EDWARD GAUVIN

with Jérémie Guez, the author of my most recent translation, the contemporary Parisian noir Eyes Full of Empty, which drops in bookstores November 10th and is currently available for pre-order at the website of publisher Unnamed Books, an LA-based indie press. The novel has garnered some terrific advance reviews from Publishers Weekly and M. Lynx Qualey at Arabic Literature (in English).

Tour dates include:

• Skylight Books, Los Angeles: 7:30pm, November 6, with JAMES ELLROY, 1818 N Vermont Ave
• University of California at Santa Barbara: 3:30pm, November 10, graduate translation workshop
• BookBuyers, Mountain View: 7pm, November 12, 317 Castro St
• Book Passage, Corte Madera: 7pm, November 13, with CARA BLACK, 51 Tamal Vista Blvd.

Jérémie will also be appearing on his own at San Diego’s Mysterious Galaxy at 7:30pm on November 11.

This year’s ALTA, the 38th annual conference of the American Literary Translators Association, is in Tucson and themed “Translation and Traffic.” I will be speaking on a panel that takes its title from Karen Emmerich’s forthcoming book, “The Making of Originals: Translation as a Form of Editing” with translator and professor Karen Emmerich herself, and translator and co-chair of PEN America’s Translation Committee Alex Zucker, moderated by Words Without Borders editor Susan Harris. It’s at 3:45 on the afternoon of Friday, October 30th. Come see!

To grab your copy of the October 2015 issue of Harper’s Magazine, featuring my translation of “The Bawdyhouse for Beggars,” a chapter (or subchapter) unto itself in the “nonfiction novel” Paris insolite (“unseen” or “curious” Paris), which first ran in Issue 58, the John Le Carré issue, of TLR, Fairleigh Dickinson’s litmag The Literary Review. It will also be featured in the forthcoming anthology of writing on Paris from Serving House Press, edited by TLR World Literature Editor Jessie Vail Aufiery.

Clébert’s complete book is forthcoming next spring as Paris Vagabond from New York Review Books, in a translation by Donald Nicholson-Smith.

Jean-Paul Clébert (1926-2011) is the author of more than forty works of fiction and nonfiction. He left Jesuit school at 16, to join the French Resistance, and afterward, traveled Asia. In the 1950s, he frequented two related movements—dwindling Surrealism and burgeoning Situationism—as well as reporting from Asia for Paris Match and France Soir. The 1996 Dictionnaire du surréalisme, for which he single-handedly composed every entry, is widely considered a classic, as is his first book, Paris insolite, a memoir of homeless life in Paris said to have influenced Henry Miller and the Situationist principle of the dérive. Published in 1952 with a dedication to Robert Doisneau and photographs by Patrice Molinard, it was, in the author’s own words, “not a story in the journalistic sense, but a personal investigation.” Among other prominent works are The Blockhouse (1958), his only translated novel, and 1962’s Les Tziganes, a pioneering sociological study of Gypsies also based on personal experience, translated into English by Charles Duff (Dutton, 1963). His later works were dedicated to the history, nature, and culture of Provence, where he spent his final years.

The month is almost over, but you can still catch 4 pages from French cartoonist Luz’s memoir Catharsis, which traces his journey through artist’s block in the months after last January’s Charlie Hebdo attacks. It’s in the September issue of Harper’s, now on newsstands.

In an earlier post, I flashed the cover of the French edition, but here’s The Curse of the Wendigo, with art by Charlie Adlard (best known for his work on The Walking Dead) from a script by Mathieu Missoffe. Think the movie Ravenous, but with a Native American protagonist in the trenches of World War I France…

The good folks at Melville House have come up with a moody Ludlumesque cover and a preview of what I call “Inception directed by David Cronenberg,” Serge Brussolo’s SFnal novel The Deep Sea Diver’s Syndrome, which they’ll be releasing this coming January.

. . . the long, black, oily car clung to the sidewalk. Like a giant wet rubbery leech fastened to the foot of the building, siphoning blood from the façade, slowly gorging on the vital fluid flushing the pink marble . . . Would the structure shrivel up, wither away? Instinctively, David reached out for the car door to make sure the metal wasn’t going soft. He checked himself just in time. Rule number one: keep fleeting impressions from blossoming into full-blown fantasies. A moment’s inattention and images seized the chance to sink roots, proliferating at incredible speed—like tropical plants that, no sooner slashed, sprouted back, stalks dripping sap, amputees already reanimating . . .

And another from the summer, a contemporary comedy of changing manners originally entitled Contemporary Western Male, by journalist François Bégaudeau and seasoned artist Clément Oubrerie:

As has been reported all over—Paste Magazine, Bleeding Cool, Comic Book Resources, Comics and Cola, Comics Reporter, Newsarama, Comic Book, French Culture—publisher Delcourt-Soleil has spearheaded the French invasion of the US digital comic book market, releasing direct on Comixology, and yours truly has been dutifully busy cranking out the words for them. The full range of titles available so far is right here.

Here’s a series I did over the summer that’s been likened to Lost: Christophe Bec’s Prométhée.

A SERIES OF UNEXPLAINED EVENTS ARE AFFLICTING THE WORLD, DAY AFTER DAY, AT 13:13 PM EXACTLY.

But what is the origin of these planetary wide anomalies?

As the threat of Apocalypse hangs over the whole planet, it would seem that the future of Humanity has been plunged into chaos and obscurity… Heralding the worst for civilization.

Well, since they’ve talked about it, I guess I can. A recent Publishers Weekly piece by Calvin Reid announces the Delcourt-Soleil juggernaut’s direct-to-digital invasion of the US market, part of a larger coordinated French assault that will see Mediatoon (Dargaud-Dupuis-Le Lombard) and Glenat getting in on the action by New York Comic Con this coming fall. I’m really excited to the part of this initiative allowing more than the trickle of BDs over than American readers have been able to see in the past. Belgian-French BD has a wealth of genres and stories. Hopefully, the flexibility and lower costs of digital platforms will result in more experimenting with subject matter, as till now most Americans have only seen one or two colors from the full spectrum of kinds of comics France has to offer. I’ve been doing books for all three of these major French publishers, and Reid’s piece mentions a recent project of mine that will be part of Delcourt’s launch: paranormal war comic The Curse of the Wendigo by Mathieu Missoffe and Charlie Adlard. French cover below:

At Words Without Borders, Jeffrey Zuckerman, formerly of Dalkey Archive and now Digital Editor at Music & Literature Magazine, has these kind words for my translation of Jean-Philippe Toussaint’s recent essay collection Urgency and Patience:

Edward Gauvin seems to have devoted the same patience to translating Toussaint as I once did proofreading him; Gauvin’s facility with both the original, crisp French and a correspondingly transparent English are in full evidence here. A reader intimately acquainted with Toussaint’s novels might well wonder if his mind occasionally becomes as flattened, as empty, and as analytical as those of his overlapping narrators. The delightful revelation offered by Urgency and Patience is that such a prospect is nigh well impossible.