EDWARD GAUVIN

The third volume of Frederik Peeters’ cosmic SF saga Aama, The Desert of Mirrors, now available for your reading pleasure. Things really speed up in this, the penultimate chapter, and Peeters’ depiction of the planet Ona(ji) under the organic influence of the evolving Aama remains disturbing as ever. Don’t miss it!

I recently had the pleasure of translating Du vide plein les yeux, the third novel by the young Parisian crime writer Jérémie Guez. Guez was born in Paris in 1988, and has already been hailed as the rising star of contemporary French noir. His two previous novels Balancé dans les cordes and Paris la unit were awarded the 2013 SNCF du Polar and 2012 Plume Libre prizes, respectively.

Eyes Full of Empty, as I’ve titled it, is the third novel in Guez’s Parisian trilogy, but the books don’t share a single protagonist. You can read more about it here, at the publisher’s site. Unnamed Books is a terrific new LA press devoted to “unlikely protagonists, undiscovered territories and courageous voices.”

Translating this noir was a fascinating exercise in contemporary slang. Guez knows Paris and his people inside and out. Like much of private eye fiction, this novel offers a cross-section of society, from high life to low, with astute observations about race and class.

The annual Words Without Borders Comics Issue ran in February, but thanks to the miracle of the interwebs, it’s still available to be greedily perused! Check out an excerpt from Black Spring, the memoir of Cuban political refugee Alejandro González Raga as told to author Maxence Emery and illustrated by Thomas Humeau. Raga was a victim of the titular event, a 2003 dissident crackdown. The excerpt covers Raga’s childhood among citizens block committees, and the free flowering of adolescence cut short by government repression.

Over at Guernica, an excerpt from Walking Wounded: Uncut Stories from Iraq and Afghanistan, by Olivier Morel and artist Maël. It’s a graphic novel companion piece to the documentary On the Bridge, which tracks the repercussions of PTSD on several soldiers returned from the front. It was a privilege to work on this sensitive and searing book of graphic journalism.

I hope to translate more of Xavier Mauméjean, the current reigning French master of the reimagined or “alternate” history, that SF subgenre. In January, he contributed “Cinépanorama” to Words Without Borders’ theme issue on alternate histories, guest edited by Gabriel Saxton-Ruiz. It seeks to answer the question: what if Alain Delon lost an eye during military service in Indochina and never became a movie star? Here’s an excerpt:

In your hotel room on Boulevard Rochechouart, you flip through the magazines. One photo at a time, so your eye won’t get tired. It takes you until late in the night. There’s no such thing as an innocent gaze. So you slip on your trenchcoat, headed for Pigalle. Smuggled cigarettes, gold-plated bracelets fallen from a truck, junk you pawn off on the gigolos just to seem in the know. Not that you’re diving into any fishy-smelling sidelines—the only thing you want to smell is Romy Schneider’s perfume. Pretty girl. You could’ve had her. A quick double espresso at the bar by the drag queens, maybe a croissant. Next to you, the mailman’s peeling his hard-boiled egg. Half of it disappears in one bite. You look away. The yolk’s yellow circle reminds you of an eye.

Xavier Mauméjean has a degree in philosophy and science of religions. He has won the renowned Rosny Award (the most important French award for science fiction) in 2005 and 2008. Mauméjean is also the author of short stories and radio plays for France Culture (winning the Grand Prix de la Radio in 2014), and works for television and cinema. He lives in the North of France, with his wife and their daughter, Zelda.

Jean-Philippe Toussaint’s brief essay “For Samuel Beckett” is available online as a complement to Gulf Coast‘s Winter 2015 issue. Here’s an excerpt:

In the early ’80s, I wrote Samuel Beckett a letter. I explained that I was trying to write, adding that he was probably often sought out by strangers, and so rather than asking him to read my work, suggested instead we play a game of correspondence chess with, at stake, a play I’d written. If I won, he’d read it and give me his opinion. If he won, I’d read over my own play at my leisure. I closed my letter with these words: “Just in case, 1. e4.” By return post, Samuel Beckett replied, “Black resigns. Send the play. Sincerely. Samuel Beckett.”

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. These essays are taken from the collection Urgency and Patience, forthcoming next spring from Dalkey Archive Press.

Penned by Patrick de St. Exupéry’s (Antoine’s son), a career foreign correspondent, the very graphic 2014 graphic novel Whim of the Gods blends fact and memory as he revisits Rwanda on the anniversary of the genocide he witnessed there twenty years ago, in 1994. Artist Hippolyte’s sensitive watercolors provide a heartbreaking counterpoint to the human devastation. Read an excerpt at Words Without Borders.

Bengal Lights, in its latest issue (Autumn 2014), features an excerpt from Bernard Quiriny’s satire “Black Tides,” the fifth story I’ve published from his multi-prizewinning 2008 collection Contes carnivores.

Bengal Lights is a literary journal out of Dhaka, Bangladesh.

Our tastes are cosmopolitan: no location, no writer, no genre is off-limits. we welcome all writers: established or beginning, grizzled veterans or fresh-faced newbies, versed in the classics or cyber-narratives. we also seek to publish quality writing from bangladesh and south asia, but above all we seek to be engaged, to be a bazaar where all genres can mingle and multiply.

We seek writing that reflects the spirit and diverse voices of bangladesh and the rest of south asia. we also want expressive writing from the wider world beyond it. we are searching for fresh voices and new talent. we seek to forge literary connections between bangladesh and the wider world.

Here’s an excerpt:

The lights went down, and the first image was projected onscreen. It showed smoke shot from a helicopter: a gigantic black mushroom, quite alarming. After that we saw the oil tanker in different stages of sinking, then the massive flood that escaped its tanks and spread over the ocean. The club members waxed ecstatic like art lovers before a stormy sky by El Greco. Philippe narrated his photos, recounting his feelings on beholding such scenes of desolation. Next came the photos taken from the coast, when the sheet of bunker fuel hit shore. If the aerial shots were still bearable for being relatively abstract, these were so repulsive as to turn one’s stomach: petroleum patties stuck to the rocks like sooty buboes, birds bogged down to their beaks, natives pathetically trying to gather the spill with rakes, and even a lost little boy, his feet in fuel oil, a gluey patty he gazed at disgustedly in his hand, not knowing whether to hurl it far away or hang on to it so as not to add to the general desolation. It was appalling. Gould came and sat down beside me, murmuring a gentle reprimand: “Remember, morality has no place here! The disaster has already happened; it’s not our fault, nor is it within our power to repair. So check your guilt at the door.” I tried as best I could to suppress my nausea; all around me, the club members were purring with pleasure. It was very strange: the sight of oil-covered animals, soiled beaches, and lichens sopping with petroleum aroused in them the same kind of reaction that pornographic pictures did in the average person. These lovers of black tides weren’t just perverts: they were in fact connoisseurs of a special kind of obscenity, akin to refined erotomaniacs whose tastes run only to sophisticated depravities.

Belgian Bernard Quiriny (1978 – ) is the author of three short story collections: L’Angoisse de la première ligne (Phébus, 2005), which won the Prix Littéraire de la Vocation; Contes carnivores (Seuil, 2008), which won Prix du Style, the Prix Marcel Thiry for fabulism, and Belgium’s top literary prize, the Prix Rossel; and Une collection très particulière (Seuil, 2012), which won the Grand Prix de l’Imaginaire. He has also written two novels: Les assoiffés (Seuil, 2010), a satirical dystopian alternate history of Belgium as a feminist totalitarian state, and most recently Le village évanoui (Flammarion, 2014), as well as a biography of symbolist poet Henri de Régnier, Monsieur Spleen (Seuil, 2013). His work has appeared in English in Subtropics, World Literature Today, The Coffin Factory, Weird Fiction Review, and Dalkey Archive’s Best European Fiction 2012.

Pakistani literary journal The Missing Slate has published my translation of Jean Muno’s flash fiction “The Chair”! Here’s an excerpt:

Stranger still: the chair was only there till it wasn’t. This happened more or less quickly, and always unexpectedly. It took advantage of a moment’s inattention, a brief absence on Frederick’s part, to vanish, so quickly that he’d never actually seen it vanishing. Every morning for two weeks now, the chair had escaped him. He would have had to keep an eye on it without let-up, not look away before the sun was fully up, but he had neither the patience nor the leisure.

Jean Muno is the greatest 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 the Prix Rossel in 1979, and was a member of Belgium’s Royal Academy of Languages and Literature. His work has appeared in Weird Fiction Review and is forthcoming in Year’s Best Weird Fiction Vol. 2.

Issue 18 (Fall/Winter 2014) of the erstwhile Subtropics features Bernard Quiriny’s story “A Neverending Bender,” the fourth story I’ve published from his multi-prizewinning 2008 collection Contes carnivores. Here’s an excerpt:

When my brother and I were children, Dad had a safe in his office where he hid his papers, money, and a revolver. The office was off-limits; John and I were not allowed to set foot inside. But one day, our games led us there. The safe was open, and I remember catching sight of a little bottle which, habitué that I was of falling off bikes, I took for astringent. (That very night, I gave myself away by telling my father that he should keep the bottle in the medicine cabinet, thus revealing that I’d disobeyed him.)

What did that bottle contain? In light of the manuscript we’ve just seen, I find it hard to believe it wasn’t zveck.

Belgian Bernard Quiriny (1978 – ) is the author of three short story collections: L’Angoisse de la première ligne (Phébus, 2005), which won the Prix Littéraire de la Vocation; Contes carnivores (Seuil, 2008), which won Prix du Style, the Prix Marcel Thiry for fabulism, and Belgium’s top literary prize, the Prix Rossel; and Une collection très particulière (Seuil, 2012), which won the Grand Prix de l’Imaginaire. He has also written two novels: Les assoiffés (Seuil, 2010), a satirical dystopian alternate history of Belgium as a feminist totalitarian state, and most recently Le village évanoui (Flammarion, 2014), as well as a biography of symbolist poet Henri de Régnier, Monsieur Spleen (Seuil, 2013). His work has appeared in English in Subtropics, World Literature Today, The Coffin Factory, Weird Fiction Review, and Dalkey Archive’s Best European Fiction 2012.