Search results for ""les fugitives""

She is famous throughout the world, but how many know her name? You can admire her figure in Washington, Paris, London, New York, Dresden or Copenhagen but where is her grave? She danced as a 'petit rat' at the Paris Opera. She was also a model, she posed for painters and sculptors - among them Edgar Degas. Taking us through the underbelly of the Belle Epoque, Laurens casts a light on those who have traditionally been overlooked in the study of art, and opens a space for essential questions. She paints a compelling portrait of Marie van Goethem and the world she inhabited, in the 1880s; a time when art unsettled the hypocrisy of society.

Read more less

Sidi Bou Said, Tunisia: on the night after the terrorist attack killing thirty-eight tourists on the nearby beach of Sousse, a woman sits facing the sea, and attempts to take stock. Personal tragedies soon resurface, the unexpected deaths of a dear friend - a fellow writer who died just weeks ago at sea, having forsaken the work that had given his life meaning - and of her father, a quiet man who had left all that he held dear in Tunisia to emigrate to France in his later years. Through childhood memories and the prism of modern French classics, the story of Tunisia's Jewish community is pieced together. Shifting from Tunisia to Paris to a Flaubertian village in Normandy, Colette Fellous embarks on a Proustian lyrical journey, in which she gives voice to loved ones silenced by death and to those often unheard in life. Her love letter and adieu to her native country becomes an archive - or refuge - for stories of human resilience.

Read more less

In a large country house, shut off from the world within a gated garden, three young women responsible for the education of a group of little boys are hanging paper lanterns for a party. Their desires, however, lie elsewhere... Meet The Governesses: wild or drifting about in a melancholy calm, spied upon by Monsieur Austeur, fascinated by the ever more mysterious unfolding of events, like the charms and spells of a midsummer night's dream...

Read more less

On 8 March 2008 the Italian performance artist Pippa Bacca set out to hitchhike from Milan to Jerusalem in a wedding dress, documented with a video camera. On 31 March her body was found in woods on the outskirts of Istanbul. In telling the young woman's story, which overwhelms her and inexorably draws her in, Leger recounts the different stages of her research and the writing of the book. She strikes upon something fundamental within Bacca's performance: the desire to remedy the unfathomable nature of violence and war. Ultimately, she must face up to the failure of the young woman's endeavour. As she surveys the terrain of performance art and continues her examination of portrayals of the female condition, as in her earlier books, Leger explores the existential mystery and harsh truths expressed in Bacca's work, and that of other performance artists. The White Dress closes what is now regarded as a trilogy that begins with Exposition and is followed by Suite for Barbara Loden.

Read more less

Studded with five gouache drawings by Louise Bourgeois, this erudite, witty fable by the acclaimed author of Now, Now, Louison (2018) considers the ambiguous figure of the baby Jesus and its representation in the artistic canon.' 'One day in 2007,' recalls Jean Fremon about a visit to artist Louise Bourgeois's studio, 'I discovered an entirely new series of drawings.... silhouettes of women with embryos in their wombs, drawn with a brush full of water and red gouache. These drawings were, for me, the most poignant of her long career.'

Read more less

Assembling fragments of past and present Erica Van Horn describes a life laid out in detail, quietly registering the fuzziness of the line between eccentricity and madness. In this mosaic portrait of a singular everywoman, an undutiful daughter details her mother's immutable rituals and her irrepressible anarchy.

Read more less

From the brilliant, sui generis Anne Serre - author of the celebrated Governesses - come three bewitching, thoroughly out-of-the-way tales. 'To make a pact with the thing that threatens you is arguably the smartest trick of all.' 'The Fool' may have stepped out of a tarot pack - to walk a mountain trail or worm his way into a writer's mind. 'The Narrator' proposes his mirror image, a storyteller in sheep's clothing, who has a bone to pick with language. In 'The Wishing Table', the orgiastic antics of an incestuous family are recounted by one of three daughters. A dream logic rules each of these unpredictable, sensual and surreal stories: romps no doubt, yet deeply moral, and entirely unforgettable ones.

Read more less

In an anonymous French village a child loves to wander a forest where his mother may have disappeared. His father is speechless with anger; his grandmother is concealing her own story.

Read more less

In the late 1850s, Celina, a young girl aged fifteen, takes up work as a maid for the Hugo family in Guernsey. There she encounters the delicate balance between the professional and the personal, and the obligations upon her as her livelihood is at stake. Celina navigates a life of hardship and loss, but not without crucial moments of pleasure and pride. In a voice full of the innocence of youth, yet studded with fine observations about her surroundings, her perspective offers a nuanced, potentially challenging portrait of the man and the artist. Axelrad''s fictional account is based on cryptic notes found in Hugo''s diaries as well as letters from his wife.

Read more less

A French woman haunted by her encounter with an American-German pianist-composer who is obsessed with Arnold Schoenberg's portrait, flies home with her lively sister and a volume of Adorno's letters to Thomas Mann. While the impossible heroine unpicks her social failures the pianist reaches towards a musical self-portrait with all the resonance of Schoenberg's passionate, chilling blue. A novel of angst and high farce, Blue Self-Portrait unfolds among Berlin's cultural institutions but is more truly located in the mid-air flux between contrary impulses to remember and to ignore. Noemi Lefebvre shows how music continues to work on and through us, addressing past trauma while reaching for possible futures.

Read more less

Everything can be exhibited: trinkets from the Second French Empire, a collection of photographs, a boudoir from beyond the grave, a heroine famous for her beauty, her extravagance and her pitiful end. Everything can be exposed: a woman for another woman... , the fear of one's own body, a way of entering a scene, the thrill of seduction, abandonment, the reassurance of objects, a ruin. Over the course of four decades, the Countess Virginia Oldoini returned to the same Paris studio to be photographed, posing in different tableaux to mark the moments of her life, real and imagined. A fascination with 'La Castiglione' led Nathalie Leger to weave together this imaginative proto-biography. Mysterious yet over-exposed, adored and despised for her beauty in equal measure, Castiglione was a flamboyant aristocrat, mistress of Napoleon III and a rumoured spy. Examining the myths around icons past and present, Leger meditates on the half-truths of portrait photography, reframing her own family history in the process.

Read more less

A chance encounter on Portobello Road incites an unsettling, magnetic attraction between Mary, an elderly white woman, and Cub, a British-Jamaican boy, and drives her crumbling world into heightened delusion. The two struggle to keep their footing as white supremacy, desperation and class conflict collide on the streets of London. Through exquisite juxtaposition, Ananda Devi exposes the tensions of an increasingly nationalistic and polarised metropolis. At once realistic and fantastical, The Living Days encapsulates Devi's daring, unflinching talent and paints an unforgettable portrait of London at it's most bewitching, and most dangerous.

Read more less

'The best early training for a writer is an unhappy childhood,' Hemingway famously said. Julia Kerninon, one of France's most acclaimed young novelists, tells an altogether different story in a poetic account of her pursuit. Her vibrant ode to reading, and to writing as a space for discovery (as well as a 'respectable occupation') entwines the French and Anglo-Saxon literary traditions as she journeys fluidly through her formative years. From her native Brittany to the city of Shakespeare and Company, to a seaside cafe on the Atlantic coast, to Budapest and back, the author conjures a feminine answer to A Moveable Feast.

Read more less

Rural Iraq, during the war against the so-called Islamic State. A pregnancy out of wedlock. The young woman knows her fate is sealed. In crystalline prose May the Tigris Grieve for You enters the minds of all protagonists, before and after death; fragments of the legend of Gilgamesh, the Mesopotamian hero who carries along the memory of the country and its people, punctuate the family members' short monologues, spaced with the mythical voice of the Tigris River, who has seen it all.; Inspired by her experience of Iraq's complex reality and brutal wars, Malfatto delivers an uncompromising yet compassionate insight into a rigid society ruled by fathers and sons, a world in which life matters less than honour. Winner of the Prix Goncourt du Premier Roman 2021.

Read more less

A woman addresses letters to an absent loved one while in the apartment opposite hers, a mysterious female figure keeps on appearing under a landscape painter's brush. Directing her reader and characters with a deftness reminiscent of Alfred Hitchcock's Rear Window, Lucie Paye dramatises the power of unconditional love and the role of the unconscious in artistic creation. From Paris to Naples, Mauritius and London, Absence traces a poignant search for redemption and truth, among the lies that destroy lives.

Read more less

As she tries to collect them for an essay she is planning to write, other women's words begin interfering in Clara Schulmann's life - heard on the radio, in podcasts, songs, and films; words of novelists, feminist intellectuals, friends or strangers overheard in the street. They invade her psyche, reshaping the essay that she once had in mind into a picaresque adventure which investigates the fault lines around women's voices: and in particular those moments of overflow and excess where wayward words take seed. Chicanes heralds a new French feminism through a meticulously orchestrated chorus of the wildest female voices, from figures in the history of feminist writing to the stranger on the street, blurring the boundaries between body and art; personal and political. A poly-translation, by eight female translators, from established to emerging, Chicanes brings the individual voice of each translator into subtle relief.

Read more less

Progressing by image and word associations, Fremon evokes Bourgeois's history and inner life, bringing a sense of fascinating and moving proximity to the internationally renowned artist... The art world's grande dame and its shameless old lady, who spun personal history into works of profound strangeness, speaks out with her characteristic insolence and wit, and comes to vibrant life again through the words of a most discrete, masterful writer. From her childhood in France to her exile and life in America, to her death; her relationships to her family and her young assistant, her views on landmark male artists, the genesis of her own work... through the moods, barbs, resentments, reservations and back, at full speed - this is a phosphorescent account of Bourgeois's life, as could only be captured by the imagination of one artist regarding another.

Read more less

Taking selfies is not the exclusive preserve of millennials. In Selfies, the niece of French philosopher Simone Weil, also daughter of one of the most brilliant mathematicians of the 20th c., gives a playful twist to the concept of self-representation: taking her cue from self-portraits by women artists, ranging from the 13th c. through the Renaissance to Frida Kahlo and Vivian Maier, Weil has written a memoir in pieces, that is yet unified. Each picture acts as a portal to a significant moment from Weil's own life (as schoolgirl, writer, daughter and mother) and sparks anecdotes tangentially touching on topical issues (from the Palestinian question to the pain of a mother witnessing her son's psychotic breakdown, to the subtle manifestations of anti-Semitism, to ageism, genetics, and a Jewish dog...). Switching from poignant to light-hearted, with Weil's trademark irony and self-deprecating humour, Selfies is a sophisticated, `delightful read', with heartwrenching tendencies. (Front cover photograph: VIVIAN MAIER, Self-portrait, New York, NY, 1955 copyright Estate of Vivian Maier, Courtesy Maloof Collection and Howard Greenberg Gallery, New York. End page photograph of the author by Marc Riboud, courtesy of Catherine Riboud, Paris.)

Read more less

Over the course of a night in police custody, a young woman tries to understand the rage that led her to assault a refugee on the Paris metro. She too is a foreigner, now earning a living as an interpreter for asylum seekers in the outskirts of the city. Translating the stories of men and women who come from her country of birth, into the language of her country of citizenship, Sinha's narrator finds herself caught up in a tangle of lies and truths. Armed with an acerbic sense of humour she exposes prejudices on all sides.

Read more less

I was trying not to think about looking for work, which is immoral, I wasn't hoping to earn a living, which is pretty unusual, I couldn't have cared less about the cash, which is reckless in these times of very grave threats, but I was scraping a living already, which was repugnant, on the miniscule royalties from a thickwit novel, which is scandalous, which I'd created from the stories of a brilliant and brittle grand dame of theatre, survivor of a romance full of stereotypes, which makes you think though I don't know what about.' Sparring with the spectre of an over-bearing father, torn between the push to find a job and the pull to write, the narrator wanders into a larger debate, one in which the troubling lights of Kafka, Kraus, and Klemperer shine bright. Set against the backdrop of police brutality and rising nationalism that marked the state of emergency following the 2015 terrorist attacks in Paris, Poetics of Work takes a jab at the values of late capitalism. Hence these ten 'lessons to today's young poets' - a blistering treatise of survival skills for the wilfully idle

Read more less

In early 1920s England, Nora''s life in a state of flux. A gifted painter, married to man named Herbert, she has fallen in love with another. Sent away to her parents'' home to consider her position, she decides to take control of her life. She divorces her first Herbert to marry the second, then embarks on an existence on the margin of the artistic and political elite. This quest for control of her life as an artist, mother and wife will continue. Nora is a gifted painter but struggles to find the focus that seems to come so easily to male artists who are not required to fit their work into their domestic lives. In late 1960s Glasgow, young biologist Maria de Sousa wrestles with her feelings for Adam, her older colleague. Fifty years later, his daughter seeks out Maria to discover what really happened between them. Adam is the author''s father, and Nora the grandmother she never knew. Penelope Curtis offers sensitive portraits of those whose lives she has had to imagine in order to un

Read more less

Mireille Gansel grew up in the traumatic aftermath of her family losing everything-including their native languages-to Nazi Germany. In the 1960s and 70s, she translated poets from East Berlin and Vietnam to help broadcast their defiance to the rest of the world. In this half memoire, half philosophical treatise Gansel's debut illustrates the estrangement every translator experiences for the privilege of moving between tongues, and muses on how translation becomes an exercise of empathy between those in exile.

Read more less

The author of Flaneuse: Women Walk the City joins the bus commuter crowds in this love letter to Paris, written in iPhone notes. Commuting between English and French, Lauren Elkin chronicles a life in transit. From musings on Virginia Woolf and Georges Perec, to her first impressions in the aftermath of the Charlie Hebdo attacks, to the discovery of her ectopic pregnancy, her diary sketches a portrait of the author, not as an artist, but as a pregnant woman on a Parisian bus. In the troubling intimacy of public transport, Elkin queries the lines between togetherness and being apart, between the everyday and the eventful, registering the ordinary makings of a city and its people.

Read more less

Fables, memories, things he's read, things he's seen, transposed or made up, the stories gathered in Portrait Tales take the reader around the world, hopping through art history, with imaginative flair for the caustic or extravagant, yet always telling detail: from an impossible portrait of Jesus in 50 AD, which somehow brings J.L. Godard into the picture, to the 14th c. Ottoman Empire, to China's Qing Dynasty, the Italian Renaissance, French Rococo, and Louise Bourgeois's mirrors, these historiettes expound the paradoxes, the necessity, and the dangers of seeking truthfulness in art. With gentle but unmistakable irony, they highlight the intricate connexion between art and power.

Read more less