The author of The Bicycle Eater shares "a fluid and troubling fable" of brotherhood, tragedy, and the limits of art, written in "a subtle and fine poetry" ( La Presse, CA).Twin brothers Amed and Aziz live in the peaceful shade of their family's orange grove. But when a bomb kills the boys' grandparents, the war that plagues their country changes their lives forever. Blood must repay blood. And in order to avenge their grandparents' deaths, one brot...

Bestselling author Alice Livingstone is dead. She leaves her philosopher husband, Antoine, to deal with her legacy, towards which he feels increasingly estranged. Confronted with his wife’s much-reported disappearance, Antoine revisits their past relationship: open and liberal on the outside, but constrained and deviant on the inside. The news of the day (the death of JFK Jr., the self-immolation of a Buddhist monk), which plays on the television running in the novel’s background, graduall...

John Wilkes Booth assassinated Abraham Lincoln at Ford’s Theatre in Washington, D.C. Inside that theatre today, Ranger Powell of the U.S. Parks Service takes crowds of tourists, the curious and the ghoulish through a step-by-step description of the assassination. Underneath the box where Lincoln was shot, he describes the plot of the comedy Lincoln watched that night, Our American Cousin, as being “kind of like the Beverly Hillbillies.”Scratch the surface of any s...

War Cantata translated by Keith Turnbull How far will humanity go in its quest for power? Why do we desire to eliminate each other through war? War Cantata looks at ways the impulse for violence is transmitted from one generation to the next; for example, when a father teaches his son hatred to transform him into a soldier impervious to pity. Without focusing on a particular battle or soldier, this harsh, intense, choral text builds the rhythmic power of words to ...

In “The Axe” a literature professor arrives at the door of one of his students in the middle of the night. On his way he has stumbled (with a flask of whiskey) through the pouring rain, stopping in a city park to vandalize the statue of an angel, tormented by the image of his life’s work, ninety-seven poems he has left behind in flames in his apartment. The student has turned in an assignment (which the professor has brought along in his briefcase): a carefully wrapped hatchet.In “...

Singularly obsessed with his all-consuming passion for Anna, the object of his adolescent desire, the photographer Christophe Langelier is beside himself. Ten years ago, he failed the test of eating a bicycle for her as proof of his love and devotion. Since then, he has created a photographic catalogue of his only model, complete with a glossary, an “Anna-lexique,” in which the darkness and the light of her idealized being have shaded his language, even as her ubiquitous image has crowded ...

Edgar, a timid, asocial thirty-something, witnesses the brutal rape of a young woman and subsequently bears the unconscious victim home. Haunted by the death of his overbearing mother, he pledges to act as the mysterious woman’s saviour. Gothic and darkly humorous, The Obese Christ explores the nebulous divide between Good and Evil, while demonstrating a powerful mastery of suspense.

Some will tell you that there is no cure for Functional digestive disorders (FDDs), like dyspepsia and irritable bowel syndrome (IBS) Without being completely cured, with the help of regular internal exercises I developed, I live my life as if I was, because at the earliest sign of pain or symptoms I do the exercises to help eliminate them. I hope my experience will enable as many of you as possible to get some relief from FDDs with or without medication. The Personal Approach section desc...

Just thirty, with a well-paid job, depression and no love life, the narrator and anti-hero par excellence of this grim, funny and clever novel smokes four packs of cigarettes a day and writes weird animal stories in his spare time. A computer programmer by day, he is tolerably content, until, that is, he's packed off with a colleague - the unimaginably ugly, sexually-frustrated virgin Raphael Tisserand - to train provincial civil servants in the use of a new computer system... A painfully ...

What is the truth? A gift of the human condition to the self. Free Verse in Useless Times is the first collection of poetry ever published by the author. Peter W. Chaltas has written 14 collections of poetry over many years. This is the first to be released. The poetry addresses questions that concern everyone. Free Verse in Useless Times asks questions about the truth of the human condition, speaks about nature, about beauty, and about what may transcend the finite human existence. It is ...

"Brussels, Belgium's cosmopolitan, multilingual capital, has it[s] criminal underside, as shown in the 13 dark—and sometimes darkly humorous—stories" ( Publishers Weekly).From the historic city center to the Palais de Justice to the pubs, this collection contains crime fiction tales, often with a touch of the surreal and the dystopian, that reveal the stranger and seamier side of the city known as the "capital of Europe."Includes brand-new stories ...

Winner of the inaugural French Voices Award: "[A] masterfully conceived debut, a relentless tale, intricately and irresistibly told" ( La Quinzaine Littéraire).Only once in a great while does a new novel come along that takes a literary scene by storm, demonstrating real innovation in the craft of storytelling. Julia Deck provides this force in Viviane—the first debut novel in a generation to be released by the most prestigious li...