Category: Spotlight on Publishing

the insider

Spotlight | Rosy & John, Pierre Lemaitre #FrenchNoir | MacLehose Press

Pierre Lemaitre, the Prix Goncourt-winning French novelist and screenwriter behind the Paris Crime Files a.k.a. Verhœven series, is brought to English-language readers by the publisher behind Stieg Larsson, Henning Mankell and Jo Nesbø. So much for having a shrewd eye for genuinely original storytelling and talent-spotting big hitters from foreign climes, not just once but again and again and again . . . chapeau!

Rosy & John, translated by word wizard Frank Wynne, is published today. It is the fourth and last book in the Verhœven series. The opening description of an eight year old boy seeing “the body of his father soar into the air as though a giant hand has punched him in the solar plexus” when a bomb explodes in a Paris street, evoking the November 2015 Paris attacks, is both globally apocalyptic and highly personal.   Continue reading Spotlight | Rosy & John, Pierre Lemaitre #FrenchNoir | MacLehose Press

Review | Chauvo-Feminism: On Sex, Power and #MeToo, Sam Mills | Indigo Press

Chauvo-Feminism: On Sex, Power and #MeToo is an erudite, pithy assessment of the chauvo-feminist man based on personal lived experience and testimonies from women and men.

Journalist, writer and indie co-publisher at Dodo Ink, Sam Mills builds up a disturbing portrait of the charming, self-obsessed covert misogynist who espouses the feminist cause in public, yet undermines women emotionally and psychologically behind the scenes; and indulges in gaslighting.

Throughout history, women have fought to assert themselves as individuals, whereas most men have had the luxury of taking their independence and authority for granted. Today, those men who feel challenged or inadequate because of the feminisation of society have simply found a new way to objectify women and play a new game based on an age-old sadistic theme. Continue reading Review | Chauvo-Feminism: On Sex, Power and #MeToo, Sam Mills | Indigo Press

Review | The Fool & Other Moral Tales, Anne Serre | Les Fugitives

Anne Serre is a remarkable and unusual writer; her pen a scalpel dissecting the human condition with painful precision. The Fool & Other Moral Tales – three novellas – is lyrical and disturbing, wonderful and terrible, arousing and devastating. The hallucinatory, and at times nightmarish quality, is beautifully rendered by translator Mark Hutchinson.

All three tales adventure through the multiple guises and meanings of The Fool. Is he a fallen angel, a grotesque carrier of vice and folly bringing wisdom in his wake as a consequence of blind faith, hopeless romance and reckless desire, or is he an abortive saint, a mistaken revolutionary? The ultimate shapeshifter, he can lead you to Heaven or Hell or, if you get stuck, into the abyss.  

Continue reading Review | The Fool & Other Moral Tales, Anne Serre | Les Fugitives

Podcast LIVE | In conversation with Natasha Lehrer, translator of Consent by Vanessa Springora

Vanessa Springora’s memoir, Consent, became an instant, international literary sensation when it was published in France. Her beautifully written, intimate and powerful description of her relationship in the mid-1980s with the French author Gabriel Matzneff, when she was fourteen and he fifty, is a beautifully written universal #MeToo story of power, manipulation, trauma, resilience and healing. Award-winning translator, Natasha Lehrer, captures Springora’s changes in pace and in tone, the voices and the silences, the literary milieu then and now with a sensitive ear and lexical deftness.

Continue reading Podcast LIVE | In conversation with Natasha Lehrer, translator of Consent by Vanessa Springora

Spotlight | La Familia Grande, Camille Kouchner | Éditions du Seuil

The publication of La Familia Grande by Camille Kouchner reveals how incest is everpresent at the highest levels of French society, even among the most glamorous, powerful, bohemian, left wing intellectual Parisian élite, known as “la gauche caviar” (champagne socialists). In France, one in ten people say they are victims of incest according to Ipsos.

Camille Kouchner is the daughter of the late feminist, political scientist and lecturer Évelyne Pisier, and Bernard Kouchner, co-founder of the medical charity Médecins Sans Frontières and Minister of Foreign and European Affairs under President Nicolas Sarkozy, having previously been a minister during Mitterand’s presidency. In 2010, the Jerusalem Post considered Bernard Kouchner the fifteenth most influential Jew in the world.

Continue reading Spotlight | La Familia Grande, Camille Kouchner | Éditions du Seuil

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