Imagine spending one night in a museum.
Imagine spending one night in a museum.
Head of Rights
For Asian, German, Dutch, Greek, Middle Eastern, North African, Russian, Scandinavian, Turkish, UK and US inquiries
Foreign Rights Manager
For Brazilian, Eastern Europe, Italian, Portuguese, South American and Spanish inquiries
Dear friends,
We are delighted to unveil our 2022 Fall Non-Fiction Rights List.
We will be attending the Frankfurt Book Fair in October. Do send us an e-mail should you wish to book an appointment!
You can also drop by our stand at Hall 4.1 C30.
Don’t forget to peek in our 2022 Fall Fiction Rights List.
We very much looking forward to hearing from you!
The Rights Team
Garance Le Caisne
Option in Finland (Art House), Germany (C.H. Beck), Italy (Rizzoli), Netherlands (De Bezige Bij), Poland (Sonia Draga), Romania (RAO), Russia (AST), Spain (Ediciones B), Turkey (Harmoon) and UK (Polity).
The Syrian Spring activist and whistleblower Mazen el Hamada has been missing since October 2020. Using interviews carried out in 2017 and 2018, the journalist Garance Le Caisne traces his journey.
When in 2014 Mazen el Hamada was released after 18 months’ imprisonment for protesting, he had to flee Syria. The young refugee crossed the Mediterranean and ended up in the Netherlands. He would be one of very few Syrians to speak out about the torture he suffered in a state prison.
Mazen’s testimony, as told to Garance Le Caisne between 2017 and 2018, describes the tragedy of torture and the chaos of a new life, however long-awaited it was. This former skilled worker keeps saying that the regime “has destroyed [their] memory”, but he does still remember: the family farm, the cache of forbidden books, the early demonstrations and, of course, life buried in overcrowded cells where he was incarcerated with two of his nephews.
As well as physical abuse, Mazen witnessed souls being ravaged. His words, recorded over several months, reveal his turmoil as he struggled to get through to Western leaders who should have had the perpetrators arrested.
On 22nd February 2020, Mazen returned to Damascus. Arriving at the airport, he realised his mistake. “Pray for me” are the last words he is known to have uttered.
The journalist Garance Le Caisne is the author of a significant book published by Stock in 2015, Opération César, which described the atrocities committed in Bashar al-Assad’s prisons in Syria. It was translated into ten languages and won the German Geschwister Scholl prize in 2016.
Clémence Boulouque
A dazzling essay about the intrinsic links between literature and religion in accounts of apocalypses.
If the human solution to giving some meaning to disasters is to describe them, then reading sacred texts about catastrophes helps in precisely the same way. These religious writings can be read as mirrors held up to our world, almost as novels, rather than standards or dictates. Following on from them, books that have become cornerstones of literature describe how we are shaped by the fine line between what kills us and what saves us, sustaining our survival instinct and our need for hope.
In seven chapters, Clémence Boulouque examines accounts of scourges, linking them to religious traditions and literary history, shifting from the Bible to Oedipus Rex, from the Gospels to the Talmud, and from Islam to Tibetan Buddhism, but also exploring The Decameron and Faust, Ben Johnson, Pushkin, Zweig, Camus, Saramago and Octavia Butler. This essay reveals how literature has responded to existential issues, affording us a dual view of religion and literature.
Clémence Boulouque is a Doctor of History and Jewish Studies and teaches in the Department of Religion at Columbia University. She is also a novelist whose works include Mort d’un silence (Gallimard, 2003), Nuit ouverte (Flammarion, 2007) and Un instant de grâce (Flammarion, 2016).
Brigitte Benkemoun
Rights sold to Germany (BTB/Random House).
Options in China (Guangxi Normal UP), Denmark (Mellemgaard), Italy (Skira), Korea (Bokbokseoga), and Russia (AST).
An inquiry based on unpublished documents about Picasso’s most mysterious and secret muse.
When Picasso met 17-year-old Marie-Thérèse Walter one winter’s evening in Paris, he asked her to sit for him. From there she falls madly in love before being abandoned once her daughter Maya was born. Even though she marked the most dazzling, ebullient and erotic phase of the Picasso’s career, he always tried to keep her hidden.
The author reveals the story of a woman who spent fifty years in the shadow of a tyrant even though her body is exhibited in the world’s greatest museums.
Brigitte Benkemoun is a journalist and writer. She is the author of La Petite Fille sur la photo (Fayard, 2012) and Albert le Magnifique (Stock, 2016), and her last book, Je suis le carnet de Dora Maar (Stock, 2019), was translated into nine languages.
Aliette de Laleu
Rights sold to Korea (Les Mots) and Spain (Ficta ediciones, Castilian and Catalan).
Paying homage to prodigiously talented female musicians who have been left in the shadows.
“Forsake your triumphs that don’t suit your sex and make way for your brother,” were the words of Fanny Mendelssohn’s father. Her compositions were already being signed by her brother Felix.
Have you heard of Kassia of Constantinople, the first female composer in history whose scores have been identified? Destined to marry Emperor Theophilos, she insolently spurned him to devote herself to music and religion. The saint and Christian mystic Hildegard of Bingen corresponded with emperors and popes but found time to compose sacred hymns recognised as leading lights of medieval music. Barbara Strozzi, she of the scandalous reputation, was Italy’s most prolific female baroque composer. Composers, instrumentalists, orchestra directors, founders of ensembles, patrons… this book finally shines a spotlight on these women.
Aliette de Laleu is a journalist who specialises in classical music. In her unmissable weekly piece for France’s top music radio station, she dismantles clichés and talks feminism.
An author is invited to spend a night in a museum and write a book on their experience.
Lola Lafon
Prix Décembre 2022
Prix Les Inrockuptibles 2022
Rights sold to Germany (Aufbau), Italy (Einaudi, preempt), the Netherlands (De Arbeiderspers, at auction), Slovakia (Inaque) and Spain (Alianza, WSL, at auction).
Options in China (Haitian), Japan (Hayakawa) and Russia (Corpus).
Lola Lafon spends a night in Anne Frank’s house in Amsterdam, an empty museum haunted by absence.
“Anne Frank is so much a story ‘everyone knows’ that no one actually knows that much about it. Because ‘everyone knows’ doesn’t mean ‘everyone understands’, but that we’re in a hurry to move on, and tidy this little ghost away in a museum.
The Anne Frank House is an empty apartment. What visitors file past is the absence of its inhabitants. And it’s this emptiness that transforms the apartment, the annexe, into a museum. But that emptiness doesn’t exist. It is peopled with reflections that bear witness to the chasm left by Anne Frank’s death.
I will go from one room to another all through the night as if an emergency is still hiding there, waiting to be found.”
Lola Lafon grew up in Eastern Europe between Sofia et Bucharest. She studied Dance and Music in Paris and New York. Her literary output of six novels to date is distinctive for its thorough exploration of narrative forms. La petite communiste qui ne souriait jamais (Actes Sud, 2014) was translated into 11 languages and awarded many prizes including the Madame Figaro Heroine Prize, the prix de la Closerie de Lilas and the prix Étonnants Voyageurs. Chavirer (Actes Sud, 2020) was translated into 16 languages and awarded the prix Landerneau, the prix France Culture Télérama and the Swiss Choix Goncourt.
Diane Mazloum
Rights sold to Lebanon (Librairie Antoine, French language)
Diane Mazloum spends a night in the National Museum of Beirut, the only national commemorative building in this fragile, divided nation.
The National Museum of Beirut stands on what was the murderous frontier between East and West Beirut during the civil war that lasted 15 years – if it can even be said to have ended.
How did this temple which harbours the treasures of vanished civilisations – from the Egyptians to the Babylonians and the Byzantines to the Mamluks – survive mankind’s brutal assaults?
During her close brush with this sediment of historical material, this confetti of bygone empires, Diane Mazloum comes to understand that the past shapes the present, and the shadows of the dead are cast over the living and inform who they are.
Diane Mazloum was born in Paris and grew up in Rome. She is Lebanese and is the author of several books, including Beyrouth, la nuit (2014, Stock), L’Âge d’or (2018, JC Lattès) and Une piscine dans le désert (2020, JC Lattès), all of which were shortlisted for literary prizes.
Éric Chevillard
Éric Chevillard spends a night in the hall for extinct and threatened species at the Paris Natural History Museum.
The place is frightening, exotic and very inspiring for writing. Between his wanderings and contemplations, the author imagines being a saviour for these lost worlds. He encourages us to think about these extinct species and the conservation of the human race, raising a question at the heart of modern-day concerns: what is our place on this earth and what is our relationship with nature and other animals? He claims that “To resuscitate lost species, rather than the uncertainties of cloning, wouldn’t it be wiser to put our faith in poetry?”
With its sublime writing, this book takes an inventive look at preserving threatened species.
Éric Chevillard first came to public attention in the 80s as one of the “minimalist” writers at Les Editions de Minuit, alongside Jean Echenoz, Jean-Philippe Toussaint and François Bon. His work is characterised by its subverting of narrative conventions and its quirky humour; it has earned widespread critical acclaim and has been translated into 12 languages. His most famous books include Mourir m’enrhume (1987), La Nébuleuse du crabe (1993) and Vaillant Petit Tailleur (2004). Since 2007, he has written a literary blog called L’Autofictif.
Jakuta Alikavazovic
PRIX MEDICIS ESSAI 2021
Rights sold to Germany (Carl Hanser Verlag), the US (Fern Books) and Spain (Muñeca Rusa).
Jakuta Alikavazovic at the Louvre! Intimately surrounded by classic masterpieces, she reveals her roots.
Imagine a night alone with the greatest treasures in French heritage. The novelist spent this night wandering around the Ancient World sections, with a bag slung across her shoulders containing, amongst other things, an illicit bar of nougat. This personal and original book is peopled with nocturnal shadows and ghosts of the past, and the glide of bare feet past the Venus de Milo.
But Alikavazovic soon explains her intention: “I came here tonight to become my father’s daughter again.” Her father was born in 1951, in a village in Montenegro, which was then part of Yugoslavia. Without a word of French, he came to Paris out of love, to escape, and to see the Louvre. He sees the museum as a city within a city. This exiled father, a scavenger-aesthete, once strolled casually around the Louvre with his daughter Jakuta and asked her, “So, how would you go about stealing the Mona Lisa?”
A novelist and translator of English born in 1979, Jakuta Alikavazovic won the 2008 Prix Goncourt for a first novel for Corps volatils. La Blonde et le Bunker received a special merit in the Prix Wepler. Her most significant translations have been into English with Granta.
Zoé Valdès
Rights sold to Spain (Thyssen Museum)
The expression “dead painting” is used by French auctioneers for works that can’t be authenticated…
When she visits the galleries of the Thyssen-Bornemisza Museum in Madrid, Zoé Valdés finds herself immersed in a half-fantasy, half-real world. She takes us with her in her pursuit of two muses and two famous painters, Balthus and Bonnard.
The first part of the novel introduces a young model who poses for Balthus, playing cat and mouse with the master who painted “Passage du commerce Saint-André”. Who’s looking at who? Who wants who? Does art produce dreams in a semi-conscious state or scorching reality?
The second part shows us another muse, Renée de Monchaty, the lover idealised by Pierre Bonnard in “Femme à sa toilette” who, broken-hearted, took her own life in 1925.
The muses are young women, sometimes teenagers, innocents sacrificed on the altar of the painters’ desire. In this sensual, sleep-walking narrative tinged with Latin American-style magic realism, truth and illusion intertwine like poisonous flowers.
Born in Havana in May 1959, Zoé Valdés is a novelist, poet and filmmaker, as well as a known figure within the opposition to the Cuban political regime. She found asylum Paris in 1995 following the publication of her controversial book Le Néant quotidien. Winner of the 1996 Prix Planeta, she has written many books, including La Douleur du dollar.
Leïla Slimani
OVER 100.000 COPIES SOLD!
Rights sold to Germany (Luchterhand), Brazil (Casa dos Livros), Portugal (Objectiva), Italy (La Nave di Teseo), Korea (Mujintree), Slovakia (Inaque), Spain (Cabaret Voltaire), Taiwan (Ecus), UK (Hodder) and USA (Mobius)
Leïla Slimani, winner of the 2016 prix Goncourt, doesn’t like leaving home and prefers solitude to entertainment. So why agree to spend a sleepless night in the Punta della Dogona Museum in Venice?
Reflecting upon the “impossibility” of a book whilst subtly digressing in the Venetian night, Leila Slimani talks about herself, about imprisonment, intimacy, identity, being caught in the middle, between East and West.
A discreet, sensitive confession in which the author mentions her father who was once imprisoned.
But this book – with its intensity and inner fire – is also about beauty disappearing and how urgently we must make the most of it. It is about the glory of the ephemeral.
At dawn, although awake and alert, the author emerges from the building as if from a dream, and all that is left of her night is the smell of flowers.
Leïla Slimani was born in 1981. She has written three acclaimed novels published by Gallimard, including Lullaby, which won the 2016 Prix Goncourt, was sold to 44 countries and has sold over a million copies in France.
Bernard Chambaz
A night in the world’s largest maze surrounded by works of art at the Franco Maria Ricci Museum in Parma.
Franco Maria Ricci founded the prestigious FMR magazine and the Labirinto della Masone in Parma where his art collections are housed. Next to it he grew the bamboo maze which is the largest maze in the world.
Over one night, Bernard Chambaz comes across many individuals whose lives build his narrative. Franco Maria Ricci himself, first young then aging, arousing subtle feelings of tenderness. The writers who gave him texts, such as Borgès, Giono and Zavattini. Donizetti whose skullcap was stolen during his autopsy. Clelia Marchi, a 72-year-old peasant woman who chronicled history in ink on her bridal sheet. The luxury shoemaker Ferragamo who started as a small-time cobbler. And so many others.
The novelist, poet and historian Bernard Chambaz won the 1993 Goncourt Prize for a debut novel for L’Arbre de vies (F. Bourin), and the 2014 prix Jouvenel from the Académie française and the sporting literature Grand prix for Dernières nouvelles du martin-pêcheur (Flammarion).
Enki Bilal
A supernatural night at the Picasso Museum for Enki Bilal, one of the greatest and most popular creators of comic books.
What is this strange ultra-powerful hand picking up Enki Bilal in the middle of the night and putting him on a camp bed? And what is this mysterious, haunted place where he ends up?
During his hallucinatory exploration, Enki Bilal meets not only personalities from Picasso’s life, his muses and models, but also the great master himself and his idol Goya. His wanderings through the corridors of the Picasso Museum take the form of a waking dream, allowing us to touch the painter’s work in a captivating, sensual way, culminating in the epiphany of the master’s great work, Guernica.
Enki Bilal, to use his pen name, was born in Belgrade on 7th October 1951. In Serbo-Croat and French, his family name is Enes Bilanovic. He creates, writes and illustrates comic books in French. He works partly in the realms of science fiction and tackles themes of time and memory. In 1987 he was awarded the Grand Prix at Angoulême Comics Festival.
Santiago H. Amigorena
Santiago Amigorena’s love letter to paintings and the woman he loves.
There’s only one love.
Or rather, is there only one love? Do we mean the same love with reference to a painting as to another person? What’s the score with love? Santiago Amigorena wonders.
Deep in a sleeping museum, questions become statements, and statements questions. Clinging resolutely to the thread of love, Amigorena waits through sleep and dreams for the paintings to guide him and give him answers. During this night of enforced solitude – peopled by Picasso, Giacometti or perhaps Vermeer and Bataille – he gently but in great depth explores love, writing, art and the inextricable links between them.
Born in Buenos Aires in 1962, Santiago H. Amigorena is an Argentine writer, director, screenwriter and producer who lives in France. His books are published by P.O.L. His tenth novel, Le Ghetto intérieur, was a renowned success in France and was sold all over the world.
Léonor de Récondo
Rights sold to Korea (Mujintree) and Spain (Minuscula)
A dreamlike night in the private world of the great master of the Spanish School at the El Greco Museum in Toledo.
During a dreamlike night, Léonor de Recondo looks for the most original painter of the Sixteenth Century: Dominikos Theotokopoulos, known as El Greco, in his museum in Toledo.
In this overheated museum which recreates the artist’s home, her heart beats faster. While she waits to meet the artist, she plays the violin, admires his poorly lit paintings emerging from the shadows, and collates snatches of the painter’s little-known life story.
Will El Greco, who died in in 1614, be there to meet her?
Writer and violinist Léonor de Récondo has recorded some fifteen albums and published six novels, including Amours (winner of the Prix des Libraires and the Prix RTL/Lire) and Point cardinal (winner of the Prix du Roman France-Culture/Télérama).
Adel Abdessemed & Christophe Ono-dit-Biot
Rights sold to Italy (La Nave di Teseo) and Korea (Mujintree)
Two contemporary artists are on a quest for Picasso’s legendary work, Guernica. A book that celebrates art and friendship.
Adel Abdessemed and Christophe Ono-dit-Biot are invited to the Guernica exhibition at the Picasso Museum for one night. Paradoxically, the centrepiece of the exhibition is absent because it can no longer leave Spanish soil. Armed respectively with chalk and a pen, they set out to find precursors of the Guernica in the other paintings exhibited.
But the missing work soon refers the artist back to his own story in Algeria: he spent his childhood with a charcoal pencil in his hand and hasn’t stopped drawing since, but had to flee to express his indomitable freedom from any form of power, be it political or religious.
Born in Algeria, Adel Abdessemed is an artist exhibited worldwide from Moma in New York to the Pompidou Centre in Paris.
Christophe Ono-Dit-Biot is a journalist, deputy editorial director of Le Point and a prize-winning novelist. His books include Birmane (Winner of the Prix Interallié), Plonger (Grand Prix of the Académie Française), and Croire au merveilleux.
Lydie Salvayre
Rights sold to Korea (Mujintree) and Spain (El Desvelo).
With Giacometti’s statue The Walking Man as a starting point, the 2014 Goncourt winner undertakes an emotional re-exploration of her indignation and her family’s story as the daughter of a Spanish exile.
Lydie Salvayre spent a whole night alone at the Picasso Museum during its Picasso-Giacometti exhibition. Having had a lasting passion for The Walking Man (a work that she sees as the very essence of art but had only previously seen photographed in magazines), she was sure to be profoundly moved when confronted with so much beauty. And yet, seeing this “motionless, frozen but also moving body, like a waves at sea that the cold has frozen the swell” produces only mild irritation in her.
Is she illiterate in beauty? Is this sensibility passed on only among the well-to-do to reinforce their exclusivity? Unless the space is cramping the piece and robbing it of its profound message? Between the lines – as the author reveals her relationship with her father, her family of exiled Spanish communists, her obsession with humility and the denunciation anchored within every injustice – the reader gradually discovers her demanding expectations of art and her fear of death. A powerful, full-blooded read
Lydie Salvayre has written some twenty books, translated into many languages, including Pas pleurer which won the 2014 prix Goncourt (300,000 copies sold).
Kamel Daoud
Rights sold to Germany (Kiwi), Italy (La Nave di Teseo), Korea (Mujintree), the Netherlands (Ambo/Anthos), Taiwan (Utopie) and Morocco (Virgule Editions, French language).
One of the greatest Arabic writers revisits the theme of nudes, desire and women.
Kamel Daoud spent a night alone in the Picasso Museum, a singular experience that inspired him to write this essay in which he juxtaposes the image of a female nude with the painter and a Jihadist. To Picasso, a woman was a body that could be truly captured only in terms of desire and erotic associations. The nude is also like a self-portrait imprinted on his subject’s flesh. In fact, she devours him, like a cannibal. But how does a Jihadist view this painting? In his view, the woman painted by Picasso is a scandalous anticipation of dream woman who awaits him in paradise, when he dies. She therefore incites disobedience and sin.
For the former, she evokes dying of desire. For the latter, killing desire itself or dying in order to satisfy it.
Kamel Daoud was born in Algeria in 1970. He grew up in the village of Mesra near Oran. He is a columnist for Le Point, and Le Quotidien d’Oran, and a contributor to The New York Times and El País. His previous books include the bestseller The Meursault Investigation which has been published in translation across the world.