Intrigued and unnerved, she turns to her neighbours: Vandoosler, an ex-cop, and three impecunious historians, Mathias, Marc and Lucien - the three evangelists. They agree to dig around the tree and see if something has been buried there. They find nothing but soil.A few weeks later, Sophia disappears and her body is found burned to ashes in a car. Who killed the opera singer? Her husband, her ex-lover, her best friend, her niece? They all seem to have a motive.Vandoosler and the three evangelists set out to find the truth.

    For Marlaud, this involves carrying out a meager existence on rue Froidevaux in Paris, tending to his father’s grave in the cemetery across the street, and earning the ghost of a living through a part-time job at the funerary shop on the corner. It does not, however, take into account the amorous intentions of the obese concierge of his building, who has set her widowed sights on his diminutive frame, and whose aggressive overtures will set the wheels in motion for a burlesque and obscene tragedy. Originally published in 1979, The High Life introduces cult French author Jean-Pierre Martinet into English. It is a novella that perfectly outlines the dark fare of Martinet’s vision: the terrors of loneliness, the grotesque buffoonery of sexual relations, the essential humiliation of the human condition, and the ongoing trauma of twentieth-century history.

    Loden’s 1970 film Wanda is a masterpiece of early cinema vérité, an anti-Bonnie-and-Clyde road movie about a young woman, adrift in rust-belt Pennsylvania in the early 1960s, who embarks on a crime spree with a small-time crook.How to paint a life, describe a personality? Inspired by the film, a researcher seeks to piece together a portrait of its creator. In her soul-searching homage to the former pin-up girl famously married to Hollywood giant Elia Kazan, the biographer’s evocative powers are put to the test. New insights into Loden’s sketchy biography remain scarce and the words of Marguerite Duras, Georges Perec, Jean-Luc Godard, Sylvia Plath, Kate Chopin, Herman Melville, Samuel Beckett and W.G. Sebald come to the narrator’s rescue. As remembered scenes from Wanda alternate with the droll journal of a flailing research project, personal memories surface, and with them, uncomfortable insights into the inner life of a singular woman who is also, somehow, every woman.

    Obsessive, darkly comic, and full of angst, Blue Self-Portrait unfolds among Berlin's cultural institutions, but is located in the mid-air flux between contrary impulses, with repetitions and variations that explore the possibilities and limitations of art, history, and connection.

    A new translation by Scot James Hogarth for the first unabridged English edition of the novel, which tells the story of a reculsive fisherman from the Channel Islands who must free a ship that has run aground in order to win the hand of the woman he loves, a shipowner's daughter.

    Now the basis for a hit underground film which was banned in France, Baise-Moi is a searing story of two women on a rampage that is part Thelma and Louise, part Viking conquest. Manu and Nadine have had all they can take. Manu has been brutally raped, and determines it's not worth leaving anything precious lying vulnerable -- including her very self. She teams up with Nadine, a nihilist who watches pornography incessantly, and they enact their own version of les vols et les viols (rape and pillage) -- they lure men sexually, use them up, then rob and kill them. Drawing from the spiky cadences of the Sex Pistols and the murderous eroticism of Georges Bataille or Dennis Cooper, Baise-Moi is a shocking, accomplished, and truly unforgettable novel.

    Philosophy of the Boudoir follows three aristocrats as they indoctrinate the fifteen-year-old Eugénie de Mistival in “the principles of the most outrageous libertinism.” 200 years after de Sade’s death, readers will continue to find shock and delight in this most joyous of his erotic works, now with a new introduction by Francine du Plessix-Gray.

    R. Sanders, whose name is printed on the cover of every installment of the wildly successful young adult adventure series? Or is it Daniel Roche, the enigmatic world traveler who disappears for months at a time? When Daniel’s great-niece, Hélène, moves to Paris to study archeology, she does not expect to be searching for answers to these questions. As rumors circulate, however, that the twenty-fourth volume of The Black Insignia series will be the last, Hélène and her friend Guillaume, a devoted fan of her great-uncle’s books, set out to discover more about the man whose life eludes her. In so doing, she uncovers an explosive secret dating back to the darkest days of the Occupation.In recounting the moment when one history began and another ended, The Travels of Daniel Ascher explores the true nature of fiction: is it a refuge, a lie, or a stand-in for mourning?

    A major hit in Germany that went on to become one of Europe’s biggest literary blockbusters in the last five years, Night Train to Lisbon is an astonishing novel, a compelling exploration of consciousness, the possibility of truly understanding another person, and the ability of language to define our very selves. Raimund Gregorius is a Latin teacher at a Swiss college who one day—after a chance encounter with a mysterious Portuguese woman—abandons his old life to start a new one. He takes the night train to Lisbon and carries with him a book by Amadeu de Prado, a (fictional) Portuguese doctor and essayist whose writings explore the ideas of loneliness, mortality, death, friendship, love, and loyalty. Gregorius becomes obsessed by what he reads and restlessly struggles to comprehend the life of the author. His investigations lead him all over the city of Lisbon, as he speaks to those who were entangled in Prado’s life. Gradually, the picture of an extraordinary man emerges—a doctor and poet who rebelled against Salazar’s dictatorship.

    And he couldn’t have guessed why she was calling—not to apologize for, or explain, the way she’d vanished from his life, but to invite him to a party. A birthday party. For a woman he’d never met. This is the story of how one man got over a broken heart, learned to love again, stopped wearing turtlenecks, regained his faith in literature, participated in a work of performance art by mistake, and spent his rent money on a bottle of 1964 bordeaux that nobody ever drank. The Mystery Guest is, in the words of L’Humanité, a work of “fiendish wit and refinement.” It pushes the conventions of autobiography (and those great themes of French literature: love and aging) to an absurd, poignant, and very funny conclusion. This translation marks the English-language debut of an iconoclast who has attracted one of the most passionate cult followings in French literature today.

    Devastated, Elisa unravels. As controlled as Elena Ferrante's The Days of Abandonment and as propulsive as Jenny Offill's Dept. of Speculation, La Femme de Gilles is a hauntingly contemporary story of desperation and lust and obsession, from an essential early-feminist writer.Just after her novel was first published in 1937, Madeleine Bourdouxhe disassociated herself from her publisher (which had been taken over by the Nazis) and spent most of World War II in Brussels, actively working for the resistance. Though she continued to write, her work was largely overlooked by history . . . until now.

    G. Sebald's first novel, never before translated into English, is perhaps his most amazing and certainly his most alarming. Sebald—the acknowledged master of memory's uncanniness—takes the painful pleasures of unknowability to new intensities in Vertigo. Here in their first flowering are the signature elements of Sebald's hugely acclaimed novels The Emigrants and The Rings of Saturn. An unnamed narrator, beset by nervous ailments, is again our guide on a hair-raising journey through the past and across Europe, amid restless literary ghosts—Kafka, Stendhal, Casanova. In four dizzying sections, the narrator plunges the reader into vertigo, into that "swimming of the head," as Webster's defines it: in other words, into that state so unsettling, so fascinating, and so "stunning and strange," as The New York Times Book Review declared about The Emigrants, that it is "like a dream you want to last forever."

     Diane needs to start over again. After returning from Ireland and turning the page on her stormy relationship with Edward, the brooding Irish photographer, she is determined to rebuild her life in Paris with help from her best friend Féx. She focuses solely on getting her literary caféack on track-until she meets Olivier. He is kind and thoughtful, and she may have a future with him...until she stumbles across her former love at a photography exhibit. What is Edward doing in Paris? Why didn't he reach out? Faced with a hail of questions, her old flame remains cold and unresponsive. Apparently, he, too, has moved on. In order to put the past behind her, Diane must go back over her tracks. Ireland saved her before. Can she get answers there and find peace again?

    Alice and Mattia, both "primes," are misfits who seem destined to be alone. Haunted by childhood tragedies that mark their lives, they cannot reach out to anyone else. When Alice and Mattia meet as teenagers, they recognize in each other a kindred, damaged spirit. But the mathematically gifted Mattia accepts a research position that takes him thousands of miles away, and the two are forced to separate. Then a chance occurrence reunites them and forces a lifetime of concealed emotion to the surface. Like Mark Haddon's The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, this is a stunning meditation on loneliness, love, and the weight of childhood experience that is set to become a universal classic.

    But Ferdinand has another lover, Lucienne, an ambitious doctor, and together the adulterers have devised a murderous plan. Drugging Mireille, the pair drown her in a bathtub, but in the morning, before the "accidental" death can be discovered, the corpse is gone--so begins the unraveling of Ferdinand's plot, and his sanity... This classic of French noir fiction was adapted for the screen by Henri-Georges Clouzot as Les Diaboliques (The Devils), starring Simone Signoret and Véra Clouzot, the film which in turn inspired Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho. A second movie version, Diabolique, followed in 1996, starring Sharon Stone.