EDWARD GAUVIN

My translation of Jean Ferry’s The Conductor and Other Tales is now officially a year old! As if in celebration, over at the erstwhile Necessary Fiction, Matt Pincus says Ferry’s tales “linger somewhere between Kafka’s The Castle and Bataille’s Story of the Eye. At times transgressive, and at others with a Poe-like Gothic, the stories are also ironically mythical, creating a juxtaposition of nuance and beauty.

“These 25 stories have transient, wandering elements in which characters inhabit a place somewhere between fact and fiction, history and illusion, dream and reality of an eerie murkiness.

There is a ghostly, ethereal quality to each tale, which, as the collection progresses, become darker and phlegm-like. A tale not part of the original collection is of a man on a mountain expedition who loses his partner climbing an ice sheet, but seems to be only clinging a few feet off the floor in someone’s home. Each story shifts between admiration for spectacle, and violence or mortal danger within that spectacle. As any excellent story collection, the tension vibrates at unexpected moments, and the language expands, or crests at moments of insight to allow the reader’s creativity to see a new perception of their own imagination.”

The latest Fall/Winter issue of Epiphany features two short translations by yours truly: Yann Coridian’s “Seagulls and Fig Newtons,” about memories stirred by a phone conversation between two brothers, and the return of Thierry Horguelin with “Positions in Space,” a neurotic extrapolation about getting lost in airports.

Coridian is a French filmmaker and a writer. He has written ten novels, many published by l’école des loisirs. His first feature film, “Ouf,” was released in theatres in February, 2013. He is currently completing his next screenplay.

Thierry Horguelin won the Royal Academy of Belgium’s Franz de Wever Prize for his collection The Endless Night (2009), a story from which was published in Eleven Eleven #15 and Best European Fiction 2014 from Dalkey Archive. He has published two other books of short prose with Quebec’s L’Oie de Cravan press: The Night Voyager (2005), and These Foolish Things (2012). He blogs at Locus Solus. My translations of his work have also appeared in Birkensnake.

Born in Montreal in 1965, Horguelin has lived in Belgium since 1991. For twenty years, he worked as a book reviewer and film critic for numerous magazines and newspapers in Canada, France, and Belgium. A former bookseller, he has also worked as a free-lance translator, copy-editor, and proofreader for various publishers in France and Belgium. He is currently copy-editor-in-chief at Indications (Brussels), editor and book designer for les éditions Le Cormier (Brussels), and assistant manager of Espace Livres & Création, a Belgian small-press network.

When a team of scientists on the moon accidentally opens a long-buried alien tomb, similar ancient tombs activate all over the Earth, unleashing a vast destructive force. Is there any hope for humanity? Like Scott Glenn waking up half an hour into The Keep, the pandemonium also awakens a guardian who at various times throughout the ages–from the Roman era through medieval times–has led humanity to repel the creatures’ attacks. His name? Helios.

A series by Jerry Frissen, Peter Snejbjerg, and Delphine Rieu.

Coming to you soon from the good folks at Titan Comics!

Jean-Philippe Toussaint (1957 Р) is a Belgian writer and filmmaker whose books have been translated into more than twenty languages. The author of nine novels, he is the winner of numerous literary prizes, including the Prix M̩dicis in 2005 for his novel Running Away, and the Prix D̩cembre in 2009 for The Truth about Marie, the two middle books of the Marie tetralogy.

• The essays “The Ravanastron” and “How I Built Certain of My Hotels” appeared in Issue 27.1 of Gulf Coast, Winter-Spring 2015.
• The essay “For Samuel Beckett” is forthcoming online at Gulf Coast.

His essay collection Urgency and Patience is forthcoming in Spring 2015 (despite this page from Google Books).