying of the brightness, but also its warning”—like The Year of Magical Thinking before it, is an iconic book of incisive and electric honesty, haunting and profoundly moving.

A revelatory meditation on the big-box superstore, from 2022 Nobel laureate Annie Ernaux For half a century, French writer Annie Ernaux has restlessly explored stories and subjects often considered unworthy of artistic reflection. In this exquisite meditation, Ernaux turns her attention to the phenomenon of the big-box superstore, a ubiquitous feature of modern life that has received scant attention in literature—until now. Recording her visits to a single superstore in Paris for over a year, Ernaux captures the world that exists within its massive walls. Culture, class, and capitalism converge, reinscribing the individual’s role and rank within society while absorbing individuality into the machine of mass consumerism. Through Ernaux’s eyes, the superstore emerges as a “great human meeting place, a spectacle”—one of the few spaces where we come into direct contact with difference. She notes the unexpectedly intimate encounters between customers; how our collective desires are dictated by the daily, seasonal, and annual rhythms of the marketplace; and the ways that the built environment reveals the contours of gender and race in contemporary society. With her relentless powers of observation, Annie Ernaux takes the measure of a place we thought we knew, calling us to question the experiences we overlook and to gaze more deeply into ordinary life.

"Si vous deveniez auteur, vous perdriez la bienveillance des femmes, l'appui des hommes, vous sortiriez de votre classe sans être admise dans la leur. Ils n'adopteront jamais une femme auteur à mérite égal, ils en seront plus jaloux que d'un homme. Ils ne nous permettront jamais de les égaler, ni dans les sciences, ni dans la littérature ; car, avec l'éducation que nous recevons, ce serait les surpasser." "Gouverneur" des enfants d'Orléans avant la Révolution, Caroline-Stéphanie-Félicite Du Crest, comtesse de Genlis (1746-1830) est l'auteur d'une oeuvre considérable, presque entièrement oubliée aujourd'hui à l'exception de ses célèbres Mémoires publié en 1825. Dans La Femme auteur, nouvelle sentimentale parue sous l'Empire, elle met en garde les femmes qui souhaitent sortir de leur condition et devenir célèbres grâce à la littérature.

"En 68, ils avaient trente-cinq ans, aucune conscience politique, et surtout aucune conscience. Ils pataugeaient dans l'innocence. Aimer ses enfants n'est pas un crime, non ? Si, comme ça, si. Aller ensuite expliquer que ces gestes, ces actes, ces mains, ces langues, ces caresses en passant, cet exhibitionnisme forcené constituent le climat le plus fécond de l'inceste ? Impensable. À quoi bon le leur dire ? Ils ne m'auraient pas crue. Ils ne m'ont pas crue. Mère pourtant l'a compris... à la toute fin de sa vie."Unique par l'ampleur de ce qu'il dévoile, ce témoignage sur l'inceste dresse le portrait glaçant d'une lignée de bourreaux.

A queer hijabi Muslim immigrant survives her coming-of-age by drawing strength and hope from stories in the Quran in this daring, provocative, and radically hopeful memoir. When fourteen-year-old Lamya H realizes she has a crush on her teacher—her female teacher—she covers up her attraction, an attraction she can't yet name, by playing up her roles as overachiever and class clown. Born in South Asia, she moved to the Middle East at a young age and has spent years feeling out of place, like her own desires and dreams don't matter, and it's easier to hide in plain sight. To disappear. But one day in Quran class, she reads a passage about Maryam that changes everything: when Maryam learned that she was pregnant, she insisted no man had touched her. Could Maryam, uninterested in men, be . . . like Lamya? From that moment on, Lamya makes sense of her struggles and triumphs by comparing her experiences with some of the most famous stories in the Quran. She juxtaposes her coming out with Musa liberating his people from the pharoah; asks if Allah, who is neither male nor female, might instead be nonbinary; and, drawing on the faith and hope Nuh needed to construct his ark, begins to build a life of her own—ultimately finding that the answer to her lifelong quest for community and belonging lies in owning her identity as a queer, devout Muslim immigrant. This searingly intimate memoir in essays, spanning Lamya's childhood to her arrival in the United States for college through early-adult life in New York City, tells a universal story of courage, trust, and love, celebrating what it means to be a seeker and an architect of one's own life.

From the International Booker Prize shortlisted author of The Order of the Day and The War of the Poor comes a searing account of a conflict that dealt a fatal blow to French colonialism. 'Excoriating and profound . . . A remarkable work' - Scotsman 'Absolutely spectacular' - France Info 19 October 1950. The war is not going to plan. In Paris, politicians gather to discuss what to do about Indochina. The conflict is unpopular back home in too expensive, and too far away for the public to care. Withdrawal is not an option – a global power cannot surrender to an army of peasants – but victory is impossible without more soldiers and more money. The soldiers can be sourced from the colonies, but the money is out of the question. A solution needs to be found. In this gripping and shocking novel, Éric Vuillard exposes the tangled web of politicians, bankers and titans of industry who all had a vested interest in France’s prolonged presence in lands far from Paris. Skilfully skewering the guilty, Vuillard shows us how key players in conflicts throughout history often have a motivation even deeper and darker than nationalism and political ideology – greed. As well as bringing scenes from the battlefields to life, Vuillard looks beyond this visceral reality on the ground to the cold calculations of the boardroom elite with the power to turn a military win or loss into their financial gain. Short, sharp and brutal, An Honourable Exit is a journey behind closed doors to witness how history is really made.

"Soyons réalistes, réalisons l’impossible." Ernesto Che Guevara (1928-1967) est une icône. Son portrait par Alberto Korda est une des photographies les plus célèbres du monde. Mais que cache cette image trop lisse ? C’est tout le propos du livre d’Alain Foix. Ainsi suit-on le jeune étudiant en médecine dans son voyage en Amérique latine, le voit-on rejoindre le Mouvement du 26-Juillet, renverser Fulgencio Batista aux côtés de Fidel Castro et devenir procureur d’un tristement célèbre tribunal révolutionnaire. Initiateur des camps de « travail et de rééducation », il a occupé plusieurs postes importants dans le gouvernement cubain. Après avoir subitement disparu de la vie politique nationale et avoir combattu au Congo-Léopoldville, celui qui affirmait que « le véritable révolutionnaire est guidé par des sentiments d’amour » est exécuté sommairement par l’armée bolivienne

"This is all the raw urgency of female adolescent sexuality: its energy and intensity, the push-pull of its excitement, its dangers and glories, building to a coming explosion."—Kate Millett, author of Mother Millett "Read it in one sitting... Literally breathless. This first-person torch song for 'the pink brute' reminds us why French schoolgirls are the emblem for naughty passions as literary classics."—Sarah Schulman, author of The Gentrification of the Mind "School-aged, yet sage in their desires, Thérèse and Isabelle called forth an endless night—a dark and delicate space for them to explore the complexity of their love. I have waited a very long time to slip back into the unexpurgated, delicious darkness with these iconic lesbian lovers."—Amber Dawn, author of How Poetry Saved My Life Thérèse and Isabelle is the tale of two boarding school girls in love. In 1966 when it was originally published in France, the text was censored because of its explicit depiction of young homosexuality. With this publication, the original, unexpurgated text—a stunning literary portrayal of female desire and sexuality—is available to a US audience for the first time. Included is an afterword by Michael Lucey, professor of French and comparative literature at the University of California, Berkeley. Violette Leduc (1907–1972) has been referred to as "France's greatest unknown writer." Admired by Jean Genet, Nathalie Sarraute, and Albert Camus, Leduc was championed by Simone de Beauvoir when she published her scandalous autobiography La Batarde (1964).

Cowritten by Malcolm X’s daughter, this riveting and revealing novel follows the formative years of the man whose words and actions shook the world. I am Malcolm. I am my father’s son. But to be my father’s son means that they will always come for me. They will always come for me, and I will always succumb. Malcolm Little’s parents have always told him that he can achieve anything, but from what he can tell, that's nothing but a pack of lies—after all, his father's been murdered, his mother's been taken away, and his dreams of becoming a lawyer have gotten him laughed out of school. There’s no point in trying, he figures, and lured by the nightlife of Boston and New York, he escapes into a world of fancy suits, jazz, girls, and reefer. But Malcolm’s efforts to leave the past behind lead him into increasingly dangerous territory when what starts as some small-time hustling quickly spins out of control. Deep down, he knows that the freedom he’s found is only an illusion—and that he can't run forever. X follows Malcolm from his childhood to his imprisonment for theft at age twenty, when he found the faith that would lead him to forge a new path and command a voice that still resonates today.

Hanns-Erich Kaminski a su décrire avec justesse et chaleur la vie étonnante de cet aristocrate russe devenu un vagabond magnifique.La silhouette d'un colosse traverse les révolutions politiques de l'Europe en 1848-1849. Michel Bakounine (1840-1876), le premier Russe absolument libre, accourt là où règne l'émeute, et la crée quand elle n'existe pas. L'insurrection de Dresde amènera son arrestation, sa tête mise à prix dix mille roubles d'argent. Condamné à mort par les Saxons, puis par les Autrichiens, il est livré au tsar Nicolas. Ses forteresses le retiendront six ans, mais pas la Sibérie, d'où il s'enfuira en 1861 pour reprendre son combat contre toutes les autorités de la terre. Inlassablement, il insistera sur la nécessité de saper les fondements juridiques de l'ordre existant pour rendre vaine toute tentative de restauration, s'attaquant aux institutions plutôt qu'à ceux qui ont le malheur de les représenter. Des conspirations de sa jeunesse à la «dictature invisible» qui lui paraîtra mieux adaptée, dans ses dernières années, à son projet d'incendier les châteaux, de brûler cadastres et hypothèques, Bakounine cherchera à réunir les conditions d'une liberté qui ne doit pas être octroyée, mais conquise... Détruire les anciens rapports sociaux, produire l'étincelle qui mettra le feu aux poudres, cette illumination d'un monde nouveau, il ne cessera de la vivre pour la rendre plus proche à ceux de ses compagnons qui rêvaient moins ardemment que lui. Hanns-Erich Kaminski a su décrire avec justesse et chaleur la vie étonnante de cet aristocrate russe devenu un vagabond magnifique et dépenaillé, à qui on ne pouvait refuser de partager son rêve...Journaliste et essayiste, Hanns-Erich Kaminski est né en Allemagne en 1899. Après des études d'économies, Kaminski engage une carrière de journaliste dans la presse allemande de gauche, et devient rédacteur politique d'un journal social-démocrate de Francfort, Die Volkstimme.En février 1933, à la suite de la victoire des nazis, Kaminski quitte l'Allemagne pour Paris. Déçu de la faillite de la social-démocratie en Allemagne, il se rapproche des milieux anarchistes, plus particulièrement des anarcho-syndicalistes de l'AIT. De septembre 1936 à février 1937, il est en Espagne, à la suite de quoi il publie son livre sur la guerre d'Espagne (Ceux de Barcelone, 1937). Il écrit ensuite une biographie de Bakounine. Admirateur de Céline pour son Voyage au bout de la nuit et Mort à crédit, il récuse radicalement Bagatelles pour un massacre et publie le pamphlet Céline en chemise brune en 1938. La même année, il écrit un livre sur le nazisme, qui est publié en Argentine en 1940. Après la défaite française de 1940 il fuit en Argentine où il meurt 1963. En 1972, Hans Magnus Enzensberger inclut plusieurs textes de Kaminski dans son roman sur la vie de Buenaventura Durruti, Le bref été de l'anarchie.A retenirPremière édition en français, Aubier-Montaigne, 1938, réed. Bélibaste 1971.