Under option in Germany (Suhrkamp), Greece (Kapon), Italy (Einaudi), Israel (Kinneret Zmora Dvir), Macedonia (Antolog), the Netherlands (De Bezige Bij), Slovenia (Modrijan Zalozba), Spain (Alianza) and USA (Alfred Knopf).

An incomparable portrait of Romain Gary by one of the greatest Polish authors.

Although many biographies have already tried, it is impossible to impose any sort of order on Romain Gary’s unusual life. He is the only author to have received the Goncourt prize twice and was also a diplomat, screenwriter, war pilot and traveller. His first name was variously Roman, Romain, Romouchka and Émile. His birthplace, Wilno, Kursk or Moscow.

But the word “impossible” doesn’t feature in Agata Tuszyńska’s vocabulary. After a long search for the truth, she managed to go beyond many of the masks used by one of the greatest tricksters of world literature. It’s all here: from his mother who was as domineering as she was seductive, his time in Warsaw, the journey to Nice, and his two turbulent marriages, to his careers as an artist and a diplomat.

Thanks to this book, we can see how much of an illusionist Romain Gary was as he juggled facts and invention with the ultimate aim of making his own life a true work of art.

The author

Agata Tuszyńska was born in Warsaw in 1957. She is a novelist, poet and biographer whose work enjoys acclaim from her peers and international literary critics. The standout works among her many books are Singer, paysages de la mémoire (2002), Wiera Gran l’Accusée (2011) and La fiancée de Bruno Schulz (2015).

Download the material

Find out more

Click here

“A brilliant story that paints a scathing of the novelist.”

Le Figaro

Blindsided

Sylvie Kauffmann

Politics/Current Affairs - October 2023 - 450 pages

Did Europe pave the way for Putin?

On 24^th February 2022 the world fell apart: Putin invaded Ukraine and pulverised stability in Europe.

Three decades earlier, everyone was convinced that the end of the Cold War heralded a new era typified by the triumph of liberal democracy. But over the years, Vladimir Putin’s Russia in the East was growing increasingly aggressive; young democracies in central Europe fell into the trap of populism; while in the West, Donald Trump abused American democracy and threatened international order.

Why did we get it so badly wrong? What warning signs did we ignore?

Using the testimony of key players from pivotal episodes over the last twenty years, this book highlights why we failed to notice the realities of Putin’s Russia: withdrawal by America; blindness in a Germany trapped by its own history; a contempt for new democracies in eastern Europe; and the obsolete russophilia among some of the French elite, including – importantly – Sarkozy and Macron, who were incentivised by unrealistic visions of a robust security structure between Europe and Moscow.

Exactly when should we have taken a different route? Was there even one to take? Will Europe emerge weakened or strengthened by this war that has opened the continent’s eyes?

The author

Sylvie Kauffmann is a journalist at Le Monde, where she writes a weekly geopolitical column. She has been an international correspondent in Moscow, central Europe, the United States and Asia. She has also been a contributor to the New York Times and regularly writes in the “Opinion” pages of the Financial Times.

Download the material

Find out more

Click here

New Titles

Last Stop: Istanbul

Fabien Azoulay

True Story - October 2023 - 234 pages

English sample available.

Four years in Turkish prisons.

Turkey was meant to be Fabien Azoulay’s last leg of the world tour he’d started a year earlier. But when he reached the lobby of his hotel on 25^th September 2017, his nightmare began…

He asked at reception whether he’d received a parcel he’d order from Israel, and four officers arrested him for “importing drugs”. However hard he tried to explain that the contents were for his own use, he’d committed a fatal error. GBL was no longer legal in Turkey, contrary to the assurances on the site where he’d bought it.

And so began a terrifying descent into the hell of Turkish prisons made even more difficult because he is Jewish and gay. His brother Xavier, his lawyer Olivia Carole Montenot and a mysterious guardian angel spent four years moving heaven and earth, going to the highest authorities in both states, to extricate him.

Released on 2^nd November 2021, the author now opens his heart about this chilling story. The story of a mistake that cost him far too much.

The author

Fabien Azoulay was born in 1977. After studying in France, he moved to New York where he ran health spas. When he sold them, he embarked on a world tour with Turkey as its final leg. He would spend four years in prison and his case would attract huge media attention.

Download the material

Find out more

Click here

Portraits of Yana

Yoann Barbereau

Narrative Non-Fiction - October 2023 - 252 pages

Option in Spain (Ático de los Libros) and Taiwan (Yuan-Liou).

A complicated friendship, a life hampered by reality, a woman’s metamorphosis.

At the dawn of the 21^stcentury, Yana emerges from adolescence with a lock of hair artfully arranged over her left shoulder. Yoann meets her on a street under construction in southern Russia. They become close, then their paths diverge and cross again years later in a Siberian prison. They make an escape together.

She is an archaeological anthropologist who wields forgotten words, both her parents are dead, and her son is a soldier fighting on the plains of Ukraine. She can be wild when it suits her, a sorceress or a prostitute when circumstances require.

If people tell Yana she’s like a book character, she replies that she’ll always have more imagination that some poor fictional creature. In fact, she’d rather see herself in a picture painted by Ilya Repin a century before she was born. Yoann wants to sound the drums of language for her in the ceremony of his book. And to produce portraits whose flaws will capture all the different versions of Yana.

The author

Yoann Barbereau spent nearly ten years in Russia where, amongst other things, he was director of the Alliance française in Irkutsk. In 2020, Stock published his Dans les geôles de Sibérie, a first book warmly received by critics and readers alike.

Download the material

Find out more

Click here

Recent Highlights

Mao's Mountaineers

Cédric Gras

Travel Writing - March 2023 - 304 pages

Under option in Germany (Tyrol Verlag), Italy (Corbaccio), Poland (Kobiece) and Russia (Sport-Marafon Library).

Through the stories of two working-class heroes, the author transports us into the Maoist era and its delusions.

Xu Djin and Liu Lianman had never seen a mountain before, let alone attempted climbing one. But in 1960 the Communist Party elevated them to the rank of “designated volunteers” and ordered them to conquer Everest. As part of China’s blind ambition to establish the definitive subjugation of Tibet, their mission was to put a bust of Mao Zedong on the summit of the world’s highest mountain.

Against a backdrop of rural famine and widespread repression, Cédric Gras uses in-depth research to reconstruct this climb shrouded in mystery… and lies. The climate of propaganda was so powerful that public opinion in China overlooked the fact that the summit had been reached from the Nepalese side seven years earlier, by Edmund Hillary and Tensing Norgay.

Will these improvised specialists manage to escape death which threatens them with every step? Despite Xu Djin and Liu Lianman’s dedication, they end up in one of the Cultural Revolution’s re-education camps and eventually take the Chinese regime’s Himalayan secrets to their graves.

The author

Born in 1982, Cédric Gras studied geography all over the world and ran several different Alliances françaises in the post-Soviet region. He still travels the vast Eurasian expanses to fuel his writings and films. Stock published his previous books L’Hiver aux trousses (2015), Anthracite (2016), Saisons du voyage (2018) and Alpinistes de Staline (winner of the 2020 prix Albert Londres du livre).

Download the material

Find out more

Click here

“A funny and alert pen.”

Le Parisien

NARRATIVE NON-FICTION

Higlights

The Last Seat

Négar Djavadi

Narrative Non-Fiction - August 2023 - 288 pages

Longlisted for the Prix Femina Essay and the Prix Médicis

Offer in Croatia

Under option in Germany (C.H Beck)

A telling enquiry into the Iranian regime’s methods.

After several years as an expat in Canada, Niloufar makes a three-week visit to her family in Iran. She is reunited with her sisters and relatives. Enthused by this reunion, she decides to delay her trip back. She manages to change her ticket and secures the last seat on a Teheran-Kiev-Toronto flight.

Shortly before she leaves, Qasem Soleimani, head of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, is assassinated by the American army. Amid the political provocations and intimidations, fear hangs over Niloufar’s family. And justifiably: on 8^th January 2020, Ukraine International Airlines’ flight 752 crashes six minutes after take-off. Three days later, in a taut geo-political atmosphere with Iran and America threatening each other, the truth erupts: Iran launched the missile that killed the 176 passengers. Niloufar, Négar Djavadi’s cousin, was on that flight.

In this extraordinary investigation, which sheds light on the Iranian regime’s operations and their consequences for the country’s people, the author acts as a mouthpiece for the victims on that flight, her own family and her fellow Iranians. A clear and revealing account about the genesis of the current conflict in Iran.

The author

Négar Djavadi is a novelist and screenwriter. Her fisrt novel, Désorientale (2016), has been translated into a dozen of languages.

Download the material

Find out more

Click here

“A key to understand the Iranian revolution of autumn 2022.”

Elle

“It leaves you shaken, but enlightened.”

Le Figaro

“A dazzling story.”

Elle

"My Night in a Museum"

A Night at the Mekong Hotel

Jena-Luc Coatalem

Narrative Non-Fiction/Art - October 2023 - 208 pages

Guimet Museum

Option in Spain (AdN)

Deep in the Guimet Museum, the author reels between different Asian enticements, confiding us a powerful sensory odyssey.

Why the Guimet Museum, devoted to Asian arts? It was to this exotic museum with its fertile stories and secrets from distant lands that Jean-Luc Coatalem’s grandfather came at weekends in the hopes of diluting his melancholia.

The museum will always be a special place for the author too. Cocooned by treasures from the likes of China, Indochina, southern India, Tibet, Japan and Afghanistan, he’s reminded of his childhood in Singapore. When the sandstone Buddhas, winged dragons and armies of Samurais are shrouded in darkness, they seem to come to life, frightening this lone visitor.

Over the course of this account, the line between the real and the imaginary blurs and Jean-Luc Coatalem starts to lose his bearings. But he decides to play on this disorientation and is eventually reconciled with his childhood.

The author

Jean-Luc Coatalem is a writer and journalist whose most acclaimed books published by Stock are Mes pas vont ailleurs, about Victor Segalen and winner of the Prix Femina for an essay and the Prix de la Langue française; and La part du fils, shortlisted for the Prix Goncourt and the Prix Renaudot.

Download the material

Find out more

Click here

Shifting the Moon from Its Orbit

Andrea Marcolongo

Art/Narrative - September 2020 - 128 pages

Franco Maria Ricci Museum

Rights sold to Italy (Einaudi), Greece (Patakis), Spain (Taurus/Penguin Random House) and UK & US (Europa Editions).

Option in Slovenia (Athenaeum).

An intimate yet universal text about our relationship with language and the question of identity.

Andrea Marcolongo spent a a night with a waning moon completely alone on the cold floor of the Acropolis Museum in Athens. But can you really be alone when you’re watched by thousands of eyes carved in marble?

Come nightfall, it wasn’t so much the presence of these unfamiliar eyes that unsettled the author, but rather the absences. All that’s left in this museum, or any museum in Athens, are offcuts: One of Zeus’s hands, a horse’s head, a section of pediment from a temple. The West was built on fragments of marble torn from Greece with pickaxes and sent to England by Lord Elgin in the 19^th Century.

In this museum that howls in silence about this collective theft the author considered what shapes our identity and spent her night haunted by a feeling of being just another impostor: “I’m not Greek, I don’t speak modern Greek, but I still built my life and my writing on this theft.”

The author

Andrea Marcolongo was born in Crema in 1987. A Hellenist with a classics degree from Milan’s Università degli Studi, she is the author of La lingua geniale (2018), La misura eroica (2019), Alla fonte delle parole (2020) and La lezione di Enea (2021). Her books have been published in translation in 28 countries. She now lives in Paris.

Download the material

Find out more

Click here

“A subtle blend of historical reminiscences and intimate confessions.”

Le Monde des Livres

King Kasaï

Christophe Boltanski

Narrative Non-Fiction/History - January 2023 - 160 pages

Africa Museum

Rights sold to Italy (ADD Editore) and the Netherlands (Cossee).

Christophe Boltanski feels his way through the underbelly of European colonial history.

When it was opened in 1897, the Royal Museum of Central Africa near Brussels showcased Belgian colonialism in Congo. On an initiative of Léopold II, stuffed animals, geological samples, food products, and objects of ethnographic and artistic interest from Congo were unveiled. A whole African village was even recreated in the grounds, costing the lives of its seven inhabitants.

Reopened four years ago as the Africa Museum, the establishment is still struggling to come to terms with its dark past. The author Christophe Boltanski decides to spend a night in this place full of ghosts in order to learn to live with them. Entering like an explorer in an ecosystem full of ferocious wild animals, he also finds statues and other clichés snapshots of the European colonial era, including the stuffed body of King Kasaï. This elephant was hunted and shot to order for the museum and was a propaganda tool for Léopold II’s colonial project for many years.

Setting off in the footsteps of the hunter who took part in this zoological expedition and killed the elephant in 1956, the author ventures into the heart of the most violent darkness – our memories.

The author

The writer and journalist Christophe Boltanski is the author of Minerais de sang (Grasset, 2012), La Cache (Stock, 2015), which won the 2015 prix Femina and sold 120,000 copies, Le Guetteur (Stock, 2018), and Les Vies de Jacob (Stock, 2021).

Download the material

Find out more

Click here

“Bursts of pure beauty to the sordid heart.”

LH Le Magazine

“A monumental castle haunted by memory.”

Transfuge

“A humanist and poignant text.”

Télérama

When You Listen to this Song

Lola Lafon

Prix Décembre 2022

Prix Les Inrockuptibles 2022

Narrative Non-Fiction/Art - August 2022 - 256 pages

Anne Frank House

Rights sold to Brazil (Paris de Historias), Germany (Aufbau), Italy (Einaudi, preempt), the Netherlands (De Arbeiderspers, auctions), Slovakia (Inaque), Spain (Alianza, WSL, auctions) and US (Yale UP, WEL).

Option 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.”

The author

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.

Download the material

Find out more

Click here

“Written with astonishing accuracy.”

Télérama

“Lola Lafon found the right words to abolish oblivion.”

Les Echos

“A powerful book.”

Madame Figaro

The National Museum

Diane Mazloum

Narrative Non Fiction/Art - March 2022 - 176 pages

National Museum of Beirut

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.

The author

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.

Download the material

Find out more

Click here

“Fascinating.”

Elle

“A declaration of love to her broken country.”

Geo Histoire

“Diane Mazloum turns this museum into an emblem of resistance.”

L'Obs

The Titanic Ark

Éric Chevillard

Narrative Non Fiction/Art - January 2022 - 176 pages

Museum of Natural History

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.

The author

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.

Download the material

Find out more

Click here

“Both melancholic and burlesque.”

L'Obs

“We laugh, but cackle and shiver at the same time.”

Le Monde des Livres

The Sky Inside Us

Jakuta Alikavazovic

PRIX MEDICIS ESSAI 2021

Narrative Non-Fiction/Art - September 2021 - 160 pages

The Louvre Museum

Rights sold to Germany (Carl Hanser Verlag), the US (Fern Books) and Spain (Muñeca Infinita).

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?”

The author

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.

Download the material

Find out more

Click here

“The author excels in probing the mysteries of the nocturnal world, of art and of our sensitive and tenacious memory.”

Les Inrocks

“A very joyous and personal text.”

Télérama

“A shimmering narrative.”

Le Figaro Littéraire

Muses Never Sleep

Zoé Valdès

Art/Narrative - June 2021 - 224 pages

Thyssen-Bornemisza Museum

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.

The author

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.

Download the material

Find out more

Click here

“The paintings come to life thanks to the artist's genius.”

Livre Hebdo

“A text to be devoured with the eyes.”

Marie Claire

A Smell of Flowers in the Night

Leïla Slimani

OVER 100.000 COPIES SOLD

Art/Narrative - January 2021 - 120 pages

Punta Della Dogana Museum

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.

The author

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.

Download the material

Find out more

Click here

“After the overwhelming success of Chanson douce and Le Pays des autres, the novelist opens a more intimate parenthesis.”

Télérama

“Breathtaking beauty and strength.”

Les Inrockuptibles

“A divine surprise.”

Le Figaro Littéraire

Ephemeral

Bernard Chambaz

Art/Narrative - September 2020 - 128 pages

Franco Maria Ricci Museum

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 author

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).

Download the material

Find out more

Click here

“Thank you, Bernard Chambaz, for perpetuating such beauty.”

France Inter

“A marvelous storyteller.”

L'humanité Dimanche

Behind Closed Doors with Picasso

Enki Bilal

Art/Narrative - June 2020 - 96 pages, illustrated

Picasso Museum

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.

The author

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.

Download the material

Find out more

Click here

“A fantastic and sensual night.”

Le Monde des Livres

“A literary gem.”

Le Figaro Littéraire

“A brilliant writing.”

Le Temps

There Is Only One Love

Santiago H. Amigorena

Art/Narrative - March 2020 - 128 pages

Picasso Museum

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.

The author

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.

Download the material

Find out more

Click here

“What a wonderful book!”

Le Point

“Splendid!”

Elle

“A magnificent love letter.”

Madame Figaro

A Lesson from the Shadows

Léonor de Récondo

Art/Narrative - January 2020 - 160 pages

El Greco Museum

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?

The author

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).

Download the material

Find out more

Click here

“Only few people have written so sensitively about El Greco.”

Le Figaro Littéraire

“Léonor de Récondo is a genuine storyteller.”

Libération

“Exhilarating.”

Elle

Spanish Night

Adel Abdessemed & Christophe Ono-dit-Biot

Art/Narrative - October 2019 - 224 pages, 23 illustrations

Picasso Museum

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.

The authors

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.

Download the material

Find out more

Click here

“It is a book on creative madness, on the encounter of words and images, and also on friendship.”

Le Figaro

“An exhilarating book.”

Libération

“Spanish Night is an ode to liberty, to rebellion.”

Walk on till the Evening

Lydie Salvayre

Art/Narrative - April 2019 - 224 pages

Picasso Museum

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

The author

Lydie Salvayre has written some twenty books, translated into many languages, including Pas pleurer which won the 2014 prix Goncourt (300,000 copies sold).

Download the material

Find out more

Click here

“A book of rare power.”

François Busnel La Grande Librairie

“A text of unusual strength and intellectual honesty.”

Le JDD

“An aesthetic, cultural and social lesson given with hothead generosity.”

Le Soir

The Painter Devouring the Female Nude

Kamel Daoud

Art/Narrative - October 2018 - 220 pages

Picasso Museum

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.

The author

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.

Download the material

Find out more

Click here

“The writer had never revealed so much about himself.”

Le Figaro Littéraire

“A sharp-edged, sparking reverie about women and desire.”

Le Point

“A seductive and subversive text which examines our relationship to Art and the body from two different sides of the Mediterranean.”

Leila Slimani, L'Obs

Title*
Last name*
First name*
Company*
Email address*
Country*

Pourquoi collectons-nous vos données ?

Les données que vous consentez à transmettre à HACHETTE LIVRE, destinataire et responsable de leur traitement (HACHETTE LIVRE - DPO – 58 rue Jean Bleuzen – 92170 Vanves), sont hébergées conformément au dispositif EU-U.S. Privacy Shield, permettent la gestion de votre abonnement, et sont conservées pour sa seule durée. Si vous êtes déjà abonné auprès d’autres éditeurs du groupe, elles seront partagées avec ces derniers. Vous pouvez demander l’accès, la rectification, la suppression et la portabilité de vos données ici , définir des directives post mortem les concernant ou vous adresser à une autorité de contrôle. Vous pouvez retirer votre consentement au traitement de ces données, ce qui mettra fin à votre abonnement.
Les informations que nous collectons nous permettront de vous proposer des contenus personnalisés et adaptés en fonction de votre profil.
Tout savoir sur les données personnelles