At 11:15 AM in Ustler Atrium, I’ll be giving one of three keynote addresses at the University of Florida’s annual Conference on Comics and Graphics Novels. The theme of this 13th  year is Transnational Comics—Crossing Gutters, Transcending Boundaries.

Looking forward to this spring, Zainab Akhtar of Comics and Cola has a column at The Guardian on graphic novels to look forward to. Blutch’s Peplum, due out in April, is one of the launch titles for New York Review Comics, New York Review of Books’ new comics imprint.

The man known as Blutch is one of the giants of contemporary comics, and Peplum may be his masterpiece: a grand, strange dream of ancient Rome. At the edge of the empire, a gang of bandits discovers the body of a beautiful woman in a cave; she is encased in ice but may still be alive. One of the bandits, bearing a stolen name and with the frozen maiden in tow, makes his way toward Rome—seeking power, or maybe just survival, as the world unravels.

Thrilling and hallucinatory, vast in scope yet unnervingly intimate, Peplum weaves together threads from Shakespeare and theSatyricon along with Blutch’s own distinctive vision. His hypnotic storytelling and stark, gorgeous art pull us into one of the great works of graphic literature, translated into English for the first time.

“Blutch is a master. No other cartoonist renders with such casual virtuosity. It’s long overdue for his books to be translated into English.” —Craig Thompson

Words Without Borders’ annual comics issue featured an excerpt from Le piano oriental by Zeina Abirached, of A Game for Swallows fame. Serialized online in its entirety at the French newspaper Le Monde, Abirached’s work tells a playful and complex intergenerational tale of music and migration. This  excerpt tells the story of how she left home for Paris for the first time.

7:30 – 9PM

453 S Spring St – Ground Floor
Los Angeles, CA 90013

The Last Bookstore is pleased to present Melville House Night, featuring authors Christopher Boucher, Jeremy Bushnell, Catie Disabato, and Kirk Lynn, and translator Edward Gauvin. Come join us to hear them read from their latest books.

CHRISTOPHER BOUCHER teaches writing and literature at Boston College, and is the managing editor of Post Road Magazine. He is the author of How to Keep Your Volkswagen Alive, and the forthcoming novel Golden Delicious.

JEREMY P. BUSHNELL is the author of The Weirdness, and the forthcoming novel The Insides. He teaches writing at Northeastern University in Boston and lives in Dedham, Massachusetts.

CATIE DISABATO is the author of The Ghost Network. She is a columnist for Full Stop and has written criticism and commentary for This Recording, The Millions, and The Rumpus.

KIRK LYNN is the head of the Playwriting and Directing Area in the Department of Theatre and Dance at the University of Texas at Austin, is one of six coproducing artistic directors of Rude Mechanicals theater collective. He is the author of Rules for Werewolves.

EDWARD GAUVIN is a translator from the French. His work has won multiple prizes and has appeared in the New York Times, Tin House, Subtropics, World Literature Today, and Weird Fiction Review. The translator of more than two hundred graphic novels, Gauvin is a contributing editor for comics at Words Without Borders. His translation of Serge Brussolo’s The Deep Sea Diver’s Syndrome marked the first English-language publication of the French master of the fantastic.

Room 513, LA Convention Center, Meeting Room Level
Thursday, March 31, 2016
1:30 pm to 2:45 pm

Editor Jessie Vail Aufiery’s labor of extraordinary love is now out from Serving House Press, and available on Amazon! Featuring, I’m proud to say, my translations of the essay “Paris” by Julien Green and an excerpt, “The Bawdyhouse for Beggars,” from Jean-Paul Clébert’s Paris insolite, forthcoming in Donald Nicholson-Smith’s translation as Paris Vagabond from New York Review Books. The Clébert piece previously appeared in the Le Carré issue of The Literary Review and Harper’s.

An anthology of poems, stories and essays that explore what Paris means to writers who have visited and lived in this fascinating city. These are works that are jubilant, despondent, flippant, stuck, liberated, devastated, bored, solitary, joyous, in love–that explore, in short, a wide rambling space that is not just tragedy or fantasy, but all the life that happens in between.

Blank Slate by Boulet & Bagieu

A young woman wakes up on a bench without any memory of either her name or what she is doing there. Conducting an investigation with great difficulty, she tries to reconstruct her not only her memory, but her entire identity.
What is she going to discover? A past made of drama and romance, or the regular old life of an ordinary girl? And if so, will she know how to become somebody, having potentially been anyone at all?

Thanks to Ian Baran, librarian and blogger at the New York Public Library, my 2013 translation of Jean Ferry’s Surrealist-tinged tales is back in the news, part of a handful of titles profiled in two articles on Wakefield Press, that valiant publisher of Euro-obscurities based in Boston. In this “exceptional pocket book of 24 or so stories,” Baran says, “Jean Ferry has won over the everyday with extraordinary grace.”

On a side note: to date, Jean Ferry’s collection The Conductor and Other Tales is the only book where I’ve received royalties–not just contractually promised, mind you, but actually paid. For that I have my editor and publisher Marc Lowenthal to thank.

I’ll be reading from and discussing Serge Brussolo’s The Deep Sea Diver’s Syndrome tonight in downtown Mountain View at Bookbuyers, one of the largest used bookstores in the SF Bay Area.

WHEN: 7:30 PM

WHERE: 317 Castro St, Mountain View, CA 94041

Come one and all!

At his site The Complete Review, always a trove of helpful links and context, Michael Orthofer gives The Deep Sea Diver’s Syndrome an A-, saying that it offers “a remarkably full story, creating two fascinating worlds [and] a beautful conclusion […]a very impressive flight of fantasy.” At his blog The Literary Saloon, he concludes that it is

“a very good book. I’m surprised it hasn’t gotten more attention — not even pre-publication Publishers Weekly or (full) Kirkus Reviews reviews — but it’s strong enough that word-of-mouth and internet attention should help it find its appreciative readership. (Yes, it is kind of science fiction — but hardly just.)

Really — give it a try.”

(Incidentally, this is the 3rd translation of mine Orthofer has reviewed, and the first to break me out of my B+ streak.)

Meanwhile, despite misspelling the author’s name so as to make him more Russian, Matt Staggs at Suvudu is unapologetic about Brussolo’s SFnal qualities, and calls DSDS

“an unbelievably gorgeous little novel that lies somewhere between Inception and Blade Runner: a work of acid-laced science-fiction noir that grabbed me from page one and pulled me deep into the darkest waters of the imagination. It left me gasping for air. I’ve never read anything like it. It’s as high concept as anything Philip K. Dick wrote, and reads like a masterful work of magic realism. It borders on surreal. I love it like a beautiful and strange freak of nature that’s almost too good for this world: Hold it tight and keep it close, because You may never see another one like it again.”