The sensational US debut of a major French writer—an intense, delicious meringue of a novella
In a large country house shut off from the world by a gated garden, three young governesses responsible for the education of a group of little boys are preparing a party. The governesses, however, seem to spend more time running around in a state of frenzied desire than attending to the children’s education. One of their main activities is lying in wait for any passing stranger, and then throwing themselves on him like drunken Maenads. The rest of the time they drift about in a kind of sated, melancholy calm, spied upon by an old man in the house opposite, who watches their goings-on through a telescope. As they hang paper lanterns and prepare for the ball in their own honor, and in honor of the little boys rolling hoops on the lawn, much is mysterious: one reviewer wrote of the book’s “deceptively simple words and phrasing, the transparency of which works like a mirror reflecting back on the reader.” Written with the elegance of old French fables, the dark sensuality of Djuna Barnes and the subtle comedy of Robert Walser, this semi-deranged erotic fairy tale introduces American readers to the marvelous Anne Serre.
The author of fourteen novels and short story books, Anne Serre was born in 1960. Her first novel, Les Gouvernantes, was published in 1992, and praised by Michel Crépu in La Croix for its “remarkable economy of style.”
Mark Hutchinson was born in London in 1957 and lives in Paris. Among his many translations are René Char’s Hypnos: Notes from the French Resistance and The Inventors and Other Poems.
An illustrated new translation of Sophokles’ Antigone. Anne Carson has published translations of the ancient
Greek poets Sappho, Simonides, Aiskhylos, Sophokles and Euripides. Antigonick is her seminal work. Sophokles’ luminous and disturbing tragedy is here given an entirely fresh language ...
Winner of the Griffin International Poetry PrizeA collection in five parts, Susan Howe’s electrifying new
book opens with a preface by the poet that lays out some of Debths’ inspirations: the art of Paul Thek, the Isabella Stewart Gardner collection, ...
Proudly part of the New Directions Poetry Pamphlets, a classical Chinese poet considered one of
the great mastersRanging from the humorous and scathing to the evocative and strange, this 9th century collection of list poems by the late Tang dynasty ...
An affirmation of faith and identity by Japan's leading Christian novelist.Eleven short, deeply spiritual stories
ranging from autobiographical serendipities to solemn, empathetic parables. The title story is set during the 18th-century Shogunate persecution of Christians in Japan.
The English-language debut of a master stylist: a compassionate but relentless novel about the long,
dark harvest of Brazil’s totalitarian rule A professor prepares to retire—Gustavo is set to move from Sao Paulo to the countryside, but it isn’t the ...
A new volume of the singular, ongoing, great American jazz novel Nathaniel Mackey’s Late Arcade opens
in Los Angeles. A musician known only as N. writes the first of a series of letters to the enigmatic Angel of Dust. N.’s jazz ...
Johannes Bobrowski tells the story of the narrator's grandfather, who plats and schemes to ruin
the Jewish newcomer who has built a mill down-stream from him. With splendid irony, Bobrowski describes the diverse characters of the Jews, Poles, Gypsies, and ...
Frédéric Mistral (1830-1914) was without a doubt the greatest modern Provençal poet and the foremost
champion of his native Provence, the guiding spirit of a group of latter-day troubadours who revived and refined the language of Southern France as a ...
