Jordan Stump

Claire Baglin

On the Clock

Rebecca Gisler

About Uncle

Patrick Modiano

Out of the Dark

Éric Chevillard

New work from the acclaimed author of The Crab Nebula and Palafox.

Demolishing Nisard

Naming and Unnaming is a dazzling study that centers on the work of Raymond Queneau, one of the most influential French novelists of the twentieth century. Jordan Stump takes as his subject the many implications?epistemological, political, literary, sometimes even physical?of naming in Queneau?s remarkable novels. From the idea that the names of characters offer a more immediate and perhaps even a more intimate understanding of their souls than we might glean from their words and deeds has grown the broad field of inquiry known as literary onomastics. Stump argues that there is another approach to the literary proper name, one that concentrates not on the meaning of names but on the meaning of the use of those names?the ways in which the characters and narrator of a novel address or refer to others. Naming and Unnaming considers the literary and philosophical implications of names and naming. Stump examines four issues in Queneau?s novels?the nature of writing and of creation in general, the possibility or impossibility of knowledge, the relationship between the individual and the group, and the uses of power and control?in relation to which naming emerges as a force both powerful and utterly impotent. By exploring these forces and their evocation, Stump reveals the complexity of both the act of naming and the novels of Queneau.

Naming and Unnaming

Jordan Stump had often contemplated the relationship between a translation and ?the book itself,? ruminating on the intriguing inherent sameness and difference between the two. In The Other Book, Stump examines the ?other? forms of a book and the ways in which they both mirror and depart from the original. Grounding his witty and original study in an exploration of four forms of Raymond Queneau?s Le chiendent?a copy, the manuscript, a translation, and a critical edition?Stump poses questions designed to help readers reconsider the nature of fiction and reading. ø Each form of Le chiendent both is and is not what we mean when we say "Le chiendent," yet the friction between their ways of being and that of ?the book itself? proves unexpectedly productive, raising troublesome questions about the nature of textuality, reading, language, and knowledge. It also positions us to assess several answers proposed in response to such questions and to wonder about their usefulness. And as we consider those questions, we will have Queneau?s novel beside us, further confounding our attempts to answer?for our inability to answer those questions is precisely the point of The Other Book, as it is of Le chiendent.

Bewilderments of Fiction

The Other Book

Marie NDiaye

Longlisted for the Man Booker International Prize 2016 Clarisse Rivière's life is shaped by a refusal to admit to her husband Richard and to her daughter Ladivine that her mother is a poor black housekeeper. Instead, weighed down by guilt, she pretends to be an orphan, visiting her mother in secret and telling no-one of her real identity as Malinka, daughter of Ladivine Sylla. In time, her lies turn against her. Richard leaves Clarisse, frustrated by the unbridgeable, indecipherable gulf between them. Clarisse is devastated, but finds solace in a new man, Freddy Moliger, who is let into the secret about her mother, and is even introduced to her. But Ladivine, her daughter, who is now married herself, cannot shake a bad feeling about her mother's new lover, convinced that he can bring only chaos and pain into her life. When she is proved right, in the most tragic circumstances, the only comfort the family can turn to requires a leap of faith beyond any they could have imagined. Centred around three generations of women, whose seemingly cursed lineage is defined by the weight of origins, the pain of alienation and the legacy of shame, Ladivine is a beguiling story of secrets, lies, guilt and forgiveness by one of Europe's most unique literary voices.

Ladivine

Pierre Siniac

The unbuttoned, unkempt, unlikely fiction of Pierre Siniac is a slap in the face of the traditional crime novel, and The Collaborators is his best and most hilarious book...

A Novel

The Collaborators

An examination of the relationship between a text and its "other" forms--translation, manuscript, critical edition, copy--and what can be gleaned from this textual interplay.

Jordan Stump

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