Frankfurt rights guide 2014 sabine wespieser éditeur 13, rue séguier 75006 Paris www.swediteur.com [email protected] + (33) 144 07 59 59 Yanick Lahens Bain de lune (Moon Bath) novel A fter three days of storm, a fisherman discovers, unconscious on the shore, a girl who seems to have come through a big violence. But did she really come through it? The voice of the castaway rises then, praising all the voodoo gods and her ancestors, to understand how and why she found herself there. This hardly breathing voice will chant the ample family novel which Yanick Lahens displays here, summoning the three generations which preceded the young woman to try to clarify the double mystery of her aggression and her identity. The Lafleur family always lived in Anse Bleue, a village in Haiti where earth and waters cohabitate in a violent beauty. Between them and the Mésidor family, the story is an old one and especially the resentment. It began when this family of well-to-do took over all the good lands of the region. The Lafleur now live from the tiny proceeds of their small farm. At the market, when Tertulien Mésidor, the man with both a Lord and a rogue gaze, stops as struck in front of the stall of Olmène Dorival (whose grandfather was a Lafleur), only sixteen years old, the attraction is mutual. The passion of the two lovers is going to live under the people and the gods gaze, and their child will be the beginning of a lineage. But, on this island also swept by the political hurricanes, the new world overlaps the older one. In this beginning of the sixties, trucks pass from village to village to drive men to the big gathering which has to be held in Port-au-Prince in honor of “The Man with the black hat and the thick glasses”. While a black veil comes down for a long time on Anse Bleue. Calling in to witness the age-old chorus of these villagers whose saga she wrote, Yanick Lahens, carried by a lyric language and a beautiful narrative ability, gives a voice to the forgotten of her country, the silent mass of these farmers with whom history is nevertheless written. Her novel is simply brilliant. Other titles at sabine wespieser éditeur Guillaume et Nathalie (Guillaume et Nathalie). April 2013, 180 pages. Failles (Faults). October 2010, 160 pages. Rights sold: Brazil (Foundation Alexandre de Gusmao), Germany (Rotpunktverlag). La Couleur de l’aube (The Colour of Dawn). November 2008, 224 pages. Rights sold: Germany (Rotpunktverlag), Haïti (Editions Presses Nationales d’Haïti), Italy (Barbès Editore), UK/US (Seren Books). Yanick Lahens lives in Haiti. She has on the literary scene of her country a very singular position by her independence of mind and the authority she has acquired through community activism. In her novels as in her short stories and her essays, she always brushed without complacency the picture of the Caribbean reality. For a long time professor of literature, Yanick Lahens dedicates herself today, when she does not write for her, to the production of documentaries with young people in camps around Port-au-Prince. September 2014 • 280 pages [email protected] + (33) 144 07 59 59 Catherine Mavrikakis La Ballade d’Ali Baba (The Ballad of Ali Baba) novel D edicated to “the forty thieves”, The Ballad of Ali Baba is a dizzying tribute to the disappeared father. From Key West, where he drives his daughters in his turquoise blue Buick Wildcat to greet the birth of 1969, to Kalamazoo, where he drops them for a week and where he will never return to get them back, via Las Vegas where he claims to use his ten-year-old daughter, Érina, as lucky charm in the casinos, Vassili Papadopoulos wants to show off. Of this unpredictable and seductive father, who very early misused his wife’s patience, and whom she saw again only sporadically after the divorce of her parents, Érina, the narrator of the novel, was not fooled for a long time. The first sudden chill passed, the specialist of Shakespeare that she became wonders not really to find him, as an old skinny man dressed in a light overcoat, in the streets of Montreal swept by a snowstorm, although he died nine months earlier… Without having lost anything of his selfassurance, he explains to her, that he, who dropped out the school at the age of fourteen, will finally be able to understand Hamlet’s statement – «the time is out of joint» –, to which she dedicated two chapters of her thesis. Érina anticipates that he is not going to stop there. Catherine Mavrikakis is on first-name terms with ghosts and deceives the chronology in this brilliant portrait of a man whose existence is given to us by brightness, as through a kaleidoscope. On the island of Rhodes, he left in 1939 with his family, in Algiers where, as a very young man, he had to make a living, in New York where he came in 1957 «to play the American»: everywhere, he is terribly present, and terribly attaching. Other titles at sabine wespieser éditeur Les Derniers Jours de Smokey Nelson (The Last Days of Smokey Nelson). September 2012, 336 pages. Rights sold: Italy (Keller editore), Sweden (Sekwa Förlag). Le Ciel de Bay City (The Sky of Bay City). August 2009, 304 pages. Rights sold: Greece (Hestia), Italy (Bompiani), Sweden (Sekwa Förlag). Catherine Mavrikakis was born in Chicago in 1961, of a Greek father and a French mother. She teaches literature at the university of Montreal. Since the publication of her first essay in 1996, she builds a literary work of high importance. Two of her novels have already been published by Sabine Wespieser éditeur, Le Ciel de Bay City (The Sky of Bay City, 2009) and Les Derniers Jours de Smokey Nelson (The Last Days of Smokey Nelson, 2012). August 2014 – 200 pages [email protected] + (33) 144 07 59 59 Marion Richez L’Odeur du Minotaure (The Smell of the Minotaur) first novel O f the wound which made her the barbed wires, while she dashed, confident, in a field where grazed cows, the girl only kept a mark on her arm. The girl who didn’t want to grow up made a success of a perfect performance. Her mat childhood, her first love story with a young man who was as orderly as herself, she put it all away very far. Marjorie, after brilliant studies, became the ghostwriter of a Minister. Locked into her certainties, beautiful and conquering, she mocked men and her past. But the number which displays on the screen of her mobile phone while traveling to her ministry, she would recognize it between all, although she didn’t compose it any more for a long time: her mother calls her at the bedside of her dying father. When, in her powerful car, she leaves the highway which led her at her parents, thinking of taking a shortcut, a violent shock made her stop. She just strucked an animal. Upset, trembling in the night of the forest, she collects the last breath of the big deer she killed. And that’s the moment when her life tips over. The Smell of the Minotaur, as the initiatory tales to which it’s similar by the extreme conciseness of its language and the simplicity of its structure, is a beautiful novel of metamorphosis. Born in the North of France in 1983, Marion Richez grows up in Paris then in the countryside; she starts to like the theater with the Scène Nationale d’Aubusson. Accepted at the École normale supérieure de la rue d’Ulm, qualified teacher of philosophy, she prepares a doctorate at the Sorbonne on physical consciousness. The Smell of the Minotaur is her first novel. August 2014 • 128 pages [email protected] + (33) 144 07 59 59 Françoise Huguier Au doigt et à l’œil Selfportrait of a photographer F or soon forty years, Françoise Huguier travels the world, the podiums and behind the scenes in search of the good light and of the perfect frame. In his foreword in « Photo poche « dedicated to the work of this great lady of photography, Gérard Lefort (journalist at Libération) evokes her style, recognizable between all: “ When you close Françoise Huguier’s books, having bathed in hundreds of her pictures, what stays ? A Russian proletarian who drinks straight from the beak of a kettle in a nickel foundry of Norilsk. A young bozo girl in an improper bra in Mopti, Mali. An evanescence of ultramarine blue at the end of a Thierry Mugler fashion show in January, 1997. A beautiful proud and sad young man, laborer in a Cambodian plantation. They are all characters of an internationalist fiction. All are ordinary heroes. “ The one whose childhood was marked by a determining episode – she was kidnapped at age eight by Viêt-minhs in Cambodia and stayed eight months hostage in the “cursed jungle” –, has decided today to put words, and only words, on her surprising journey. Her autobiography reveals her most intimate photographic choices, to begin with learning the job as the employee in laboratory, where she spent days in the dark to develop movies. It is also the portrait of the free and determined woman to whom no one never imposed nothing and very early, after having published her first shootings in different French magazines and newspapers, she chose large-scale, personal projects, subjects of numerous books: Sur les traces de l’Afrique fantôme (Maeght, 1990), En route pour Behring (Maeght, 1993), Sublimes (on the world of fashion, Actes Sud, 1999), Kommounalki (on the community apartments of Saint-Petersburg, Actes Sud, 2008) or Les Nonnes (in Colombia, Filigranes, 2013). Françoise Huguier appears here as an explorer who has nothing to envy to the female pioneers of the last century: Au doigt et à l’œil is also a tremendous adventure novel. April 2014 • 256 pages [email protected] + (33) 144 07 59 59 François Jonquet Les Vrais Paradis (The Real Paradise) novel I n the turning point of the 80s, a young man discovers the life in a nightclub. He is going to make this former theater, transformed into a temple of disco, a fabulous ground of game, seduction and experiment. Every evening, he loses himself inside of in a hedonist labyrinth which opens on the imagination. In the trail of the narrator, The Real Paradises restore a moment of grace, sort of French Movida, as evoked by Gilles Châtelet: “ Definitely, who will not have known the end of the 70s will not have known the relaxed rhythm of life, this shiver of swing where the History hesitates between an Ancien Régime and crashes of a Revolution «. Then comes the turning point where the young man attends the end of a world and the birth of ours. Alternately initiatory then crepuscular, this novel marks the passage from adolescence to adulthood, from one environment to another, from the corridors behind the scenes, from a music-hall to the circus, from the party to the drama. It is the stage door, the door of masks, drugs and ghosts. The Real Paradises is also a wink to old Paris, that of Baudelaire and Lautréamont, the Surrealists and Alain Pacadis, Edith Piaf, Coluche. Other titles at sabine wespieser éditeur Daniel (Daniel) April 2008, 128 pages. Et me voici vivant (And Here I Am living) August 2006, 128 pages. In his first book, the biography of Jenny Bel’Air, mythical figure of the Parisian nights (Pauvert, 2001) and in his documentary Les Années Palace, broadcasted by France 5 in 2005, François Jonquet already wrote about the 80s. He is also an art critic, lives in Berlin and is also the author of a book of conversations with the British contemporary artists Gilbert and George (Phaidon / Denoël, 2004) and, at Sabine Wespieser éditeur, of a novel, Et me voici vivant (And here I am living, 2006) and of an essay, Daniel (2008). March 2014 • 256 pages [email protected] + (33) 144 07 59 59 Kéthévane Davrichewy Quatre murs (Four Walls) novel T he family house is too vast for a single woman. On this day of moving, four children, already adults, find themselves there for the last time. Their father died. In the empty rooms which resonate, the seemingly harmless words are full of insinuations. These four know each other too much to pretend, especially when their mother, taking advantage that they are for once together, without children nor spouses, raises the question of the inheritance. Two years later, nothing is solved: the brothers and the sisters speak to each other hardly, and especially not of their past. On the insistence of their mother, they nevertheless agreed to gather altogether in Greece, the country of their origin, in the house where the elder one has just settled down. This journey is, for each of them, the opportunity to bring up the ambivalence of their relationship. How did they get there, those who meant everything to each other? Kéthévane Davrichewy excels in pointing out the dissonance in the voices of her four protagonists, who each believe in their own truth, and as if she would assemble the pieces of a puzzle, reveals little by little the motives a family drama and proposes a beautiful variation on the loss of innocence. Other titles at sabine wespieser éditeur Les Séparées (The Separated) January 2012, 192 pages. La Mer noire (The Black Sea) January 2010, 224 pages. Rights sold: Germany (Fischer), Georgia (Ustari Publishing), Italy (Rizzoli), The Netherlands (Meulenhoff), Sweden (2244/ Bonnierförlagen). Kéthévane Davrichewy was born in Paris into a Georgian family. After La Mer noire (The Black Sea, 2010), she published, always at Sabine Wespieser éditeur, Les Séparées (The Separated, 2012), who was acclaimed by the critics and became a public success. She also wrote numerous children books at L’École des loisirs. February 2014 • 192 pages [email protected] + (33) 144 07 59 59 highlights 2013 Léonor de Récondo Pietra Viva, Novel Spring 1505. Michelangelo leaves Rome overwhelmed. He has just discovered the dead body of Andrea, a young monk whose bright beauty fascinated him. He travels to Carrare to choose the marble of the grave which Pope Julius II ordered him. During six months, Michelangelo, already in his thirties, to whom his “Pietà” was worth glory and fame, is going to live at the rate of the quarry, selecting the best blocks, negotiating them, organizing their transport. His capacity to discern the slightest vein in the marble made him win the trust of the stone-cutters. During his solitary evenings in the inn, with the small book of Petrarch which Lorenzo de Medici offered him and Andrea’s Bible, Michelangelo still questions the mystery of the death of the monk, deeply desiring to capture his beauty in the marble. In the course of days, the arrogant and restless sculptor, whom nothing has to divert from his work, allows nevertheless others to approach him: his companions the quarrymen, the sheer madness of Cavallino, but also Michele, the six-year-old child who’s mother has just died. The naivety and the affection of the little boy will make Michelangelo’s most buried souvenirs reappear: the death of his own mother. Because he finally gives way to his feelings, his stay in Carrare, in the heart of an exuberant nature, is going to point out a deep transformation in his work. He will find from now on those that he loved in the lively material of the marble. August 2013 • 240 pages Rights sold: Spain (MInuscula). Ot h e r t i t l e s Rêves oubliés (Forgotten Dreams), 2012 Rights sold: Spain (MInuscula). Marie Richeux Polaroïds, short fictions Foreword by Georges Didi-Huberman The short fictions gathered in this collection were chosen among those Marie Richeux writes daily for “Pas la peine de crier”, the radio show she produces for three years on France Culture. Each of these short texts intends to create an image gradually, as the photography on a Polaroid reveals itself. This selection of about sixty on more than six hundred texts, in its random and shrubby shape, reveals unquestionably the temperament of a writer. The first time I experienced Marie Richeux’s Polaroids, was a few months ago. I walked into a radio studio to participate in a program of which I knew nothing (I never listen to the radio in the afternoon), with this young woman who asked so beautiful questions, with very calm but very playful sentences, like improvised but so precise in reality. I then thought about what Walter Benjamin said in his text on «The Author as Producer»: when the work, not the ego itself speaks in certain favorable circumstances. And then Marie Richeux suddenly stopped the time, producing a break in the dialogue, according to a rule of a game that I had no idea of, and she read in front of the microphone a written text where the issue first was a «crack in the ground,» a «crack in the concrete,» and then, lying on the ground, a few colored beads, probably fallen from a beauty box for little girls. From Georges Didi-Huberman’s foreword October 2013 • 160 pages Michèle Lesbre écoute la pluie, Novel (Listen to the Rain) Before the old man throws him-self on the rail, sending her his last smile, the narrator was going to meet the man she loves at the hotel Les Embruns. The shock made everything tip over. Rather than to go to the station, she sinks into the streets of Paris for a long night-wandering under the thunderstorm. Back at her home in the early morning, always incapable to explain to her lover why she was not with him, she murmurs to his inten-tion the narrative of her sleepless night, hoping that he will be capable of understanding the enigmatic message she leaves with him: “Listen to the rain“. Michèle Lesbre in this deeply moving novel, writes tirelessly about desire and the urgency to live, anyway. February 2013 • 112 pages Rights sold: Germany (Conte Verlag). Ot h e r t i t l e s Victor Dojlida, une vie dans l’ombre, 2013 Un lac immense et blanc, 2011 Nina par hasard, 2010 Germany (dtv premium/ edition Manholt im DTV), Italy (Sellerio), Sweden (Sekwa Förlag). Rights sold: Sur le sable, 2009 Le Canapé rouge, (shortlisted for the Prix Goncourt 2007) Rights sold: China (Shangai 99), Finland (Lurra), Germany (dtv premium/manholt im dtv), Iran (Nashreh Cheshmeh), Italy (Sellerio), Lithuania (Versus Aureus), The Netherlands (Ailantus), Poland (Wydawnictwo Sonia Draga), Romania (Editura Echinox), Spain (RBA Libros), Sweden (Sekwa Förlag), USA/UK (Seagull books). La Petite Trotteuse, 2005 Rights sold: Bulgaria (Lege Artis), China (Shangai 99), Germany (dtv premium/manholt im dtv), Italy (Excelsior 1881). Un certain Felloni, 2004 Boléro, 2002 [email protected] + (33) 144 07 59 59 backlist 12 écrivains néo-zélandais Les Belles étrangères Delperdange Patrick Chants des gorges Abdulhamid Ammar Dérèglements Demornex Jacqueline Le pire, c’est la neige Ali Tariq Un sultan à Palerme Le Livre de Saladin L’Ombre des grenadiers La Femme de Pierre La Nuit du Papillon d’or Berlin - Moscou (La Peur des miroirs) Djavann Chahdortt Autoportrait de l’autre Belleret Robert Les Bruyères de Bécon Sixties Faits divers Duong Thu Huong Terre des oublis Itinéraire d’enfance Au zénith Roman sans titre Sanctuaire du cœur Les Paradis aveugles Les Collines d’eucalyptus Dupont-Monod Clara Nestor rend les armes Benchemsi Rajae Marrakech, lumière d’exil La Controverse des temps Ellena Jean-Claude Journal d’un parfumeur La Note verte Bizien Jean-Luc Marie Joly Fignolé Jean-Claude Une heure pour l’éternité Bolecka Anna Mon cher Franz Gander Forrest En ami Boogard (van den) Oscar Mort de l’amour Pollen La Plage verticale Genardière (de la) Philippe L’Année de l’éclipse Borel Vincent Baptiste Mille regrets Pyromanes Antoine et Isabelle Richard W. Gheerbrant Alain L’Homme troué Giorgetti Florence Do you love me? Govrin Michal Sur le vif Sur le rivage Boursat Sophie L’Eau et l’Huile Guégan Gérard Inflammables Bucher André Le pays qui vient de loin Le Cabaret des oiseaux Pays à vendre Déneiger le ciel Haden Rosamund L’Église des pas perdus Charney Anne Dobryd Le Jardin de Rousseau Coulson Joseph Le Déclin de la lune Le Blues des grands lacs Dali Salvador Visages cachés Huguier Françoise Au doigt et à l’œil, autoportrait d’une photographe Ismaïlov Hamid Contes du chemin de fer Jepsen Erling L’Art de pleurer en chœur Sincères condoléances Daoud Kamel Le Minotaure 504 Jonquet François Et me voici vivant Daniel Les Vrais Paradis Davrichewy Kéthévane La Mer Noire Les Séparées Quatre murs Keegan Claire L’Antarctique Les Trois Lumières à travers les champs bleus Kidman Fiona Rescapée Gare au feu Le Livre des secrets Lahens Yanick La Couleur de l’aube Failles Guillaume et Nathalie Bain de lune Lapaque Sébastien Court voyage équinoxial Lemaître Estelle Swiftitudes (de la rapide consolation d’un chagrin d’amour) Lesbre Michèle Boléro Un certain Felloni La Petite Trotteuse Le Canapé rouge Sur le sable Nina par hasard Un lac immense et blanc écoute la pluie Victor Dojlida, une vie dans l’ombre O’Faolain Nuala On s’est déjà vu quelque part? Chimères J’y suis presque L’Histoire de Chicago May Best Love Rosie Ce regard en arrière (et autres écrits journalistiques) Peters Christoph Une chambre au paradis Rahmani Zahia Moze «Musulman» roman France, récit d’une enfance Récondo (de) Léonor Rêves oubliés Pietra viva Richeux Marie Polaroïds Richez Marion L’Odeur du Minotaure Levi Mario Istanbul était un conte Rollin André La Mémoire de l’iceberg Mattern Jean Les Bains de Kiraly De lait et de miel Simon Weber Roux Annelise La Solitude de la fleur blanche Mavrikakis Catherine Le Ciel de Bay City Les Derniers Jours de Smokey Nelson La Ballade d’Ali Baba Mercado Tununa Mémoire argentine Mestre Serge Les Plages du silence Meur Diane La Vie de Mardochée de Löwenfels écrite par luimême Raptus Les Vivants et les Ombres Les Villes de la plaine Miller Isabelle Le Syndrome de Stendhal O’Brien Edna Crépuscule irlandais Saints et Pécheurs Les Vivants et les Ombres La Maison du splendide isolement Rubinstein Marianne Le Journal de Yaël Koppman Savinio Maria Aux côtés d’Alberto Savinio Scott Lawrence Calypso de nuit Seethaler Robert Le Tabac Tresniek Sen Selina Après la mousson Théodoropoulos Takis Les Sept Vies des chats d’Athènes Le Roman de Xénophon L’Invention de la Vénus de Milo Le Va-nu-pieds des nuages Yared Hyam L’Armoire des ombres Sous la tonnelle