Myriam Antaki
Souviens-toi de Palmyre
Novel
300 pages
The Author
Born in Syria where she still lives, Myriam Antaki has been bilingual since her childhood. She writes in French. She has written three novels: La Bien-aimée (Orban, 1985, Prix de l’Amitié Franco-Arabe) ; Les Caravanes du soleil (Gallimard, 1991) ; Les Versets du pardon, dedicated to Palestine, published in the United States where it received the Hemingway Reward.
The Book
In the year 267 A.D., Odenath, King of Palmyra, died. His wife, the young Zenobia, became regent in the name of her son Wahballat of a land that was an opulent oasis in the Syrian desert, a city of culture and commerce whose rich caravans prospered from India to the Mediterranean. Taking advantage of the Rome’s discomposure after the conquest of Shapuhr, Zenobia refused to be ruled by Rome. With ambition to match the greatest conquerors and the intelligence of the finest military strategists, she lead armies and allies, soon overcame the resistance of Egypt and Asia Minor, creating an empire that spread her domination all over the Orient. She was only twenty-seven.
Yet at the height of her glory, the queen was secretly longing for Zabbaï, whose image haunted her still. He was indeed a faithful general, but a disappointing lover. Zenobia’s victories were countless, she tried in vain to extinguish the flames of one fire by lighting others. “An invisible veil floated around me, the memory of a caress, it breathed life into me and exhausted me. I replaced that absence by a mad desire to please and to astonish. Rome would lose the Orient where she gathered her food, her golden fabrics, and the dreams of her Gods.”
When the new Emperor Aurelian, worried by this powerful rival, besieged Palmyra and destroyed it, Zenobia, now a dethroned queen and a humiliated captive, still young yet on the brink of death, remembered.
Myriam Antaki brings to life this astonishing character, unaccountably little known. An epic told in poetic tones, of lands where the golden light falling on sandy landscapes challenges the beauty of oriental costumes; where the great rivers, the Nile and the Euphrates, echo to the thunder of war. The author’s intimate knowledge of the land and her subject make this a captivating restoration of  the Ancient Orient.   

Jean-François Bizot
Les déclassés
Novel
280 pages
The Author
Jean-François Bizot was born in 1944. It was in May 1970 that he launched the magazine Actuel. He has made a film, La Route (1973); written an essay, Au parti des socialistes (1975). Les déclassés is his first novel, published by Sagittaire in September 1976, here re-edited and presented in a new version. Today, Jean-François Bizot directs Radio Nova.
The Book
Hugh is agonizing between the declining grand bourgeoisie and the rising petite. Only sixteen years old, he’s completely confused. “Which do you prefer,” his friends ask. “Aqua Velva or Old Spice? Brittany farmhouse style or modern design? Marketing or advertising? A pig-face on a superb chassis or a top model’s face on a runt?” Fortunately, Karl Marx steps in with his big red Batman cape. Hugh at last finds some meaning in the world, a direction for his rebellion. He becomes a militant, sticks up posters, falls in love with Maria, discusses the reconstruction of the party. Then he gets fed up with sectarianism. Hugh is becoming more and more of a misfit.
After May 68, he goes to America to discover the underground and its electronic mutants: he gets into rock, freaks, acid trips. How provincial France looks from there! And how dull. He comes back to Paris when things are beginning to move. With ten other misfits - proletarians, hooligans, petit-bourgeois with eclectic tastes - he launches what must be the last assault on the old world, already shaking on its foundations. Utopia, musik, love-ins… he does the grand tour.
A picaresque chronicle of the sixties and the seventies, a political and sentimental education, this is the novel of France’s militant years brought to us by a legendary figure of the press.

Jean-François Bizot
Un moment de faiblesse
Novel, 300 pages
The Author
Jean-François Bizot was born in 1944. It was in May 1970 that he launched the magazine Actuel. He has made a film, La Route (1973); written an essay, Au parti des socialistes (1975) ; and a novel, Les declassés (Sagittaire, 1976). Today, Jean-François Bizot directs Radio Nova.
The Book
This is the chronicle of the fight between a man, Jean-François Bizot, and the cancer inside him that must be defeated. The story of how the monster attacked him in India, his frantic return home, hospitalization. The brutal verdict: cancer of the bladder.
Then began a never-ending combat fought by a man who was determined to win, using all the resources of science – including the most modern – even experimental.
In brief chapters that alternate humour and clinical accounts, cynicism and compassion, surgical precision and lyrical enthusiasm, the author recounts the year when his life was crossed by cancer.
He tells of the indescribable pain that made him howl till dawn, the remissions, the relapses, the constant war against a squatter in his own body, the rapports with the nursing staff, the ironic jubilation of the former addict who was now being given the drugs that used to be forbidden…
He tells us about friends who lost hope, others who didn’t, business that had to go on as usual, the procession of the ’68 generation, whose lives had reached a turning point just as his life had been assailed by the illness.
Bizot is not just anybody, he’s the founder of Actuel, director of Radio Nova, a living legend for a whole generation of journalists, artists, creators and connoisseurs of fringe culture to whom he is the polar star and a tireless forager.
With the sham detachment of a true pretender, with grating snickers of hope where we might expect polite despair, with the incredible courage of a fighter who - little by little - yells the beast out of his body. Bizot has written a magnificent book which will certainly become a myth of its genre.  

Rachid Boudjedra
Les funérailles
Novel
220 pages
The Author
Born in 1941 in Algeria, Rachid Boudjedra’s works include Le Démantèlement (1982); Le Désordre des choses (1991); Fils de la haine (1992); Timimoun (1994) and, published by Grasset, Lettres Algériennes (1995) and Vie à l’endroit (1997).
The Book
1995: Sarah has just joined the anti-terrorist brigade in Algeria, where she meets Salim, member of the scientific division. They fall in love while fighting a daily battle against the barbarian violence that is the mark of all terrorists.
In front of the mortuary lies a twisted body, a bloody mass of flesh and bone aching to go on living. Ali has just survived a bloodbath. He had a ‘miracle’ escape.
An eleven year-old  girl, fatherless, highly intelligent, continues to attend college in spite of threats to her life. She is snatched from her desk in the classroom, by the same group. Beaten, raped, an eye gouged out and her throat cut in broad daylight, she cannot be buried. Nobody is authorized to wash her body, sew up the gash in her neck, find her eye and attend a funeral. If they were to do so, they would risk ‘Fliqua’s death’. The butchers have decided that anyone whose acts defy their horrific plans will die.
Then there’s a little boy killed in the school yard while he was washing the blackboard sponge. Fliqua attends the funeral with his henchmen. He even walks forward to kiss the feet of the little boy - now purified by death – who will sit at Mohammed’s right hand that night.
Sarah makes posters of the victims, hangs them on the wall of her office, keeps the little boy’s schoolbag and the little girl’s eye that was found hanging around Fliqua’s neck when he was killed, he and his men, by the anti-terrorist police.
Sarah also keeps a little blue sachet. In it, some particles of a brain. It belonged to a judge for juveniles. It was the judge’s wife who gave it to her. In exchange, Sarah gave her an arm and the permit to use it, so sure is she that if she keeps the woman alive and puts someone on her trail, she’ll lead them to the killers. When they arrest Saïd-Foetus, he cries out in protest because they dared to wake his two babies, the twins…
This is a novel about religious fanaticism and the struggle against terrorism, experienced by a woman. A scrutiny of the killers and the madness that drives them to commit their horrendous crimes. 

Arnaud Delalande
La musique des morts
Novel
480 pages
The Author
Arnaud Delalande, aged thirty, is a scriptwriter and a writer. His first novel, Notre Dame sous la terre, sold almost 10,000 copies and was translated into several languages. His second novel, L’église de Satan, was published by Grasset in May 2002.
The Book
Created at the beginning of the 18^th century by an unknown Russian violin maker called Svetlan Borg, the Cygne is a prodigious instrument, on a par with the finest Stradivarius. A brilliant violinist and musical virtuoso, Niccolo Paganini, nicknamed “The Devil”, is believed to have taken it with him to the tomb…
Today, in Paris, this instrument has become an obsession to Igor Vissevitch, a famous composer whose health is now failing. His son Frédéric  grew up in his father’s shadow, though he never possessed his talent. In love with the young Celia, a singer who is to sing in the maestro’s ultimate chef d’oeuvre, Frédéric goes to Prague in search of the Cygne.
There he meets a rabbi, Elie Bogdanowicz, master of the Old-New Synagogue and a renowned violin maker. He gives Frédéric the body of the instrument and tells him all about its legendary genealogy. Next Frédéric takes a plane for Venice, to acquire the lost bow that belonged to the Cygne, so as to reunite the two pieces torn asunder by History, and bring them back to his father…
But Elie is murdered, and Igor Vissevitch, whose behaviour changed strangely since acquiring the violin, is killed in curious circumstances. Faced with the brutality and the mystery of these murders, Frédéric investigates. He discovers a partition hidden in the violin case: the Perpetual Movement, one of Paganini’s chef d’oeuvres still considered, with his Caprices, to be unsurpassable. Since the partition is his only clue,  Frédéric plunges into the music, even studying the way his father used to play it. He begins an investigation whose key word is music… What secret is hidden in the Perpetual Movement, a flowing cascade of notes and harmonics? What is the relation between the Cygne and the tortures practiced in the ghetto of Terezin, where one dreadful night in 1944, Elie Bogdanowicz’s father stood up to a Nazi officer?  
Arnaud Delalande brings us an ambitious blend of music and murder for his third novel.
  
Jean Ferniot
Noces de nuit
Novel
252 pages
The Author
A writer-reporter, Jean Ferniot is also a prolific novelist, essayist and writer of short-stories. We particularly remember Je recommencerais bien, his autobiography. He received the Prix Interallié.
The Book
Noces de Nuit tells the story of an ordinary man whose ordinary suffering drives him to an extraordinary psychosis: he falls madly in love with the ghost of a woman who died before he was born. Guy Larcher, an intellectual, a loser, who is secretary to a member of the Academy, Armand Dégremont, has lived with Florence for about ten years. Each day his jealousy increases – jealousy without any erotic motive (“if she came from time to time in his arms, it was with other men that she achieved spiritual orgasm”).
When she is expecting her mediocre lover’s baby, he turns out to be incapable of assuming the prospect of paternal responsibilities and persuades Florence to have an abortion. She leaves him and he flees to his old manor in Brittany, “Brittany bigoudène, with high, starched lace caps placed on top of wrinkled faces, with crucifixions of granite that only ever partially baptised the pagan beliefs, with silent vestiges of dead civilisations.”
Rummaging through an old trunk the attic, Guy finds the diary of a certain Louise Vallet, born in 1912, whose portrait affects him deeply.
Like a voyeur, he enters this woman’s secrets. She confesses her complete devotion to Antoine, a married man who has taught her the pleasure of making love. Guy starts to organize his life around the dead woman: day-time appointments to read the diary, nocturnal meetings with Louise’s ghost, who leaves a trail of captivating perfume, like irises…
When the real world breaks into Guy’s refuge, the only option open to him is to flee again… in search of the absolute.
A magnificent love story. 

Abel Grand
Culs de singe à vendre
Novel
 320 pages
The Author
Abel Grand was born in 1930 in Mantes. A classical musician, he has been writing for many years: short stories, poems, travelogues. Culs de singe à vendre is his first novel.
The Book
Mantes, May 30, 1944. Florent, a young architect traumatised by the loss of his family in the ally’s bombing, attaches little importance to his own life or that of others.
To join his godfather, an influential business man in Saigon, he sails around Africa, stops off at Calcutta in the company of an Englishwoman he met on the boat. Olivia was born in India. He meets some missionaries in Thailand and sails down the Mekong on an actors’ junk.
Olivia is in love with him, and goes to meet him in Cochinchine. They live together through the bloody putsch of March 9, 1945, when the Japanese, the ‘monkey’s asses’ became masters of all Indochina right in the middle of the war in the Pacific.
The temptation to flee to Laos, incarceration in Japanese jails: Florent’s poetic transposition blunts the edge of historical facts that would otherwise be unbearable.
In spite of Olivia’s attempt to save him, Florent cannot escape his madness.
A first novel that has poetry, control and suspense, recounts a little-known episode of the war in the Pacific. 

Roger Hanin
Gustav
Novel
 280 pages
The Author
Roger Hanin is an actor and a novelist. Grasset published his Le Voyage d’Arsène, Les gants blancs d’Alexandre, l’Hôtel de la veille lune, Dentelles.  He has also written a personal narrative devoted to François Mitterrand, Lettre à un ami mystérieux (Grasset, 2001).
The Book
Who is he really, this strange ‘Gustav’? At first encounter, he’s a man who answers questions that haven’t yet been asked. A man from elsewhere, yet who behaves like a close relative, whose wisdom may be revealed in the voices of others, and even by a dog. In other words, this ‘Gustav’ is a sort of long-awaited Messiah. A stranger who opens a heart full of love, who may disappear just as suddenly as he arrived… This brief portrait suffices to tell us how the hero is fashioned to accommodate the author’s fantasies, his taste for the absurd, for nonsense, for the fable…
The story? After receiving a wire announcing his arrival, a man and his thirteen-year old son drive to Le Havre in a Bentley to meet Uncle Gustav. There the young boy, Pablito, falls in love with a prostitute called Laëtitia. His father tries to buy her from her pimp, to no avail. Then  Laëtitia falls in love with a certain Madame Livingstone who was travelling with… Uncle Gustav. A bit contrived? No, the storyline matters much less than the digressions that accompany its telling. Roger Hanin reveals his vision of the world on each page, a fraternal, desperate, and decidedly poetic one. You can hold out against this universe, if you wish; but you can also let yourself sink into it, and just enjoy the fantasy and a good read.
In the same vein as Le Voyage d’Arsène or Les gants blancs d’Alexandre, but this is much more droll, more grave, more frenetic. Readers of Boris Vian and Alfred Jarry will be familiar with the genre. 

Henry de Monfreid
La poursuite du Kaipan
Novel
Collection ‘Lectures et Aventures’
240 pages
The Book
La Poursuite du ‘Kaipan’ is another Croisière du hachich. We are in 1923, and Monfreid buys a large quantity of ‘charras’ in Bombay. The trade of hashish is forbidden but in India, it’s called ‘charras’ and buying and selling is legal. 
Monfreid obtains the necessary authorisations from local officials. He deals with a man he met beforehand in Aden, but the man turns out to be a rogue and makes off with 6000 kilos of charras on a stolen steamship, the ‘Kaipan’. The chase begins and after a host of adventures, Monfreid finds his stolen cargo in the Seychelles…

Louis Nucera
L’obstiné
Novel
Collection ‘Lectures et Aventures’
Prefaced by Joseph Kessel
320 pages
The Author
Born in Nice in 1928, Louis Nucera began working at the age of fifteen in one of the town’s banks before going on to journalism. Among his friends figured Picasso, Brassens, Cioran, Boudard, Monfreid. In 1964, he came up to Paris and took the post of director of public relations with Philips. In 1973, he became literary director with Editions Lattès. Le chemin de la lanterne earned him the Prix Interallié in 1981 and his oeuvre was rewarded with the Grand Prix de literature de l’Académie française in 1993. Almost all his books were published by Grasset.
For many years, L’obstiné, originally published by Julliard, has been out of print.
The Book
“This book is a cry of faith. Faith in life, even though it is condemned from the first instant. Faith in man, in spite of all his abjection, madness, stupidity and crimes. Faith in the act of writing: in spite of everything, in the face of everything.
What flows and strikes and flourishes in this book, is passion and not just pretend passion; authentic, organic kindness; rebellions that seemed to be worn out by time are reborn with new violence; a naivety that blossoms in spite of the story teller’s age… his great age. Léon Acoibon is almost a hundred years old. The accumulation, the sum of so many years of life projects its substance, its density, its deep shadow on each line written by Acoibon. But his freshness, his revolt, his passion set the narrative alight.
So, with the magic of words, with an astonishing mixture of exaltation and compassion, of ingenuity and lucidity, of questions and impossible replies, Louis Nucera – aged forty - has entered the skin of his character so perfectly that professional readers believed that the author too must be nearing a hundred. They could only imagine a face full of wrinkles, creases, bumps and hollows, veined and white-whiskered, whose unusually long life had not extinguished its flame. They could only imagine a broken voice - grating, grumpy, discontented, inappeasable - of a hundred-year old man to whom the Dreyfus affair, Panama, bloody strikes and the horrors of Biribi - the world’s great massacres - had not succeeded in teaching ‘healthy’ reason or a sense of proportion.     
Joseph Kessel

John T. Parker
Méprise d’otages
Thriller, 240 pages
The Author
John T. Parker is the pen name of a French author published by Grasset.
The Book
Ben Wayne, a likeable, clumsy sort of sheriff,  is in his Northill office (Illinois), when he learns that the serial killer Charles Robertson has escaped from the nearby penitentiary in Sparte. Robertson, alias “the gravedigger”, former doctor and republican senator, killed around fifty old people. Those crimes earned him a prison sentence hundreds of years long. Robertson’s sole obsession is to clean America of its old people, exterminate them, and in so doing save the pension fund system…
The FBI cowboys arrive in Northill, with their infra-red rifles, ’copters and profilers. The man hunt can begin, closely observed by TV crews all over America.
Has Robertson made for Canada? Or has he settled in with a couple of nice ‘young’ retired people, right in the middle of Northill?
The second guess is the right one, but even the devil himself is never exactly what you expect. It’s the old gent’s wife who dreams up a Machiavellian plot to put a bit of excitement, madness, astonishment into her life, and to forget that cursed day in the seventies – she locks up her husband and pretends to be the serial killer…
But the FBI and Co. are on the warpath, and nothing in this world can stop them…
A thriller that’s full of convincing portraits - from psychologists to psychopaths, from ruthless TV hosts to corrupt politicians – and unexpected twists and turns, seasoned with sparkling, droll dialogues

Julien Salmon
L’école de la crime
Novel
240 pages
The Author
Julien Salmon was born in 1972 in Amiens. He is a police superintendent in the north of France. L’école de la crime is his first novel.    
The Book
Paul de Dardanie is a student at the Ecole Supérieure de police, training to become a superintendent. Since his girlfriend Sophie disappeared, he has been suffering from certain troubles that only Mozart’s Requiem, played night and day, can sooth. Dardanie becomes completely confused and is incapable of maintaining any kind of human relation that isn’t sado-masochistic. He has morbid obsessions: the idea of committing a crime - an aesthetic masterpiece of the genre – slowly takes hold of him.
When the time comes to choose a subject for his memoir, he considers ‘the aesthetics of crime’ and plans to establish a scale, to do for crime what Richter did for earthquakes – only this one would make his name famous and serve to judge the quality of a crime according to several criteria.
Some time later, the college’s psychologist and several students are found murdered. They discover that the killer is Daradanie. His meeting with Madame Canchale, an old woman who’s been interned in an asylum because she crucified an oddball, is a revelation for Dardanie. After an epic journey that takes him to the place where Sophie disappeared, he understands the motivations of his crimes.
A psychiatrist who has been allotted the task of studying Paul de Dardanie’s personality gives the reader a very different version of the affair.
A disturbing, gripping first novel.

Edith Wolf
En réunion
Novel
180 pages
The Author
Edith Wolf was born in 1952 in Paris. A holder of the aggregation in French, she taught in Morocco before spending ten years in a college in Sarcelles, France. In 1995, editions Gilwern published her novel set in the Middle Ages La Disparition du kabbaliste, whose main character is a Spanish Kabbalist, Abraham Aboulafia.
The Book
The narrator follows the itinerary of four boys who live in the same suburban housing scheme, Kheir-Eddine, Lionel, Fabrice and Honoré. Their activities, at first divergent, lead them from one misdemeanour to the next and ultimately to a collective crime: the rape of a local girl whose face they cover out of cowardice. If the author has chosen for the title of her book the official designation of their act, it is because she wanted to underline the nature of their crime: it is one that excludes them from all human solidarity and rejects them into the solitude of their barbarism. Three of them become aware of this when the final revelation of their victim’s identity obliges them to face up to what they have done, and to what they have become.
There is no commentary to act as interface between the reader and the characters, whose stories are told in the form of four interior monologues. This book isn’t trying to explain, even less to excuse. It is an attempt to think the unthinkable, to make the reader feel violence in action, through the voices of the main protagonists.
One is astonished at how well Edith Wolf has managed to put herself into the skin of the authors of a gang rape. A text of almost unbearable violence, remarkably controlled. 

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Non-fiction

Laurent Chalumeau
Me & Bobby McGee
Non-fiction
180 pages
The Author
Laurent Chalumeau was born in Paris in 1959. He started working with Rock & Folk in 1981. In 1983, he went to live in the United States. In 1900, he joined Canal + and for five years he wrote the script for the character interpreted by Antoine de Caunes at the end of ‘Nulle part ailleurs’.
A writer of scripts and dialogues, he has also written songs (Patrick Bruel, Fred Blondin, G Squad, Jane Fostin, Julien Clerc) and books: Fuck (Grasset, 1991); Anne Franck 2: le retour (Grasset, 1994) and Neuilly brûle-t-il? (Grasset, 1997). 
The Book
Anyone who doesn’t believe that certain songs are magic should put this book down without opening. This book needs readers who know how rhyme, a tune, and a certain voice can produce an epiphany that goes well beyond the parts that compose it.
Me & Bobby McGee is a song that everyone - or almost everyone - knows. For thirty-five years,  everyone or almost everyone has been singing it. It started out as country music from Kris Kristoffersen, Janis Joplin made it a hymn. But Me & Bobby McGee is a great story of free wandering, carefree youth and passionate love. It’s a road movie that America passes through, rather than the opposite. Like Rosebud, it’s a tribal symbol for its generation.
Combining the skill of the exegete with stand-up comedy, this little book lays out the two verses of the song and goes back to  Kristoffersen’s beginnings to tell a tale of America where we see racial and generational conflict, clashes of culture and rhythm.

Edmonde Charles-Roux
De L’Académie Goncourt
Isabelle du Désert
Un Désir d’Orient followed by Nomade j’étais
Biography
40 page colour photo section
1400 pages
The Author
Edmonde Charles-Roux, president of the Académie Goncourt, writes biographies and novels. She received the Prix Goncourt for Oublier Palerme (Grasset, 1966). She is also the author of a narrative, illustrated with photos, devoted to Gaston Deferre, her husband: L’homme de Marseille (Grasset, 2001).
The Book
Until this book was published, what did anyone know about a young woman of Russian origin who was born in 1877 and died in 1904, who decided to break with her own world and convert to Islam? Who chose to wear men’s clothes before becoming Mahmoud Saadi, the rebel who fascinated Lyautey - a lover of absolute and and a close friend of Rimbaud? For Edmonde Charles-Roux, all the ingredients of a true novel were there. Working on unpublished archives, she tracked down the itinerary of this exceptional and mystical heroine. Starting out at her birthplace, she followed her trace along the banks of Lake Leman until the moment when Isabelle decided to assume the ‘desire for the orient’ that haunted her. There follows a prodigious resurrection of all the Dostoyevskian figures that peopled her youth and forged her rebellion. From the Russia of the Tsars to Geneva and Marseilles, from the anarchist diaspora to the literary milieu, from exile to rebellion: the epoch is revealed in the effervescence of the Western world that was to change the century.
Nomade j’étais covers Isabelle’s African period, until her death at the age of twenty-seven. Many ordeals await the heroine: the mediocrity of her beloved brother Augustin, her marriage to the Algerian spahi Slimène Ehni, the shameful trial that decided her expulsion from Algeria and separation from her husband. But she returned to her chosen home and from then on, “entered into the life of a nomad as others take the veil”. It was in Aïn Sefra, where she was working on an article that she died one October afternoon in 1904, drowned in the waters of a oued. Thanks to a young Parisian lieutenant who undertook to search in the muddy ruins - one of the admirable secondary characters who revolved around Isabelle - her manuscripts have come down to us today.
Here, in one volume, the two books devoted to Isabelle Eberhardt. There is also a remarkable 40-page section of colour photos selected by the author. An exceptional book about an exceptional figure.      

François Léotard
A mon frère qui n’est pas mort
Narrative
200 pages
The Author
François Léotard, born in 1942 in Cannes, was for many years a politician. He is now Inspector General of Finance. Grasset published his Je vous hais tous avec douceur (2000) and his first novel, La couleur des femmes (2002).
The Book
‘In Fréjus, there was  a beach that for a long time you reigned over. In my memory, that beach of the fifties is still more or less empty. Our skin was even more Mediterranean than the sea. It grew tanner as the summer progressed, the sand stuck to our hair, our sexes were salty and the girls laid out like kingdoms.”   
This very private narrative is told in two voices: one is François Léotard writing a compassionate and painful letter to his older brother Philippe, a plunge into family memories, a Corsican mother and a father in the service of the Republic. He speaks to him through time, remembers teenage quarrels, burning summers, student days, then came the actor, the sad clown, from Capitaine Fracasse in the theatre to the public figure who grew distant, taking the night for companion, losing himself forever in drugs and alcohol.
The other voice, that of François Léotard the writer, trying to understand the human – all too human, being. He who liked to say “He who strives toward his destruction is welcomed by it.” Yet he sung and he wrote, with Ariane Mnouchkine, put on a play by Bernard-Marie Koltés with Patrice Chéreau, and received a César for best actor in La Balance. The man who was ‘left’ by Nathalie Baye, the seducer who fell in love too easily became a father himself, but continued to flirt with the means to his own end.
This is a unique and moving book, not a biography of Philippe Léotard, singer and actor who died on August 25, 2001. From one voice to the next, the author guides us between the investigation and the diary, between memory and meetings with Michel Piccoli and Patrice Chéreau, between the portrait of a brother who refuses to die and the self-portrait of the author, who wonders if he succeeded in loving him.
A nostalgic book that surpasses the expected clichés opposing the government minister and the entertainer. 

Annette Levy-Willard
Chroniques de Los Angeles
Chronicles
220 pages
The Author
Annette Lévy-Willard is a journalist and a novelist. Writer-reporter with the French daily Libération, she specialises in major social events, the tendencies of our times, newly emerging groups… She wrote Moi, Jane, cherche Tarzan (Flammarion, 1988).    
The Book
This is a chronicle of Paradise that often takes on the aspect of a Hell. The log book of an explorer in a city of angels, peopled with demons. A megapolis where each inhabitant is anonymously celebrating the cult of stardom, where people seek to be normal at any cost, however abnormal. This Hell-Heaven town, we might have guessed, is Los Angeles. It was there that Annette Lévy-Willard took refuge a few years ago with her husband and children. She observes, tries to understand, wants to belong to the town… then escape. Her book is the chronicle of this oscillation between love and hate…
From there on, the narrative reads like a series of scenes: droll, full of life. Should one accept to pay more for a house because Mel Gibson’s agent lives opposite? How do you tell the local rabbi that European teenagers are sexually precocious? How do you survive, poor in the land of the rich? Or rich in a system where the poor are multitudinous? How do you put up with a body that’s less than perfect, next to those silicone boys and girls? How can you be alone in a place where solitude is a sin? How can you avoid being alone when everything is pushing you in that direction?
Annette Lévy-Willard saw all that Los Angeles had to offer: the gays, the Hispanics, the Chinese, the patriots, the snobs, the exiles, the idle rich. Her book tells the daily life of these modern contingents. Paradise, or Hell on earth?

Jean Borie
La Forêt des illusions
Les Romantiques à Fontainebleau
Essay
350 pages
The Author
Jean Borie was born in 1935. As he amusingly puts it, he had “the opportunity to emigrate to the United States, cross the River Beauce several times and take refuge in Switzerland”. Grasset published the following books: Huysmans, le diable, le célibataire et Dieu (1987); Frédéric et les amis des hommes, présentation de l’éducation sentimentale (1990) ; Archéologie de la modernité (1999) ; and Un ésprit si craintif (2001).
The Book
In the 19^th century, writers discovered Fontainbleau: Alfred de Musset, Georges Sand, Michelet, les Goncourt, Flaubert, and many others made trips to the forest which gradually became a real literary object, one of the very symbols of Romanticism. Fusion with idealised nature, reverie, melancholy, the taste for solitude: Fontainebleau was more than just a forest of that name.
Jean Borie has given us in this essay an authentic history of romanticism: romanticism and its sweeping force, romanticism and its contradictions. Fontainebleau was also a facile device and its limits soon became self-evident. A cursory evasion that was only a substitute for real travel, a minor landscape lacking in the sublime, a place of vulgar escapades and no less vulgar treachery, like that of Frédéric Moreau, the hero of L’Education sentimentale, fleeing the 1948 Revolution in the company of a woman of the streets. Flaubert, having observed the hypocrisy of Bohemian evasions, slammed the door on the forest of illusions in his novel. So it was that romanticism gave way to realism.
Structured in six chapters that take us through the forest, and through the years from 1804 to 1869, L’Esprit de la forêt  begins with one of the founders of romanticism, Etienne de Sénancour. He was first to describe the forest in his famous novel Obermann. We are then introduced to the extravagant Victor de Maud’huy, a hermetic writer who hoisted the quarrymen of Fontainebleau to the rank of heroes. We go on to see Michelet on his many journeys that even became pilgrimages; we read Manette Salomon, the Goncourt brothers’ novel, observing it from the ‘conquest of landscape by painting’ viewpoint, at the very time when industrial capitalism was undertaking the destruction of the countryside. Flaubert, disillusioned with romanticism, closes the book – and the literary destiny of Fontainebleau.
An original way to observe the romantic movement and the tensions of a time that was to engender modernity. Lots of unexpected and fascinating discoveries.

Raymond Radiguet
Le Diable au corps
Followed by
Le Bal du comte d’Orgel
Novels
Les Cahiers rouges
Prefaced by Monique Nemer
400 pages
The Author
On the centenary of Radiguet’s birth, we are publishing this exceptional volume with his two novels, Le Diable au corps and Le bal du Comte d’Orgel.
The Books
Le Diable au corps
Far from the clamour of WW1, on the banks of the Marne river, a teenager and the very young wife of a soldier who is fighting at the front have an impossible, scandalous and adulterous relationship.
Written when he was only eighteen, presented by Jean Cocteau, Le Diable au corps is Raymond Radiguet’s first novel and his masterpiece. It is also the final burst of the Romantic flame in France. When the book was published in 1923 it met with phenomenal success, today it is a classic of French literature.
 Le Bal du Comte d’Orgel
When Raymond Radiguet died on December 12, 1923, a few months after the launching of  Le Diable au corps, Bernard Grasset had been in possession of his second novel, Le bal du Comte Orgel, since October. The publisher judged the text to be sufficiently complete to make proofs the same month. But Raymond did not begin reading and correcting immediately; he was suddenly struck down by typhoid. In tribute to the young man, Grasset decided to have twenty numbered copies of those uncorrected proofs printed for the writer’s close friends, among them Joseph Kessel, who received copy N° 1.
Yet the text that appeared in June 1924 is very different from the original handed over to the publisher. Not only were the misprints corrected, which was natural, as well as typesetter’s mistakes and errors of syntax, but the whole text had been “revised”, which goes far beyond what good proofreaders would have allowed themselves to do. The comparison of the two texts – the proofs and the published version – show that the equivalent of 16 pages out of 210 were simply deleted, that 600 modifications of ‘style’ were made by Cocteau, Kessel and Pierre de Lacretelle. As Georges Auric put it, “With the best of intentions, a few friends undertook not just a simple revision as required, but they changed words, altered sentences, ended up by indulging in a real correction of the novel, a correction against which I feel it is normal to protest.”
In reality, if the ‘corrections’ made do not change the plot, they do alter considerably the tone of the novel, making it an example of classicism whereas Radiguet wanted the style to be “aristocratic, but slightly unkempt”, an emblem of the Nouveau Monde that emerged from the 1914-18 war. Based on the proofs Kessel received, this edition gives us the authentic text: apart from the misprints, only the “errors of syntax and inaccuracies” as Radiguet himself put it, reported by Auric: “I have listened to all the chapters at length, and am convinced that I know Le Bal as well as possible. And I also know what the author intended, that summer of 1923: to get rid of the errors of syntax and the improprieties that might remain.” 
This year marks the centenary of Radiguet’s birth. We will see the staging of many events associated with him and his friend Cocteau. We can surmise that this restoration will receive all due attention. 

Ambroise Vollard
En écoutant Cézanne, Degas, Renoir
Narrative
Les Cahiers rouges
280 pages
The Book
Ambroise Vollard was a famous art dealer who could see more clearly and farther than all the others. That is why he discovered and revealed Cézanne, Gauguin, Van Gogh, Picasso…. Self-assured, sharing the life and work of still-unknown or ill-considered geniuses, he knew when to keep his mouth shut and his ears open. En écoutant Cézanne, Degas, Renoir is a major testimony in the history of painting. A succession of sketches, memories, attitudes are told in total freedom, casting light on the creative mechanisms of the three artists and the atmosphere around them, the genesis of their works and the intimacy of their studios. It’s like being there. Vollard, was indeed there, and he shares with us this work of art. 

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