Châteaureynaud Central

For anyone interested in a taste of Georges-Olivier Châteaureynaud’s work before picking up a copy of his collection A Life on Paper from Small Beer Press, here is a list of all the places you can find it. Some are links to free stories online, others to magazine sites where back issues can be purchased.

Forthcoming:

  • “The Beautiful Coalwoman,” Podcastle (TBA)
  • “The Bronze Schoolboy,” Confrontation (TBA)

Praise for Georges-Olivier Châteaureynaud:

“As weird as they are elegant, as delicious as they are unsettling, these fables place Châteaureynaud in the secret brotherhood that has only exemplars, no definition: Kafka, Bruno Schulz, Nathanael West, Aimee Bender. We are lucky indeed to have them, in a very skilled translation.”
—John Crowley (Little, Big)

“Châteaureynaud’s stories are disorienting, bizarre, mythical. The stories don’t end with epiphanies or a tidy wrapping-up. Some of the endings are abrupt, even unsatisfying; they feel more like a beginning. So what? A Life on Paper is fantastic in both meanings: it’s fantastic, as in strange, unreal, weird, imaginary; and it’s fantastic, as in absolutely fucking awesome. People will call A Life on Paper magical realism. A few will call it irrealism. I don’t care what you call it. I just want you to read it.”
—Bookslut

“Both classic and modern, strange and simple, Châteaureynaud’s stories remind not only of Vonnegut but of Gogol and Kafka. What’s endearing about the stories is the amount of tenderness running through them. Even in stories about bizarre cruelty (the title story tells of a father who had his daughter photographed a dozen times a day for her entire life), affection provides the glue.”
—Time Out Chicago

“A Life on Paper is a brief selection from more than thirty years of fiction. Châteaureynaud has a backlist for American readers that this book makes enticingly tangible, almost real. His own work is such that it might be subject of one of his stories. This might be all there is, the rest pure fabrication. The unreal, awaiting translation.”
—Rick Kleffel, The Agony Column

“These 22 curious tales verging on the perverse will strike new English readers of Châteaureynaud’s work as a wonderful find. Beautiful prose featuring ingenuous protagonists and clever, unexpected forays into horror are the hallmarks of these mischievous stories.”
—Publishers Weekly

“Châteaureynaud’s dance steps are so nimble that he seems, without effort, to show us what is best in others.”
—Ken Schneyer, Brooklyn Rail

“In Châteaureynaud, the most potent emotional and poetic moments, the cruelest of his tales, spring from the rift that opens between the unutterable and a language, scrupulously executed in a faultless style, whose raison d’être is to leave nothing unsaid. Words are ideally ordered, brought gracefully and gently to a high level of functioning perfection and, although at their acme, are forced to admit their defeat, to scatter before the world’s impenetrability, the shifting depths of uncertainty, the worm in the rotten fruit of the future. Every story by Châteaureynaud is an opening through which the light peers only to underscore the immensity of shadow.”  ~ Pierre Lepape, Le Monde

“He unfolds a fantastical universe that is never terrifying or oppressing—the situations in his stories might very easily cause the worst anxieties, and yet some touch neither comical nor parodical always comes to alleviate the atmosphere.  What is taking shape here is indeed difficult to pinpoint: not humor, but of another order, more subtle, a kind of gladness popping up here and there, a lightness that keeps things from sinking into blackness… Each of these tales is a perfect incarnation of the short story in its purest form.” ~ Isabelle Roche, Le Littéraire

“He seems to have come from elsewhere, with his discreet, exacting phrases so finely polished only the bare force of the words comes through… brief, luminous, accomplished miniatures, fables without morals that take us smoothly from light into shadow, from reality to fantasy.” ~ Alexis Lorca, Lire

“The themes of dream and reality… the ironies of fate, and the knowledge of one’s mortality are singularly presented in a quasi-surrealist mode. Chateaureynaud’s use of language, not to mention his startling, often bizarre images and metaphors, embellishes the otherwise mundane, realistic world he represents. The result is the creation of an intriguing, surrealistic hybrid of tales, noteworthy for their originality as well as for the psychological territories they invite us to explore.” ~ Donald J. Dziekowicz, World Literature Today

“Chateaureynaud samples, at his leisure, the bitterness of a shadowlands where reality plunges into fraught nightmare.” ~ Laurence Liban, Lire

“These stories are haunted by the twin graces of simplicity and mystery…beneath their almost too seemly exteriors, they burst with madness, strangeness, a sensuality that their prose veneer conceals only the better to reveal.” ~ Michèle Gazier, Télérama

“He leads us… with his sinuous, silken sentences, his precise choice of words, ever evocative, charged with emotion and sensation, humor and surprise.” ~ Serge Cabrol, Encres Vagabondes

“Magical because it leads us astray while pretending to show us the way.  It bows to the best in literature: lies.” ~ Joël Schmidt, Réforme

Gale’s Contemporary Authors series characterizes Châteaureynaud’s stories as “fairly realistic in nature but tinged with an element of fantasy.” This element is used to adumbrate character and emotion, producing what John Taylor in the Review of Contemporary Fiction calls “sensations of oddness to intimations of inexplicable metaphysical mysteries.” Taylor goes on in the Times Literary Supplement to dub him Hoffmanesque, placing him “in the lineage of Poe and Kafka” thanks to “the persuasiveness of his ontology… [which] derives from the parsimony with which he measures out the telltale frissons of supernatural fiction.” In The French Review, Paul Mankin remarks the author’s “sensitive impressionistic prose with… epigrammatic trouvailles.”