France | French | Short Fiction
July, 2011In a collection of six short stories, Véronique Bizot explores, with humor and a remarkable eye for the absurd in daily life, the themes of solitude and anxiety. In "The Gardeners," an old man living on a grand estate watches the gardeners around him with mistrust. In "The Hotel," young newlyweds under the watchful eye of an elegant elderly lady have their honeymoon disrupted by an invasion of rats. "George's Wife" tells of two friends, the tragic accident that leaves one paralyzed, and the ensuing and unavoidable vengeance. Another story tells of Lamirault, a sworn enemy of the narrator: his funeral proves that loathing, like loving, is stronger than death.
France | French | Short Fiction
July, 2011In September 2007, a group of ethnic minority authors in France released a literary manifesto under their group's name, Qui fait la France?. In it, they call into question the premise and intention of mainstream, introverted fiction in France, and ask for a place in the world of French letters as authors who believe in committed and realist fiction. In keeping with their literary manifesto and intention, the authors of the collective Qui fait la France? engage in outwardly committed writing that explores broadly the themes of human suffering and aspiration.
Simultaneous to the publication of their manifesto in two French magazines, Les Inrockuptibles and Le Nouvel Observateur, the authors of the collective headed by Mohamed Razane released a livre-manifeste with Editions Stock, Chroniques d'une société annoncée, in which each member of the collective contributed a story. For their second collective publication, each author of Qui fait la France? decided to write a short story revolving around the same imagined fait divers: "The following day, the papers will publish Agence France Presse content in their headlines: ‘An eighteen-year-old man was sentenced to prison for eight months on the charge of breaking storefront windows during an anti-Sarkozy demonstration, which unraveled Monday evening in the Bastille neighborhood' AFP 11/05/07." Mohamed Razane has tied his story to the incident that provoked the riots in 2005 on the periphery of France's largest metropolitan centers.
In Mohamed Razane's story, "Au loin, près de nous" ("So far so close by"), the unnamed narrator's identity remains less important than the identity and circumstances of the two male characters, Toni and Abdel, who ultimately are confounded in her mind. Toni is a young man of North African descent who has an accrued sensibility to the injustices around him; the primary space he occupies in the story is the Parisian subway system, where he takes stock of a disempowered humanity and lashes out against the political class. Abdel is a young Moroccan man whose backstory we learn much more about: the narrator falls in love with Abdel during a trip to Morocco, then convinces him to join her in France. Abdel's outcome is tragic, and part of the narrator's dilemma is to decide if she is in some way guilty for his demise. Meanwhile, through the story's juxtaposed narration, Toni comes before a judge in France, who has to decide if he is guilty of vandalism and violent conduct. What brings the two male characters together is their powerlessness to change their destiny. What separates them in the context of the story are two very different registers, poetic and militant.
In the end, the alienation expressed by the story's title resonates doubly in Abdel's alienation from his homeland of Morocco, which becomes a sort of lost idyll, and Abdel's inner alienation. Razane's story is at once committed writing (through its themes), artistic exploration (through its juxtaposed images, registers, and narration), and a call to action--to attend to those near and far.
Ecuador | Short Fiction | Spanish
May, 2011Jorge Velasco Mackenzie was born in Guayaquil, Ecuador, in 1949. In 1983, he was awarded First Prize in the José de la Cuadra Concurso Nacional. He is the author of the novels El Rincón de los Justos (1983), Tambores para una Canción Perdida (1986), and El Ladrón de Levita (1990); the fiction collections De Vuelta al Paraíso (1975), Como Gato en Tempestad (1977), Raymundo y la Creación del Mundo (1979), Músicos de Amaneceres (1986), and Clown y Otros Cuentos (1988); the poetry collection Algunos Tambores que Suenan Así (1981); the anthology Palabra de Maromero (1986); and the play En Esta Casa de Enfermos (1983).
Ecuador | Short Fiction | Spanish
May, 2011Francisco Proaño Arandi was born in Cuenca, Ecuador, in 1944. In 1982, he was awarded Segunda Mencion in the Plural Concurso Internacional de Cuentos in Mexico for his story "Oposición a la Magia," and in 1984, the Jose Mejia Lequerica Premio Nacional del Municipio de Quito for his novel Antiguas Caras en el Espejo. He is the author of the additional novels Del Otro Lado de las Cosas (1993), and La Razón y El Presagio (2003); the short fiction collections Historias de Disecadores (1972), Oposición a la Magia (1986), La Doblez (1986), and Historias del País Fingido (2003); the poetry collection Poesías (1961); and the anthologies Cuentos: Antología (1995) and Perfil Inacabado (2004). His short fiction has appeared in anthologies in Ecuador, Germany, Cuba, Colombia, Spain, and Portugal. He has served as a diplomat representing the Embassy of Ecuador in Colombia (1972-1973), the former U.S.S.R. (1973-1977), Cuba (1980-1984), Yugoslavia (1990-1992), Nicaragua (1995-1997), Costa Rica (1997-2000), El Salvador (2004-2006), and Argentina (2006-present).
Ecuador | Short Fiction | Spanish
May, 2011Raúl Pérez Torres was born in Quito, Ecuador, in 1941. He is a founding member of La Bufanda del Sol magazine and the Frente Cultural of Ecuador. He won the Casa de las Américas Prize in Cuba for his book En la Noche y en la Niebla. In 1981, he was awarded the José Mejía Lequerica del Municipio de Quito National Prize, and that same year, he served as a juror for the Casa de las Américas Prize in La Habana, Cuba. He is the author of the novel Teoría del Desencanto (1985), and the short fiction collections Da Llevando (1970), Manual para Mover las Fichas (1973), Micaela y Otros Cuentos (1976), Musiquero Joven, Musiquero Viejo (1977), Ana, La Pelota Humana (1978), and Un Saco de Alacranes (1989).
Ecuador | Short Fiction | Spanish
May, 2011Marco Antonio Rodríguez was born in Quito, Ecuador, in 1941. He has published essays about Ecuadorian painters, and been a contributing writer for specialized publications in and outside of Ecuador. His stories have been translated into multiple languages, and his books have been published in many editions. He is the author of the essay collections Rostros de la Actual Poesía Ecuatoriana (1963), Benjamín Carrión y Miguel Angel Zambrano (1966), and Isaac J. Barrera, the Man and his Work (1969), and the short fiction collections Historia de un Intruso (1976), Un Delfín y la Luna (1985), and Jaula (1992).
Dominican Republic | Short Fiction | Spanish
May, 2011Alba Mota-Santana was born in the Dominican Republic and currently resides in Brooklyn, New York.
Mexico | Short Fiction | Spanish
May, 2011Julian Rodríguez is a screenwriter and filmmaker currently residing in New Jersey and Mexico.
Russia | Russian | Short Fiction
March, 2011Anatoly Gavrilov's minimalist style is marked by extreme laconism and painstaking lexical and grammatical selection, which affords his stories a measure of heightened density. He belongs to what Osip Mandelstam called a "minor line" of Russian literature--the tradition that began with Nikolai Gogol, Evgenii Boratynskii, and Fedor Sologub, and continued in the twentieth century with Daniil Kharms, Leonid Dobychin, and Evgenii Kharitonov. While attention to word selection and style unites him with such Modernist master stylists as Bruno Schulz, Isaak Babel, and Vladimir Nabokov, his poetics are certainly more comparable to Kafka and Beckett. The marginally tragic-comical distance Gavrilov establishes to his narrators/protagonists is reminiscent of Robert Walser. Here's an excerpt from a recent review of Gavrilov's collection by Igor' Klekh (translated by Sasha Spektor):
"Gavrilov is a grotesque, hallucinogenic, extremely formal writer--somewhat in the tradition of French literature. The exquisite style together with the notorious atrociousness of the described subject, the absence of falsity--this is all that Gavrilov can offer to his real, potential, and hypothetical readers. The music that he, in his words, "hates," determines the construction of his texts. Rhythm is the main structural element of Gavrilov's prose. While the words can be chosen randomly, what's important is their repetition, each time performed with a precise degree of difference. This dance of the simplest words, the whirlwind of dance positions hypnotizes the reader."
France | French | Short Fiction
August, 2010Jacques Barbéri is a French author of more than fifteen novels and numerous short stories. Thrillers, science fiction, fantasy, or the fringes of literature—nothing is off limits to his perpetually mutating imagination. He is also a musician (with the group Palo Alto), screenplay writer, and translator.
The Brooklyn Rail welcomes you to our web-exclusive section InTranslation, where we feature unpublished translations of fiction, nonfiction, poetry, and dramatic writing. Published since April 2007, InTranslation is a venue for outstanding work in translation and a resource for translators, authors, editors, and publishers seeking to collaborate.
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