All posts tagged: France

What We’re Reading: March 2025

Curated by SAM SPRATFORD

In this special edition of the column, JAY BOSS RUBIN shares a mini review of ABDULRAZAK GURNAH’s Theft, freshly released on Tuesday, March 18. JEANNE BONNER follows him with a novel that bears witness to the modern world from a very different angle, at the close of Nazi rule in France. 

 

cover of theft

Abdulrazak Gurnah’s Theft; recommended by TC Online Contributor Jay Boss Rubin

The new novel by Abdulrazak Gurnah, Theft, is his first since he received the phone call informing him he’d been awarded the 2021 Nobel Prize in Literature. Its titular theft is open to interpretation. The plot turns decisively on an accusation of stealing. Many references to historical thievery are woven into the narrative. But the book’s most unforgettable thefts may be the central characters’ encroachments—those committed and those just contemplated—on one another’s dignity.  

What We’re Reading: March 2025
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August 2023 Poetry Feature

New poems by LESLIE SAINZ, L.S. KLATT, and MICHELLE LEWIS

 

Table of Contents:

  • L.S. Klatt, “The Alchemist”
  • Michelle Lewis, “Vain Tenderness” and “The Land of Rape and Honey”
  • Leslie Sainz, “At the Center of the Story and Utterly Left Out”

 

***

The Alchemist
By L.S. KLATT

My neighbor really has nothing to do
but mow his grass & watch television.
It’s the quiet life for him. The adhesive

August 2023 Poetry Feature
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The Headless Man

By BARBARA MOLINARD

Translated from the French by EMMA RAMADANPanics book cover

The woman took a seat on the bench. She was wearing a little black dress and a coat that was also black, brightened up with a pale blue scarf around her neck. Long blond hair framed her rather beautiful face, which her eyes, drowned in dream, bestowed with a unique absence.

The Headless Man
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Flashé Sur Moi

By ADRIENNE G. PERRY

 

He pulled up as I walked on the side of a busy Lyon road, the type that becomes a highway once it hits the outskirts of town. Ignoring the thick traffic behind him, he stalked me slowly in a compact car, beckoned to me through his open window, across the empty passenger seat.

Flashé Sur Moi
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March 2021 Poetry Feature: Sylvie Durbec

Poem by SYLVIE DURBEC, translated from the French by DENIS HIRSON

Sylvie Durbec was born in Marseille and lives in Provence, near Avignon. She writes texts in both prose and poetry, as well as painting and making collages. The many books she has published over the past twenty years include the prose-poetry memoire Marseille : éclats et quartiers (Marseille, fragments and quarters) which won the prestigious Jean Follain prize; Prendre place (Taking  place) concerning the internment camp at Douadic in France and Soutine, a prose-poem about the painter, published in The Common. This year she has published 50 carrés du jour (50 squares of the day) and Ça qui me poursuit (That which pursues me).

Denis Hirson grew up in South Africa and has lived in France since 1975. He has published nine books, several concerning the memory of South Africa under apartheid. The latest, both published in 2017, are Footnotes for the Panther, ten conversations with William Kentridge, and Ma langue au chat, in French, concerning the torture and delight of speaking and writing in that language.

 

Table of Contents 

  • The Ignorance of Beasts 

 

 

The Ignorance of Beasts

I still don’t know how to type a tilde on a computer keyboard

when writing the name of a Spanish or Portuguese writer I love.

 

Nor do I know what poetry is. 

 

March 2021 Poetry Feature: Sylvie Durbec
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Review: Older Brother

Book by MAHIR GUVEN

Translated from the French by TINA KOVER

Reviewed by FEROZ RATHER

book cover

The protagonist of Mahir Guven’s debut novel, Older Brother, is the son of a Syrian emigre taxi driver and a French mother who has died by the time the story begins. He is in his late twenties. An Uber driver addicted to hash, he is living in a suburban ghetto outside of Paris he calls “the dump of France.” He fears his ennui, induced by the indifference of the countless customers he ferries around, might kill him. But despite the jadedness, his caustic humor enlivens him, endowing his fulminations with a faint existential quality.

Review: Older Brother
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Blaenavon

By RALPH SNEEDEN 

rusty farm machinery

We thought it was just going to be a tour of the defunct coal mine’s aboveground facility, which was already troubling enough. The winding wheels and framework for the conveyor system at the “pit head” were like the superstructure of an abandoned carnival, like the one I’d read about near Chernobyl.

Blaenavon
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