EDWARD GAUVIN

“Fanciful, erudite, mischievous, and unclassifiable,” Jérôme Leroy calls it. Readers may remember a post at Weird Fiction Review from late 2011, in which I presented the Étrange Questionnaire by Éric Poindron—writer, editor, would-be poet, historian of paraliterature. (He also curates a cabinet of curiosities, and believes in ghosts.) It is now a book, delectably conceived by Les Venterniers, a small French press, and augmented by an essay of my own (in translation), collected answers, as well as assorted oddities.

The erstwhile D.F. Lewis continues his hit “real-time gestalt reviews” of new releases in weird and supernatural fiction, going story by story through the second volume of Nightscript, the yearly anthology of C.M. Muller, Scrivener. Here’s his take on H.V. Chao’s “Down by the River”:

The science fiction issue of Bard College’s venerable literary mainstay Conjunctions, guest-edited by Elizabeth Hand, features my translation of “Cartoon” by Belgian fabulist Jean Muno, lately featured at The Missing Slate and in Year’s Best Weird Fiction Vol. 2 from Undertow Books, edited by Kathe Koja and Michael Kelly.

A longtime resident of the town of Malaise, Robert Burniaux, writing under the name Jean Muno, is among the best-known of Belgium’s Silver Age fabulists, heir to Jean Ray and Thomas Owen. His ever-wicked humor skewers the absurdity of the suburbs and their spiritual emptiness. The author of nine novels and four story collections, he received Belgium’s top literary prize, the Prix Rossel, in 1979, and was a member of Belgium’s Royal Academy of Languages and Literature. “Cartoon” is taken from his first collection, Histoires singulières. His work has also appeared in English in Kim Connell’s translations in the collection Glove of Passion, Voice of Blood and the anthology The Belgian School of the Strange.

Here’s an excerpt:

ON APRIL 18, 1977, AROUND 8:00 A.M., when Cecile Angenot had drawn the garnet drapes that hid the windows of her dining room, she noticed, in the middle of the lawn, between the red cedars and the edge of the decorative well, something like an oblong splash of light. An illusion, she thought, the sun in my eyes. Error: the irradiation was quite real. It was coming from a small Class 3 UFO, roughly cigar shaped and squamous in appearance; truth to tell, a bit screwball, with its tuft of slender antennae and its three crutch-like struts, one of which was patched up with a crude ligature. But Mrs. Angenot saw none of this: she had mislaid her glasses.

In the run-up to the Best Translated Book Awards, Monica Carter pens a lovely appreciation of Paul Willems’ The Cathedral of Mist:

By far, The Cathedral of Mist is going to be one of those works that I will read from time after time, always being inspired by something new within its pages… I couldn’t help but think, after reading The Cathedral of Mist, that Willems had applied Gaston Bachelard’s Poetics of Space and On Poetic Reverie and Imagination to perfection. His Elysian stories transport you to realities so vivid, even knowing they don’t exist, feel otherwise.

Willems voice is humorous, light, hopefully resigned to his imagination, and this combination infuses his pieces with a touching nostalgia. I can’t help but be in awe of Edward Gauvin’s translation (he has many fine translations…) that captures Willems’s essence[…]

Simply breathtaking.

Thank you!

Thanks to friend and fellow writer-translator Laurent Queyssi (whose work has appeared in English in The New Accelerator and at StarShipSofa), I was able to attend Utopiales: my first time at the European science fiction and fantasy convention held every November in Nantes.

Since I’ve had the pleasure of translating for him before, editor Julien Wacquez also had me on a panel to discuss his ambitious bilingual digital magazine Angle Mort/Blind Spot, which tries to bring the worlds of science and science fiction more closely together by featuring research papers alongside short fiction, as well as in-depth interviews with everyone it publishes.

Blind Spot board meeting.

Moderated by translator, editor, and fellow Blind Spot staffer Sylvie Denis, the panel took place at 2pm on Halloween in the Agora de M. Spock, a curtained space right across from the convention bar.

Utopiales proved a fairly mind-blowing glimpse into the French spec fic scene, with a loose, inviting setup, crack organization, and lots of drunk camaraderie. I went home, bags heavy, with a long reading list from the lush book display.

Golden City, an all-ages series written by Daniel Pecqueur with art by Nicolas Malfin, kicks off today with the first volume, Wreck Raiders, available as a digital exclusive from Delcourt at Comixology. It has a Waterworld-meets-Elysium vibe: in an unspecified near future, the rich live on the titular high-tech floating island, while orphans scavenge for scraps on the trash-strewn, disease-ridden continent. Malfin’s boldly colored art shows a ligne claire influence, the comics equivalent of key-lit classical Hollywood cinema.

Golden City floats on the ocean, shielded from the overpopulation and from the violence that reigns over the continent. Only the wealthiest can live there and, as such, Harrison Banks appears to be among one of the privileged… But when his wife’s plane crashes mysteriously, Banks must start a perilous investigation in an unknown territory and embark on a descent into hell, as a sprawling plot unfolds around him…

 

Golden City, an all-ages series written by Daniel Pecqueur with art by Nicolas Malfin, kicks off today with the first book, Wreck Raiders, available as a digital exclusive from Delcourt at Comixology. It has a Waterworld-meets-Elysium vibe: in an unspecified near future, the rich live on the titular high-tech floating island, while orphans scavenge for scraps on the trash-strewn, disease-ridden continent. Malfin’s boldly colored art shows a ligne claire influence, the comics equivalent of key-lit classical Hollywood cinema.

https://www.comixology.com/Golden-City/comics-series/84541?ref=cHVibGlzaGVyL3ZpZXcvZGVza3RvcC9saXN0L3Nlcmllc0xpc3Q