Fatima Daas’s The Last One is an autobiographical novel that presents an original and complex exploration of identity. A portrait of the protagonist, also called Fatima Daas, emerges through a series of vignettes that jump across time but take us ultimately from her childhood to her twenty-ninth birthday.
Category Archive: Books
Missouri Williams’s debut novel, The Doloriad, is a wild and wholly original contribution to the growing genre of climate fiction. With its rich prose, dark humour and unsettling concentration on the very worst aspects of humankind, it’s a novel that is likely to split opinion.
I slept in Jane’s bed three months before I met her. She was nameless Jane the first time, plain Jane the second, a cruel half-smile on Jack’s lips who supplied this and only this and little else, leaving me reading the rest in the spines on the bookshelves and the herbal tea selection by the kettle.
Valérie Rouzeau’s Pas revoir (1999) is a collection of poetry written shortly after the death of her father.
Over the last forty years, contemporary French poetry has been living in a state of crisis. Pronounced dead – or worse, irrelevant – it has sought to reassert its value, define its current specificity, and delineate its difference from the poetic practices of the past.
If any twentieth-century French poet invites a methodical, quasi-mathematical approach to their work, it is Raymond Queneau, co-founder of the Oulipo and author of the proto-algorithmic Cent mille milliards de poèmes (1961).
Huysmans bemoaned the academic mediocrity of the Salons’ most celebrated regulars; never one to mince his words, he wrote that Pierre Lecontre Du Noüy “made the wrong choice of career,” that Henri Gervex “no longer knows how to paint,” and that William-Adolphe Bouguereau’s “The Birth of Venus” is “so bad that there isn’t even a word for it.”
The French author discusses autobiography, formal experimentation and her Man Booker shortlisted book “The Years.”
Taking Deleuze and Guattari’s notion of ‘déterritorialisation’ as a point of departure, this article explores how certain forms of literature dismantle or disrupt dominant linguistic codes
Looking at Freud’s paintings, one can sense this intuitively; plants are not charged with doing or saying something, they are just there, in all their quiddity.
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