- Chagall, Marc
- Noiville, Florence
- Veil, Simone
- de Baecque, Antoine & Herpe, Noël
- Cieutat, Michel & Rouyer, Philippe
- Moïsi, Dominique
- Cymes, Michel
- Cymes, Michel & Chalon, Patricia
- Paterlini-Bréchot, Patrizia
- Portiche, Roland & Gerkens, Danièle
- Portiche, Roland
- Benkemoun, Brigitte
- Bloch-Dano, Evelyne
- Laurens, Camille
- Lelièvre, Marie-Dominique
- Traoré, Assa & de Lagasnerie, Geoffroy
- Le Caisne, Garance
- Mustapha, Leïla & de Tilly, Marine
- Barbereau, Yoann
- Gras, Cédric
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Philosophy
Louis Althusser
The author
Louis Althusser was born in Algeria in 1918 and died in France in 1990. With the prestigious “Agrégation” teaching qualification for philosophy, he began his career at the École normale supérieure in 1948 and subscribed to the Communist Party the same year. He exercised considerable influence over several generations of students, and his thinking radically transformed the way Marx’s work is analysed.
The Spectre of Hegel
Philosophy - February 2020 - 272 pages
Full English translation available.
Rights sold to UK (Verso)
The Spectre of Hegel gives a unique insight into Althusser’s engagement with a philosophy he would later renounce.
Louis Althusser is remembered today as the scourge of humanist Marxism, but that was his later incarnation, an identity formed by years grappling with the intellectual inheritance of Hegel and Catholicism. The Spectre of Hegel collects the writings of the young Althusser, before his final epistemological break with the philosopher’s work in 1953.
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Click hereMachiavelli and Us
Philosophy - May 2020 - 224 pages
Full English translation available.
Rights sold to UK (Verso)
Althusser, poised between modernism and postmodernism, meets Machiavelli, poised between the Middle Ages and modernity.
“We do not publish our own drafts, that is, our own mistakes, but we do sometimes publish other people’s,” Louis Althusser once observed of Marx’s early writings. Among his own posthumously released drafts, one, at least, is incontestably neither mistake nor out-take: the text of his lecture course on Machiavelli, originally delivered at the École Normale Supérieure in 1972, intermittently revised up to the mid-1980s, and carefully prepared for publication after his death in 1990.
Though only appearing as an occasional reference in the Marxist philosopher’s oeuvre, Machiavelli was an unseen constant presence. For together with Spinoza and Marx, Machiavelli was a veritable Althusserian passion. Machiavelli and Us reveals why, and will be welcomed for the light it sheds on the richly complex thought of its author.
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Click hereThe Humanist Controversy and Other Writings
Philosophy - October 2018 - 320 pages
Full English translation available.
Rights sold to UK (Verso)
Outstanding contributions to political and theoretical thought.
There can be little doubt that Louis Althusser was one of the most influential philosophers of the twentieth century, and his influence subsists in many of the concepts currently deployed in disciplines such as cultural studies, social theory and literary criticism.
Yet Althusser was also a leading intellectual in the French Communist Party and a foremost participant in the debates in the human sciences that are marked by the names of Claude Lévi-Strauss, Jacques Lacan and Georges Canguilhem. His writings were major interventions in a specific political and theoretical conjuncture and it is this aspect of his work that this new collection of previously untranslated texts seeks to reflect.
Consisting of writings from the very height of Althusser’s intellectual powers, during the period 1966-67, this book covers, among other things, the critique of Lévi-Strauss’s structuralism, the theory of discourse and its relationship to psychoanalysis, the place of Ludwig Feuerbach, the tasks of Marxist philosophy, and the famous “humanist controversy.”
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Click hereThe Future Lasts a Long Time
Philosophy - January 2007 - 576 pages
Rights sold to China (Century Publishing Group of Shanghai) and Turkey (Bilgesu)
Louis Althusser died on 22nd October 1990. The two biographical texts published in this volume were written ten years apart. Ten years in the middle of which, on 16 November 1980, Louis Althusser’s fate topple into the unthinkable with the murder of his wife, Hélène, in their apartment at the École normale supérieure on the rue d’Ulm in Paris.
This extensive account has a clinical precision and it is a unique document of its type, written by an intellectual sliding into insanity. Can the “Althusser case” be abandoned to doctors, judges or the do-gooders who insist on the divide between public thoughts and private desires? Thanks to these texts, he may well have escaped them posthumously. Which is why they inevitably play an essential role as part of his published writings.
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Click hereLetters to Franca (1961-1973)
Philosophy - November 1998 - 832 pages
Rights sold to China (Nanjing University Press), Japan (Fujiwara Shoten) and UK (Bloomsbury)
These five hundred or so Letters to Franca are contemporaneous to Althusser’s major philosophical texts, and are instantly gripping thanks to an extraordinarily taut writing style that never pales. The language of passionate love, in all its violence, sits side by side with rational thought. The reader is surprised to discover a consummate grasp of comic and dramatic scene-setting, and watches in horror as Althusser succumbs to the bouts that saw him regularly hospitalised.
But Franca, his Italian translator for Pour Marx, was also someone the philosopher spoke to very frequently and on many subjects, and these letters, therefore, genuinely constitute a monument. Often contradicting what Althusser was currently writing in his theoretical texts, this correspondence is not happy merely to illuminate the biographical background to his work; it puts us right at the heart of the Althusserian writing process – and of its paradoxes. This collection is complemented by a selection of twenty-two of Franca Madonia’s letters.
After the new version of this philosopher discovered in his posthumous publications, after the “second Althusser » revealed by The Future Lasts a Long Time, these Letters to Franca now introduce us to a “third Althusser », not quite the same and yet not completely different.
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Click hereThe Controversy
Rémi Brague & Souleymane Bachir Diagne
Philosophy - September 2019 - 192 pages
Rights sold to Lebanon (Dar Al Rawafed)
The philosophers Rémi Brague and Souleymane Bachir Diagne, Koran in hand, bring their points of view head to head.
Is Islam different to other religions, shored up by a text dictated by God, a directly political theology that has not been tested by the Enlightenment and tolerates violence? Or have we simply become Islamophobic, unable to appreciate this religion’s rationality and its freedom of thought and action?
The authors, who are opposed on almost all these points, discuss extracts of the Koran, the acts of the Caliphs and Islam’s arrival in the modern world. There is no issue they sidestep, from Islamism to a woman’s place, via questions surrounding jihad and the relationship with other religions.
An erudite debate that goes far beyond superficial arguments.
The authors
Professor of philosophy at New York’s Columbia University, Souleymane Bachier Diagne was himself taught by Jacques Derrida and Louis Althusser. He specialises in Islamic philosophy and the history of the sciences.
Rémi Brague is a specialist in an ancient and medieval philosophy. He teaches at the Sorbonne and explores Arab, Jewish and Greco-Latin philosophical traditions. He challenges popular beliefs about religions and analyses the specificities of Judaism, Christianity and Islam.
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Click hereBelinda Cannone
The author
Belinda Cannone is a novelist and an essayist. She published six novels like Entre les bruits (Éditions de l’Olivier, 2009) and several essays with L’Écriture du désir (Prix de l’essai de l’Académie Française, 2001), Le Sentiment d’imposture (Grand Prix de l’essai de la Société des Gens de Lettres 2005), La bêtise s’améliore (Stock, 2007) and La Tentation de Pénélope (Stock, 2010).
Stupidity Is Getting Better
Essay - September 2007 - 200 pages
Rights sold to China (East China Normal UP)
We have all noticed how many of the people whose intelligence we respect use their thinking abilities rather… stupidly. Did Camus not state that there are two forms of intelligence: the intelligent one and the stupid one? The latter generates the kind of standardized thinking that we find in evidence everywhere. Yet it is not easy to describe this phenomenon of contemporary conformity.
There are no remedies to conformity; all we can do is to remain alert and La bêtise s’améliore can certainly contribute to keeping us aware of it by calling on our intellectual responsibility. First and foremost, this book is a celebration of intellectual freedom and a warning against the current threat of contemporary thought becoming ossified.
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Click hereThe Penelope Temptation
Essay - January 2010 - 220 pages
What does feeling like a woman mean today? Popular opinion tends to postulate the existence of a ‘feminine nature’ associated with the ability to bear children. This essay opposes that reductive, regressive concept, and asks us not to undo what previous generations have achieved: to resist the Penelope temptation. For it is only by truly living as a woman and having a generous concept of human beings and all their possibilities that we can have any hope for a movement towards equality.
A modest book since it is written with the words ‘for now’ in mind: tomorrow has so many surprises in store. An optimistic book because equality has been set in motion, inexorably, if we ourselves don’t slow it down. A committed book because – by hounding out representations that threaten emancipation, and trying to imagine routes to equality – it expounds several profound convictions.
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Click hereBody of Time
Essay - January 2012 - 276 pages
“On 11th March 2011, when I returned from my country house, I realized that burglars had been into the house and had taken two large trunks in which I had stored the whole of my past: several decades of private diaries, twenty years’ worth of work notebooks, all my photographs and correspondence. In fact, an unprecedented situation in peacetime: I had just lost my memories in their entirety. A peculiar bereavement to cope with: I had lost my most precious possession and yet, at the same time, what I had lost was… myself.
Confronted with such radical nakedness, such appalling sadness, the very evening I discovered the loss I started to keep a diary about it to try and assimilate it. What exactly is memory? And what is forgetting? Why was I so attached to private diaries? What had I lost in losing all those love letters? What is the present? Etc. In every instance the answer related to the nature of that sort of writing: connected to the living, to the individual, to his or her uniqueness, they form a sort of body of time, something perishable and, precisely because of that, infinitely precious.”
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Click hereThe Ferryman's Gift
Narrative Non-Fiction - August 2013 - 160 pages
“When someone dies, we can finally gauge who they were. My father is more like a character from a novel than some real life person: I’ve never met anyone so ill-equipped for a life as a member of society. But I’ve decided to write this portrait of him rather than a family memoir because the interesting thing is that, by being so very unusual, he really did exist. His very individuality lends him a universal dimension.
What we inherit from our parents, and this is far more difficult to shake off than their ideas, is their affects, those powerful living and evolving emotions that they transmit and we receive quite unwittingly and irrevocably. Since he died, I have often thought of myself as my father’s right hand armed with a pen.
In this book I have tried to capture what has been passed on to me, my inheritance of affect-ideas which I, in turn, am striving to pass on through my writing.”
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Click hereWonderment
Essay - January 2017- 192 pages, 14 colour and B&W photos
“Sometimes silence reigns, we have a peaceful sense of concentration, the light is beautiful, our eyes are alert: and we’re filled with wonderment. What sparks this fleeting feeling? It isn’t always in response to the grandeur of something we see or experience. It is often a favourable internal state that allows us to perceive a secret, poetic dimension of the world. We are suddenly more fully alive, here and now, in the pure present. This personal tendency is a consequence of our capacity for joy which is itself an expansion of our desire to live.
Our era is marked by a fear of possible impending doom which means we should strive even harder to create a sense of wonderment. Because building happiness and respecting every precious precarious life open to experiencing pleasure as well as toil are both key to our concept of existence itself. This is our brief time on earth, opening our eyes wide to it is the surest remedy against nihilism.”
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Click hereA New Name for Love
Essay - September 2020 - 234 pages
How to describe and understand modern relationships?
Belinda Cannone tracks the metamorphoses of love. From unions “for life” to love matches that emerged at the end of the eighteenth century, and to the twentieth-century revolutions that established desire as a requisite ingredient for a successful relationship.
These revolutions have their downsides: love, if it evolves, can last a lifetime whereas desire is more fleeting. So why stay in a relationship when the fire has gone out of it?
Renouncing “for life” is only possible if we acknowledge the nobility of desire. Viewed for too long as a sin, it is now valued, but not always for what it is. Other than in oppressive relationships, desire is a profoundly feminist question. It isn’t simply a physical need or a reproductive necessity, but a crucial experience that fully engages both mind and body. It is intimately bound up with love, and is its new name.
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Click hereAlain Finkielkraut
The author
Emeritus professor at the École polytechnique, Alain Finkielkraut’s previous books, published by Stock, are En terrain miné, cowritten with Élisabeth de Fontenay (2017), La Seule Exactitude (2015), L’Identité malheureuse (2013), Et si l’amour durait (2011), and Un cœur intelligent (2009). He was admitted to the Académie française in 2016.
An Intelligent Heart
Essay - August 2009 - 288 pages
Rights sold to Romania (Humanitas)
« King Solomon begged the Almighty to grant him ‘an intelligent heart’.
Having come to the end of a century ravaged by the combined effects of technological efficiency and ideological fervour, that wish is still just as potent.
And yet God says nothing. Perhaps He is watching us, but He gives us no answer, keeps His own counsel, doesn’t intervene in our affairs. He leaves us to our own devices. It isn’t to Him or to history, which has been discredited by a century of horrors committed in his name, that we should address our request with any hope of success, but to literature. Without that, the grace of an intelligent heart would remain elusive forever. And we might learn the laws of life, but not its jurisprudence. »
Alain Finkielkraut tells us once again how essential literature is in deciphering the world’s enigmas. How it is still the best defense against received ideas and certainties. How writers and their works alter our existence, mould our lives, rearrange our perception of people and values, the present and the future.
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Click hereNeverending Writings on Extermination
Essay - October 2010 - 304 pages
A civilization that forgets its past is condemned to relive it. It is with this maxim – pronounced by the American philosopher George Santayana in the early Twentieth Century – firmly in mind that our civilization has instituted and institutionalized the memory of how the Jews of Europe were exterminated. But now an unexpected problem has emerged for this civilization: not that the crime has been forgotten, but everything else has. Hitler pervades the topic and no one else, or almost no one, stays on in the popular imagination. The supreme wrongdoer is in the process of claiming the throne of memory for himself alone.
In this society where constant accusations and insistent expiation take turns in tackling “history’s darkest hours”, I sometimes find myself dreaming of memories with no banner to wave, a modest, discreet, silent, pedestrian memory or one that makes no more noise than turning the pages in the personal colloquium of reading.
How can we talk about the Holocaust without jumbling everything up and sacrificing the sensibilities of the day? What lessons can we learn from this truly unbelievable event? How can we contemplate that evil – so radical, so banal and so industrialized – without granting that evil the power of immortality? These dialogues derive from these questions and concerns.
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Click hereWhat If Love Lasted
Essay - September 2011 - 164 pages
“Are we still to believe in lasting love or is that promise a pipe dream, an illusion, a delusion, a dangerous mirage?”
In the same vein as Un coeur intelligent (An Intelligent Heart), Alain Finkielkraut now turns his attention to the theme of love as it is portrayed in four great novels from very different styles, eras and authors: Madame de La Fayette’s The Princess of Cleves; Ingmar Bergman’s The Best Intentions; Philip Roth’s The Professor of Desire; Milan Kundera’s The Unbearable Lightness of Being.
With his usual gift, he gives those who have not read the books the keys to understanding the plot while illuminating each book with his great knowledge, both literary and philosophical; under his pen, the characters of these four novels become the stakes in an existential understanding, given all the weight that, in a half-hearted or conventional reading, would go unnoticed.
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Click hereUnfortunate Identity
Essay - October 2013 - 240 pages
Rights sold to Belgium (De Bezige Bij Antwerpen), Brazil (Record), Italy ( Ugo Guanda) and Spain (Alianza)
Alain Finkielkraut pursues his impassioned confrontation with modern life. Tackling questions of national identity, immigration, secularity, schooling, lifestyle, customs and inequalities between different civilisations, his thoughts break with right-thinking received ideas but carve out their own original path. No contemporary idols, fashionable terms or ways of thinking influence him or blind him to the raw facts: the fact that societies are disintegrating because of a process of disidentification and an obsession with all things new. The whirlwind we find ourselves in and our slavish youth culture hold no weight for him, and yet he does side with all things modern and he adheres to enlightened rather than counter-revolutionary thinking. He speaks to the modern world as a modern man, and what he says is: stop blinding yourselves.
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Click hereThe Only Exactitude
Essay - October 2015 - 306 pages
Rights sold to Czech Republic (Centrum Pro Studium) and Spain (Alianza)
What’s happening today often takes the form of an enigma: confronted with the violence of completely unpredictable events, we are tempted either to cling to the past (the faintest controversy provokes a “It’s the 1930s all over again!”) or to project ourselves into the future because we long for a fresh start. In fact, there is nothing harder than experiencing the present, and following Péguy’s demanding advice: “Running early, running late, it’s so inexact. Being on time, the only exactitude.”
Alain Finkielkraut takes on the challenge. With his rigorous thinking and presentation, he tackles the key political, social, philosophical and media events of the last two years, draws on the ideas of great thinkers (Arendt, Camus, Kundera, Alain), explores what’s at stake and looks at the wider picture to deliver an accurate analysis.
This book looks at the shocking Charlie Hebdo attack, the spirit of penitence that has reached obsessive proportions in France, the excessive influence of powers and counter-powers, a left wing that knows its days are numbered… and reveals a problem: how can thinking correct the constant imbalance imposed by the present?
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Click hereOf Animals and Men
Essay - September 2018 - 300 pages
“When the veil is lifted a fraction on the appalling lives of chickens, cows or pigs in the concentration-camp spaces that have replaced traditional farms, our imaginations immediately projects us into their situation, and a growing percentage of opinion now goes against Descartes and supports the philosopher Jeremy Bentham : “It’s not a question of can they reason or can they talk, but can they suffer?” This explains the recent eruption of animal welfare issues on the political scene. I discussed this cause in my programme “Répliques” on France Culture because I would obviously answer “yes” to Bentham’s question but also because animal supporters are not united.”
Brought together in one volume tackling a fiercely topical theme especially close to Alain Finkielkraut’s heart, these topics debated on France Culture’s programme Répliques have been re-explored and transcribed by each of the contributors.
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Click herePriceless
Annie Lebrun
Philosophy / Art - May 2018 - 176 pages
Full English translation available.
Rights sold to Spain (Cabaret Voltaire) and US (Contra Mundum, WEL)
In a world where art is becoming merchandise, how do we refocus on beauty?
This war is being waged on every front and particularly in the world of contemporary art where beauty is the enemy. In this essay Annie Le Brun denounces and analyses the collusion between finance and a particular brand of contemporary art; this collusion aims to establish the commercial exploitation of something previously seen as unquantifiable. For example, a few years ago the artist Anish Kapoor claimed to own the ultra-black shade Vantablack, monopolising it so no other artist could use it. Le Brun uses her intelligence and perspective to decipher the mechanisms tending towards a generalised aesthetic and far-reaching normalisation.
In a world where capitalism contaminates art, and tries to erase any concept of plurality, diversity and individuality, how can we fight this prescriptive debasement? Will the brutality of money eventually mean we stop striving for the priceless?
The author
Annie Le Brun is an artist, writer and literary critic who witnessed the latter years of the surrealist movement. She is the author of several books including Du trop de réalité (Stock, 2000).
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Click hereBiographies
My Life
Marc Chagall
Memoir- February 2003 - 384 pages
Rights sold to China (Beijing October) and Turkey (Jaguar Kitap)
The life of the great artist, told by the man himself.
In Ma vie, the only book he ever wrote, Marc Chagall recounts his childhood, his youth and his formative years until 1922.
Born in Witebsk, , the city that would never cease to haunt him (the book is incidentally dedicated to it), he grows up in the Jewish quarter with his father who pickles herring and his tiny mother: : « I would like to say that my talent was hidden somewhere in her, that it was through her that everything was passed on to me. »
Very soon, the young Chagall’s talent for drawing becomes obvious. He goes off to Moscow to study, then to France, then returns to Witebsk before finally settling down in Paris with his young wife Bella and their baby.
His book resembles his paintings: strange, aerial characters outside of time are depicted alongside very realistic ones who are both moving and funny: the rabbi, the grandfather, the little fiancée, the neighbours, the other painters and in the background: Lenin, Lunacharsky, Trotsky… Because the 1914 Great War tears Europe apart while the Russian revolution breaks out.
A poetic, tender and timeless work.
The author
Born in Witebsk in 1887 in a Jewish family of nine children, Marc Chagall arrived in Paris and became part of the “Ruche” in 1911, where he met Modigliani, Delaunay, Cendrars and Apollinaire, among others. After escaping to New York from 1941 to 1948, he returned to France where he worked without interruption until his death in 1985, in Saint-Paul de Vence.
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Click hereIsaac Bashevis Singer
Florence Noiville
Biography - November 2003 - 264 pages
In the year 2004, the writer Isaac Bashevis Singer would have turned 100. He was born in Poland in 1904 and he died in Miami in 1991. In 1978 he received the Nobel Prize. This biography – the first to be published in France – recounts the life of this immense and prolific writer. From his Polish childhood to his exile in America, the road took many turns. Florence Noiville retraces that road step by step and thus reveals a proud and solemn personality, a fact that contradicts those who continue to recognise in Singer only the charming story-teller, the mischievous fable-writer of the Jewish soul. On the contrary: to unravel the traces of his existence is to discover a champion of physical and metaphysical distress, one of the most modern virtuosos of anguish, inhibition and fiasco. Irritating, endearing, fascinating: this Singer is miles away from the usual stereotypes. And Florence Noiville’s biography – which explores the writer as much as the man – is just one reading of his life.
The author
Florence Noiville is a novelist and a journalist at Le Monde.
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Click hereA Life
Simone Veil
Memoir - November 2007 - 416 pages
One million copies sold.
Rights sold to Korea (Galapagos)
At last, Simone Veil agrees to talk about herself in the first person. She recalls her childhood in the area of Nice in a family with Jewish roots, and of her deportation to the camps with her mother and one of her sisters in March 1944. In all the posts that she has occupied, Veil has stood out as one of the figureheads of French politics. The epitomy of a free woman, she has had positions of power which she never exploited to her own ends, but to better the living conditions of her fellow citizens. She worked for the Administration of Prisons, as well as for the Ministry of Health of the Jacques Chirac government under Valéry Giscard d’Estaing’s presidency. In the latter function, she worked against her own political side, for the vote for the legalization of abortion. She was head of the European Parliament – where she stood up to French Prime Minister Raymond Barre. She was also state minister ‘des Affaires Sociales, de la Santé et de la Ville’ in Balladur’s government under François Mitterrand’s presidency ; She was nominated at the Conseil constitutionnel as well as to the ‘Fondation pour la mémoire de la Shoah’.
True to her belief of what the role of the survivors of the camps should be, she has testified again and again, in France and elsewhere. If the work of remembrance is crucial to Veil, it is not the past, however, but the future that concerns her, and the kind of world that will exist for her grand-children and great grand-children who occupy such a great place in her life.
The author
Simone Veil was a French lawyer and politician who served as Minister of Health under Valéry Giscard d’Estaing, President of the European Parliament and member of the Constitutional Council of France. A survivor from the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp who lost part of her family in the Holocaust, she served as the first president of the Fondation pour la Mémoire de la Shoah, from 2000 to 2007, and subsequently as honorary president. She was elected to the Académie française in November 2008. She was best known for pushing forward the law legalizing abortion in France on 17 January 1975. Simone Veil passed away on June 30th 2017.
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Click hereCinema / TV
Éric Rohmer: Biography
Antoine de Baecque & Noël Herpe
Cinema - January 2014 - 608 pages - 8 page full color photo insert
Rights sold to China (Shanghai People’s Publishing), Korea (Eulyoo), Japan (Suisei-Sha) and US (Columbia UP, WEL)
What do we know about Eric Rohmer except that he seems to incarnate a particularly French way of making films? Audiences may recognise a few titles: Ma nuit chez Maud, L’Amour, l’après midi, La Marquise d’O… Those same audiences might know that he liked filming very young women – the “Rohmériennes ”. He also launched several actors who carried on their careers without him: Fabrice Luchini, Jean-Claude Brialy, Pascal Greggory,…
But do people know, say, that together his 25 feature films attracted more than 8 million viewers in France and millions more around the world? Do we even know that another man, Maurice Schérer, was hiding behind the pseudonym Éric Rohmer? A man with a taste for secrecy who invented a double in order to maintain anonymity in his private life.
Using an extensive resource of personal archives as well as a long series of interviews as its basis, this book is the first biography of Éric Rohmer. He was one of the most respected critics of his day, editor in chief of Cahiers du cinéma, but also an ambitious young writer.
The authors
Antoine de Baecque is a professor of the history of cinema at the University of Nanterre. He has already written two biographies, of François Truffaut (1996, co-written with Serge Toubiana) and Jean-Luc Godard (2010), as well as essays about film and the New Wave. He was editor in chief of Cahiers du cinema, then worked on the arts pages of Libération
Noël Herpe is a senior lecturer at the Université de Paris VIII. He is the author or collator-editor of several books (about René Clair and Sacha Guitry), and edited the collection Rohmer et les Autres as well as a book of interviews with Rohmer about his text Le Celluloïd et le Marbre (2010).
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Click hereHaneke on Haneke
Michel Cieutat & Philippe Rouyer
Cinema - September 2017 - 384 pages - 130 photos and stills
Rights sold to Italy (Il Saggiatore), Spain (Gonita Filmacción)
This is the book about the great film marker Michael Haneke that film lovers have been waiting for.
This book is not a user’s manual for Michael Haneke’s films. The result of fifty hours of interviews spaced out over two years between Paris and Vienna, this book – which boasts over 100 rare or previously unpublished photographs – gives the director of Funny Games and The White Ribbon an arena to express his concept of the art of film and his perception of our contemporary world.
As he talks to Michel Cieutat and Philippe Rouyer, two critics from the film review Positif, Michael Haneke goes back over his youth and the stage plays that he directed before itemising, film by film, his work in television and on the big screen, from his early beginnings in 1974 right up to Happy End which will be released in 2017 worldwide.
Over successive free and impassioned conversations comes a series of accounts and secrets about the art of film-making, revealing the figure of a very unusual creator, a perfectionist full of humour. This is the book about the great film maker Michael Haneke that film lovers have been waiting for.
The authors
Michel Cieutat has been contributing to the review Positif since 1973, and to CinémAction since 1987. He has written almost a dozen books on a variety of American film makers and actors (Frank Capra, Martin Scorses, Oliver Stone, Robert De Niro, Al Pacino, Audrey Hepburn). He has lectured on Hollywood iconography and on the history of French and American cinema at the University of Strasbourg.
The film critic and historian Philippe Rouyer is a senior editor on the review Positif and editorial director of the film pages for Psychologies magazine. He regularly appears on the France Culture radio show “Mauvais genres” and the TV show “Le Cercle” on Canal + Cinéma.
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Click hereThe Geopolitics of Series, or the Triumph of Fear
Dominique Moïsi
TV - Feburary 2016 - 198 pages
Rights sold to Czech Republic (Argo), Italy (Armando), the Netherlands (Boom), Serbia (Clio) and Spain (Errata Naturae)
A trailblazing book, a bright analysis by one of the most renowned political scientists in the world.
This is the first book to decipher the emotions of the world through the prism of TV series.
After 11th September 2001 geopolitics invaded real life, and also invaded our imaginations. TV series became political as well as cultural references. Thanks to their intuitive power screenwriters became the most perceptive analysts of today’s world – and perhaps of our future.
What do they see in societies across the world? Fear. Of dictatorship and barbarity in Game of Thrones, of the collapse of democracy in House of Cards, of terrorism in Homeland, of a paralysed society in Engrenages (Spiral), of a disappearing world in Downton Abbey. Finally fear of the Russian threat in Occupied.
The author
Dominique Moïsi is the author, among other works, of La Géopolitique de l’émotion, which was translated into over 20 languages. A founding member of the French Institute for International Relations, he is a Visiting Professor at Harvard University and at King’s College, London. He is also a columnist for Financial Times, Les Echos and Ouest-France.
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Click hereHealth
Michel Cymes
The author
Michel Cymes is a specialist doctor as well as a popular television presenter. Stock has published his commercial successes including Vivez mieux et plus longtemps (330,000 copies sold), Votre cerveau and Chers hypocondriaques, all of which have been sold in translation.
Live Better and Longer
Health & Well-Being - Feburary 2016 - 288 pages
Over 320,000 copies of the trade edition and 120,000 copies of the mass-market edition sold in France.
Full English translation available.
Rights sold to Germany (Goldmann), Italy (Rizzoli), Japan (Daiwa Shobo), Korea (Open Books), Lebanon (Centre Culturel Arabe), Poland (Andromeda), Portugal (Lua de Papel), Russia (Ripol Classics), Spain (Paidos) and UK (Quercus, WEL)
Good health is an invaluable gift.
But how can you be careful about what you eat while still taking pleasure in it? I didn’t write this book to stir your paranoia but to remind you of a few sound principles.
The first is about health-giving foodstuffs, some of which have been forgotten. I won’t simply recommend eating them: I’ll tell you why you should eat them and how they benefit the body. The second relates to those harmful little habits it’s so difficult to break. Listing them and thinking about them is the first step. The third chapter speaks to the sporty person lurking inside all of us, and will make you want to take more exercise than you do now. The fourth and final section brings together all the tips to keep in shape.
This book is intended to be playful, to be approached casually but that doesn’t detract from the serious nature of its contents. I don’t think it’s ever too late to embrace a few sound principles. It’s never too late to take ourselves in hand. In other words, your goose is never cooked!
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Click hereYour Brain
Health & Well-Being - Feburary 2017 - 288 pages
Over 150,000 copies of the trade edition sold in France
Rights sold to Germany (Goldmann), Italy (Rizzoli), Korea (Open Books), Poland (Andromeda), Portugal (Relogio d’Água), Russia (Ripol Classics) and Spain (Paidos)
After the body, the brain… a sequel that had to be written. For the simple reason that when the head goes, everything goes!
The brain is 1.5 kg’s worth of mysterious grey matter, but its mystery is growing less impenetrable with each new discovery made by researchers constantly studying how the brain works. Hence the need for this book brimming with useful advice on how to look after this fascinating organ. To take good care of it, then, I’ve broken things down into four chapters:
The first on diet, which has tremendous influence on brain function. I’ll tell you what foods you should favour and I’ll explain why
The second on sleep, screens, stress, sport, culture, addictions and building happiness because they all have links with our brain
The third on memory because it sits in the brain and should be looked after. I’ll tell you how
The fourth deals with illnesses that can affect the brain (Alzheimer, stroke etc.) and first and foremost provides sound and practical advice on how to try and delay their outbreak where possible and even to protect you from them.
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Click hereDear Hypochondriacs…
Health & Well-Being - May 2018 - 192 pages
Rights sold to Germany (Goldmann)
How to reassure hypochondriacs?
« I know the sketch by heart: “Doctor, I’ve got cancer…” or the variant, “Doctor, I’m heading for Alzheimer’s or a heart attack…”. Hypochondria is in better shape than ever now that health information is available to everyone on the internet and social media. I now see why it’s tempting to believe the worst of the most insignificant symptoms. But in the vast majority of cases, people are wrong. You need only to have a proper look at the patient’s symptoms to realize he or she has often over-interpreted things. I wrote this book to convince you that whatever you’re suffering from isn’t all that serious, to tell you that you will die, yes, but not necessarily straight away!
The first section runs through our main anxieties: heart attacks, cancer, Aids, Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s, impotence, sterility, viruses, multiple sclerosis and, lastly, death itself.
The second section explores twenty everyday situations: my glands are up in my neck, I’m shaking, I’m seeing double, I’m spitting blood, I have chest pains, etc.
In each case, I mention the worst-case scenario (the one we’re afraid of) to help prove that, depending on other symptoms, you may not actually be in your final hours. »
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Click hereOn Love
Michel Cymes & Patricia Chalon
Pop Science - November 2020 - 304 pages
A psychologist and a doctor discuss everything about love.
“We definitely don’t understand each other… we might as well be speaking different languages!” This is more or less how a good many heated conversations between men and women end.
Eventually, once the crisis is over, we realise that – despite our love, our good faith and our best efforts – it was all a huge… misunderstanding.
It’s in an attempt to clear up this very misunderstanding (because we are old friends, one a man, the other a woman, one a doctor, the other a psychologist), that we felt we wanted to try to get to know each other so as to have a real chance of better understanding each other’s language, despite our obvious differences.
We searched through our respective professional practices for anything that might explain behavioural differences from a psychological or medical point of view. We also interviewed people around us, particularly the younger generation, because we wanted to understand how their vision of the world differed from our own.
Michel Cymes and Patricia Chalon
The authors
Michel Cymes is a specialist doctor as well as a popular television presenter. Stock has published his commercial successes including Vivez mieux et plus longtemps (330,000 copies sold), Votre cerveau and Chers hypocondriaques, all of which have been sold in translation.
Patricia Chalon is a psychologist and psychotherapist who specialises in interactive therapy.
As a man and a woman, both specialists in their fields, they went about challenging each other’s point of view with determination, empathy and humour.
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Click hereKilling Cancer
Patrizia Paterlini-Bréchot
Health - January 2017 - 288 pages
Rights sold to Italy (Mondadori) and Portugal (Objetiva)
Tracking down cancer even before symptoms first appear? Driven by this extraordinary ambition, a woman doctor-turned-researcher braved every obstacle to devise a revolutionary test.
For years Professor Patrizia Paterlini-Bréchot vowed, both at her patients’ bedside and in the secret of her laboratory, to decode the camouflage strategies of cancer, this serial killer.
She spent nights and days perfecting experimental techniques in tracking tumour cells that circulate in the blood long before the illness first appears. And, with the help of other scientists, she found a way.
A simple blood test can now detect precursors of an invasive cancer. This could save millions of lives in the future.
Patrizia Paterlini-Bréchot sheds light on the personal journey that led her to this discovery and reveals the great scientific advancements that helped devise decisive weapons in the battle against cancer.
She is convinced: they should be focusing on early diagnosis. And this is a battle that concerns us all.
The author
Patrizia Paterlini-Bréchot is an oncologist, haematologist, Professor of cellular and molecular biology as applied to oncology at Paris Descartes University, and Director of her research team. Her work has been rewarded with several French and international prizes. She is world-renowned for her scientific precision and her commitment to fighting cancer.
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Click hereTotal Recall
Roland Portiche & Danièle Gerkens
Health - February 2018 - 336 pages
What is the secret of people with phenomenal memories?
Why them and not us? “Them” meaning those with hypermnesia, phenomenal powers of recall. Some remember every moment of their lives. Others, such as the American Kim Peek (who was the inspiration for the central character in Rain Man), memorized 12,000 books. Some have eidetic memoires, otherwise known as photographic memories. Austistes savants, such as the Englishman Daniel Dennett, can accurately recite the first 22,514 decimals of Pi. They crop up in every field: they may be musical geniuses like Mozart who had the very rare (and enigmatic) gift known as perfect pitch; or master perfumers, the great “noses” of perfumery such as Therry Vasser, of Guerlain, who admits to having memorized 3,000 different essences. They often show up in the world of politics: Bill Clinton is said to have an exceptional memory and the dictator Ferdinand Marcos could recite the 1835 Filipino constitution both backwards and forwards.
Using these extraordinary stories, the author explores the secrets of this valuable but still little understood ability: memory. Will infinite developments of the internet render it useless? Will we all be CAHs, computer-assisted hypermnesiacs? Does human memory still have valuable things to offer us?
The authors
Roland Portiche is a doctor of philosophy and the writer behind numerous documentaries and popular science programmes.
Danièle Gerkens is a chief editor at the magazine Elle.
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Click hereMathusalem's Children
Roland Portiche
Health - February 2019 - 288 pages
For 100,000 years mankind has tried everything to prolong a life that has always felt too short.
The hereafter of religions, Christianity’s resurrection of the body, the Fountain of Eternal Youth, elixirs prepared by alchemists, transfusions performed by charlatans, valleys of longevity, the supposed secrets of centenarians, the most outlandish of transplants – anything was acceptable if it added a few years to those nature had sparingly allocated.
This book, the first overview of the subject, examines the illusions, discoveries, failures and even the latest physiological findings. Antioxidants, hormones, restricted calorie intake, telomerase, genetic programming… all the big questions are explored in clear and simple prose illustrated with concrete examples. Will the human race soon confront the watershed of reaching 150 as it currently does with reaching 100? And more importantly, how would this change the way we think, live together and understand life?
The author
A doctor of philosophy and director of documentaries and popular science programmes, Roland Portiche travelled the world to interview top specialists on the subject of prolonging life. This exciting ambitious book presents his conclusions.
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Click hereGeneral Non Fiction
Finding Dora Maar
Brigitte Benkemoun
Art - May 2019 - 336 pages
Full English translation available.
Rights sold to China (Guangxi Normal UP), Czech Republic (Grada), Denmark (Mellemgaard), Germany (BTB/Random House), Italy (Skira), Korea (Bokbokseoga), Spain (Taurus/Penguin Random House, WSL) and USA (Getty Publications, WEL)
Imagine holding the address book of Dora Maar, Picasso’s muse, in your hand!
By complete chance, Brigitte Benkemoun bought a diary online, and in it she found private notes dating back to 1952. Twenty pages of telephone numbers and addresses for Cocteau, Chagall, Eluard, Giacometti…. the greatest artists of the post-war period.
When she finds out that the address book belonged to Dora Maar, she decides to track down information about this muse of Picasso. Two years of research helped her understand the role each of these artists played in Dora Maar’s life, and she homes in on the mystery and secrets of a woman who gave herself to Picasso before giving herself to God.
The author
Brigitte Benkemoun is a journalist and a writer. She has written two previous books.
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Click hereGardens on Paper, From Rousseau to Modiano
Evelyne Bloch-Dano
Literary Essay - April 2015 - 256 pages
Full English translation available.
Rights sold to China (SDX), Italy (ADD Editore), Taiwan (China Times) and US (University of Virginia Press, WEL)
Gardens of paper or dreams of gardens? Having already explored forgotten vegetables, the biographer Évelyne Bloch-Dano now moves from the vegetable plot to gardens in the work of great prose-writers: gardens are a reflection of the soul, a well-earned rest, an improving form of work, nostalgia for childhood and the dream of an ideal world.
From Rousseau to Proust, from Marguerite Duras to George Sand, from Colette to Modiano, gardens appear in novels as representations of the real world, but also as reflections of the imagination. The charmingly erudite first section focuses on history and is devoted to different types of garden from the bible to English parklands; the second analyses precisely and perceptively their role in literary works.
There is also an element of autobiography concealed within these well-tended wanderings: any lover of literature and any gardening enthusiast will navigate and decode and love this still life.
The author
The biographer and essayist Évelyne Bloch-Dano is the author of many award-winning and frequently translated titles including, most memorably, Madame Zola (1997, French Elle magazine’s Reader’s Prize), Flora Tristan, la femme-messie (2001, François Billetdoux Prize), Madame Proust (2004, Prix Renaudot for an essay), Le Dernier Amour de George Sand (2010), Une jeunesse de Marcel Proust (2017), as well as La Fabuleuse Histoire des légumes (2008), Jardins de papier (2015), and the acclaimed personal accounts La Biographe (2007) and Porte de Champerret (2013).
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Click hereMy Writers' Houses, From Ronsard to Yourcenar
Evelyne Bloch-Dano
Literary Essay - May 2019 - 318 pages - 9 illustrations
International version available.
Rights sold to China (Shanghai Culture Publishing House) and Italy (ADD Editore)
Everything in a writer’s house speaks, if we only know how to listen, look and imagine.
Évelyne Bloch-Dano invites us to discover around one hundred writers’ houses in France and worldwide, from Combray for Proust, to Berlin for Brecht, via London for Dickens. This erudite, enlightened and yet playful book aims to establish the connection between a house and a writer’s literary universe, a place and a life. These pages are as much an invitation to read as to travel, and they include ten hand-drawn illustrations.
The author
The biographer and essayist Évelyne Bloch-Dano is the author of many award-winning and frequently translated titles including, most memorably, Madame Zola (1997, French Elle magazine’s Reader’s Prize), Flora Tristan, la femme-messie (2001, François Billetdoux Prize), Madame Proust (2004, Prix Renaudot for an essay), Le Dernier Amour de George Sand (2010), Une jeunesse de Marcel Proust (2017), as well as La Fabuleuse Histoire des légumes (2008), Jardins de papier (2015), and the acclaimed personal accounts La Biographe (2007) and Porte de Champerret (2013).
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Click hereLittle Dancer Aged Fourteen
Camille Laurens
Narrative / Art - September 2017 - 176 pages
Full English translation available.
Rights sold to Germany (Piet Meyer), Italy (EDT), Turkey (Yapi Kredi), UK (Les Fugitives) and US (Other Press)
Who was the model for Edgar Degas’s world renowned sculpture of a ballet dancer? Camille Laurens embarks on a meticulous and sensitive enquiry.
Degas’s “Little Ballerina” has always been a presence for Camille Laurens. Here the novelist tells the story of the sculpture which has been exhibited in Paris, London, New York, Washington, Chicago, Copenhagen, Dresden… but few know the identity of the model.
Camille Laurens looks into the childhood of Marie Van Goethem, born to Belgian parents, with an older sister who ended up as a courtesan, a younger sister who became a ballet teacher and a mother who died on the very premises of the Paris Opera. Dancing and prostitution. Revolution and the art world. Quite unintentionally, Marie would become one of the most discussed models, and was described as a “monkey” at the 1881 Salon des Indépendants exhibition. How did Degas dare to make something beautiful of such an ugly child? And what mysterious connection was there between Degas and his subject, given that he kept the wax sculpture in his studio his whole life and never exhibited it? This enquiry ultimately leads Camille Laurens to a more personal quest.
The author
Novelist, essayist and academic Camille Laurens has published some twenty books. In 2000, Dans ces bras-là won the Prix Fémina and the Prix Renaudot des Lycéens, and was translated into thirty languages. Her latest novel Who You Think I Am (Gallimard, 2016; Other Press, 2017) sold 50,000 copies in France.
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Click hereScandal in a Bottle
Marie-Dominique Lelièvre
History - October 2019 - 288 pages
Rights sold to Italy (Baldini+Castoldi), Romania (RAO), Russia (AST) and Spain (Superflua)
The unauthorised biography of Chanel No 5.
More bottles of Chanel No 5 are sold than any other perfume in the world. But who knows its triumphant but dark story? Now we can discover the biography of an object for the first time. Because this perfume’s destiny is intimately bound with that of Twentieth Century and the rise of antisemitism.
Chanel N°5 is descended from an avant-garde perfume created in 1913 for the Russian aristocracy and called “Bouquet de Catherine”. Ernest Beaux, the super-gifted nose who conceived it, approached the house of Chanel who decided to market the fragrance in a laboratory bottle so that all its value would lie in the rare essences in its composition rather than a showy container. A revolutionary idea for the period.
At the time Gabrielle Chanel thought most sales would be through her stores. But thanks to the knowhow of the cosmetics exporters Bourgeois, expertly run by the Jewish Wertheimer family, the perfume enjoyed tremendous international success, particularly in the United States. And Gabrielle felt she was being repeatedly robbed of her profits. After a trade war and a legal battle, she eventually reclaimed possession of revenue from her brand around the world. In the shadow of this success we discover a disturbing figure and self-declared anti-Semite, the fascinating Gabrielle Chanel.
The author
Marie-Dominique Lelièvre is a journalist and writer. She has written countless articles about Haute couture. Her first article about Chanel No 5 dates back to the 1980s. Having been haunted by the perfume ever since, she gained access to previously unseen archives.
Current Affairs
The Adama Combat
Assa Traoré & Geoffroy de Lagasnerie
Sociology - April 2019 - 256 pages
Assa Traoré named Guardian of the Year by Time Magazine
Rights sold to UK (Verso Books, WEL)
On July 19th, 2016, Adama Traoré died at Beaumont-sur-Oise, asphyxiated under the weight of three police officers. It was his 24th birthday. Since then, a combat has arisen and developed, deeply questioning politics and our own world: the Adama combat.
«The Adama combat is not only the combat of the Traoré family. The death of my brother is representative of a great unrest in this France that is not doing well. My brother died under the weight of three officers and a system: he died because he was called Adama Traoré, because he was Black, because he lived in a working-class neighbourhood. The bad France, its problem with the police, colonialism, racism, the school system, the justice system, democracy: all of them are part of the Adama combat. » A. T.
« The death of Adama Traoré is inscribed within a system that killed other young men before him and has killed others after him. The question of police brutality occupies a central place within it. But this subject is an entry point that allows us to access a more lucid understanding of the social world – of the School, of racism, of the public space, of the rule of Law and the justice system. Adama’s death is the result of a stifling and finger-pointing system. It is then a matter of using the fight that ensues to question the functioning of the institutions and the powers in our contemporary societies. » G. L.
The authors
Assa Traoré is the author of Lettre à Adama, co-written with Elsa Vigoureux (Le Seuil, 2017). She is an activist inside the « Vérité et Justice pour Adama » committee.
Geoffroy de Lagasnerie is a philosopher and sociologist. He is a professor at the École nationale supérieure d’arts of Paris-Cergy. He is the author of several books.
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Click hereCurrent Affairs - Middle East
Operation Caesar
Garance Le Caisne
Document- October 2015 - 224 pages
Full English translation available.
Rights sold to Finland (Art House), Germany (C.H. Beck), Italy (Rizzoli), the Netherlands (De Bezibe Bij), Poland (Sonia Draga), Romania (RAO), Russia (AST), Spain (Ediciones B), Turkey (Harmoon) and UK (Polity,WEL)
“Never in the history of wars has proof of crimes against humanity been divulged while the war and its crimes carried on. In Syria, though, one man did it. The military photographer “Caesar” risked his life to give the world 53,000 photos and documents concerning prisoners killed by torture or starved to death in jails run by Bachar el-Assad’s regime.
While Islamic State terrorists flaunt their barbarity on social networks, the Syrian regime hides its offences in the silence of its prisons. Since his exfiltration from Syria with these documents which reveal the Machine of Death’s routine, Caesar has been in hiding to avoid assassination by Syria’s Information Services. As the only journalist to have met him, I listened for many hours as he described arbitrary imprisonments, systematic torture, hunger in over-populated cells […] and the pictures he and his team had to take to fill the archives and show the leaders that the “work” had been done.
His confession is supported by statements I have collated from former prisoners and their families.”
G L. C.
The stories and documents revealed in this book are previously unpublished. At a time when Western chancelleries and Information Services are considering re-establishing contact with Bachar el-Assad to fight Islamic State, these revelations could change the course of diplomatic history.
The author
Freelance journalist working for Le Journal du dimanche and L’Obs, Garance Le Caisne spent eight years in Cairo where she learnt Arabic and the subtleties of the Middle East. After six trips to war-torn Syria, she devoted seven months to approaching Caesar, and secured the trust of his group of activists. These militants are now trying to achieve international justice by having Bachar el-Assad’s regime judged.
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Click hereWomen, Life and Liberty
Leïla Mustapha with the collaboration of Marine de Tilly
Memoir- February 2020 - 234 pages - 14 photos
The untold story of the woman who wants to rebuild Raqqa, in war-stricken Syria.
“The people of Raqqa chose me to give them a life, a voice and a democracy, not to add my tears to the torrent of theirs.”
On 17th April 2017, Leïla Mustapha was appointed mayor of the former Islamic State capital; she was the only woman in an assembly of 130 men.
Who better than her – a daughter of Raqqa, a freshly qualified civil engineer, three times top of her year, not isolated but committed out of choice and necessity – to rebuild bridges, schools, hospitals, mosques, the 25,000 buildings flattened by bombing and the 30,000 more damaged by artillery fire? Who better than her – a Kurd who grew up among Arabs and attended their universities – to restore the city?
And lastly, who better than her – the young woman with her hair uncovered, wearing slim-fit jeans – to defend her “sisters” who scraped a living like insects caught in the devil’s jaws for three years?
Her exploits in Raqqa are a combination of courage, strength and perspicuity; and they are a real emancipatory slap in the face for the Middle East… but also for the West.
An exceptional trajectory, for woman who brings hope.
The authors
A Kurd born into Arab culture in Raqqa, Leïla Mustapha is in her thirties and is currently mayor of the Caliphate’s former capital in Bachar el-Assad’s Syria, not far from Erdoğan’s Turkey. She raises high and strong the standard for “another” Syria, a tolerant open Syria. Her personal destiny is bound up with the region as she guides it towards peace or chaos.
Marine de Tilly is a journalist for Le Point. She travelled to Raqqa to witness Leïla Mustapha’s day-to-day life first-hand.
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Click hereTravel - Adventure
In Siberia's Prisons
Yoann Barbereau
Prison escape book/True story - February 2020 - 324 pages
40.000 copies sold
Rights sold to Spain (Áticos de los Libros), Taiwan (Yuan-Liou) and UK (Hodder)
Midnight Express in Siberia. A gripping contemporary story of escape.
“The scene unfolds not far from Lake Baikal, where I live and love and am lucky enough to be loved, in Irkutsk, the capital of eastern Siberia. It’s morning, men in balaclavas appear out of nowhere. My daughter screams. She’s five years old. I’m arrested right in front of her, then beaten – expertly – and interrogated. Worst of all I’m branded with that ignominious word I struggle to commit to paper: paedophile. These men hidden behind balaclavas and shadows want my skin. They have set in motion an implacable and brutish process of destruction that has a name, a name I know, invented by the KGB: Kompromat.”
Inside Siberia’s prisons, I try to understand. In the psychiatric hospital where I’m later interned, I try to understand. I’m guaranteed fifteen years of a gruelling camp. The story of my escapes can begin.
The author
Born in 1978, Yoann Barbereau worked in Russia for over ten years, including running the Alliance française in Irkutsk.
To escape his captors, he used every modern method available, outmanoeuvring the signals from his electronic tag and travelling hundreds of kilometres across Siberia using the carpool app BlaBlaCar and then on foot. A film freely based on his story will be brought to the big screen by Jérôme Salle, the director of Zulu which was distributed internationally.
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Click hereStalin's Mountaineers
Cédric Gras
Travel writing/Adventure - May 2020 - 324 pages
Prix Albert Londres
Rights sold to Poland (Kobiece) and Spain (Critica/Planeta)
The unpublished story of the Abalakov brothers, two mountaineers working for the glory of the Soviet regime.
Vitali and Evgeni were Siberian orphans who enjoyed rock climbing before becoming expert mountaineers. They carried out many expeditions between Caucasus and Central Asia, culminating in the 1930s with their ascents of the impressive “Stalin Peak” and “Lenin Peak” in the name of power. In a culture where mountaineering was dictated by the ideology of a new world, by conquering new territories and war, Vitali Abalakov would still become a victim of the Great Terror and the purges in 1938. He was eventually released. Despite having lost several fingers to a high-altitude snowstorm, he returned to mountaineering and achieved elite status again, heading up Spartak. His brother Evgeni meanwhile was found dead in 1948 when he was preparing to climb Everest.
The author
Born in 1982, Cédric Gras studied geography all over the world. Bewitched by the vast Eurasian expanses, he travelled the former Soviet Union for ten years. He is one of the rising voices in French travel writing, producing books as well as documentaries. His well-received book L’hiver aux trousses was published by Stock.
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Click herePourquoi collectons-nous vos données ?
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