- THE PAINTER DEVOURING THE FEMALE NUDE, Kamel Daoud
- WALK ON TILL THE EVENING, Lydie Salvayre
- SPANISH NIGHT, Adel Abdessemed & Christophe Ono-dit-Biot
- A LESSON FROM THE SHADOWS, Léonor de Récondo
- THERE IS ONLY ONE LOVE, Santiago H. Amigorena
- BEHIND CLOSED DOORS WITH PICASSO, Enki Bilal
- EPHEMERAL, Bernard Chambaz
- A SMELL OF FLOWERS IN THE NIGHT, Leïla Slimani
- MUSES NEVER SLEEP, Zoé Valdès
- THE SKY INSIDE US, Jakuta Alikavazovic
- SAINT PHALLE, RISING INTO CHILDHOOD, Gwenaëlle Aubry
- AFTER LITERATURE, Alain Finkielkraut
- WE WERE NEVER CHILDREN, Berthe Badehi & Frédéric Métézeau
- MY FALLEN KING, Laurence Debray
- REPAIRING WATER, Olivier Rey
- SAVING OUR PLANET, Bertrand Piccard
Imagine spending one night in a museum
- THE PAINTER DEVOURING THE FEMALE NUDE, Kamel Daoud
- WALK ON TILL THE EVENING, Lydie Salvayre
- SPANISH NIGHT, Adel Abdessemed & Christophe Ono-dit-Biot
- A LESSON FROM THE SHADOWS, Léonor de Récondo
- THERE IS ONLY ONE LOVE, Santiago H. Amigorena
- BEHIND CLOSED DOORS WITH PICASSO, Enki Bilal
- EPHEMERAL, Bernard Chambaz
- A SMELL OF FLOWERS IN THE NIGHT, Leïla Slimani
- MUSES NEVER SLEEP, Zoé Valdes
- THE SKY INSIDE US, Jakuta Alikavazovic
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Dear friends,
We are delighted to unveil our Fall 2021 Non Fiction Rights List!
Should you be interested in receiving material, do not hesitate to contact us.
This Fall, we will be:
- at the Frankfurt Book Fair
- at the Sharjah Book Fair
- visiting clients in Italy and Finland
- holding virtual meetings at your convenience
We very much look forward to reconnecting with you all.
The Rights Team
Women's Portraits
Saint-Phalle. Rising Into Childhood
Gwenaëlle Aubry
Narrative Non-Fiction/Art - September 2021 - 287 pages
Shortlisted for the Prix Renaudot-Essay and longlisted for the Prix Médicis-Essay
An immersion in the cruel and phantasmagorical world of Niki de Saint Phalle.
“They talk about ‘falling into childhood’ like falling in love, but Saint Phalle didn’t fall, she rose up into childhood. As if inflating metal she turned her weighty inheritance into something light”.
Niki de Saint Phalle was raped by her father when she was eleven and was emotionally abused by her mother. She emerged victorious from this initiatory damage. She started out with provocative pieces, creating her Shooting Paintings, bloodied Birthing Women and ashen Brides. Her greatest work was her Tarot Garden, which she built from scratch over a 20-year period, sculpting Strength, The Emperor, The Sun, The World… She even lived there, sleeping inside The Empress. Rediscovering Saint Phalle means setting out and exploring this Garden, this other-worldly place, where the adult erases the distance from her childhood, where the artist expresses herself with her whole body, the full intensity of her gaze.
Gwenaëlle Aubry takes us on a walk across this magical garden, invites us to play with the tarot cards that the artist left behind. In this dreamlike text, Gwenaëlle Aubry reawakens Niki de Saint Phalle’s creative powers.
The author
The novelist and philosopher Gwenaëlle Aubry has published some fifteen books, including Personne, which won the 2009 Prix Femina. Her books have been translated into many languages.
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Click hereEssays
After Literature
Alain Finkielkraut
Philosophy/literature - September 2021 - 160 pages
Rights sold to Denmark (U Press) and Germany (Langen Müller)
Fiction is no longer the prerogative of literature. It has insinuated itself into our perception of reality and has distorted it: we have entered the post-literature age.
“The time when a literary vision of the world had a place in the world seems well and truly over. Not that inspiration has suddenly dried up forever. Real books are still written, but they don’t make their mark. They’re addressed to readers who, before even stepping into life, refuse to let themselves be narrated by it and view History and more minor stories with a regal understanding conferred by their complete victory over prejudice. The ransom for this overconfidence is that the false is taking possession of life.
Not only does the present reign unchallenged but it doesn’t see itself as it truly is. Having told so many stories, it’s now been completely lost itself. The fantasy scenarios that it churns out serve as its literature. Oversimplified neo-feminism, over-the-top antiracism, a neglect of beauty thanks to all-powerful technology and official ecology, and a striking denial of the possible outcomes throughout the pandemic: lies are taking root, ugliness is colonising the world, art is losing the battle.
It’s heart-breaking.”
Alain Finkielkraut
The author
Professor emeritus at the École Polytechnique and member of the Académie française, Alain Finkielkraut is best known as the author of Un cœur intelligent (2009), L’Identité malheureuse (2013), La Seule Exactitude (2015), À la première personne (2019), and, co-written with Élisabeth de Fontenay, En terrain miné (2017). For thirty years he has chaired the show Répliques for France Culture, and the debates have fuelled several collections, including Des animaux et des hommes (2018).
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Click hereWWII
We Were Never Children
Berthe Badehi & Frédéric Métézeau
True Story/WWII - October 2021 - 180 pages
The rare and moving true story of a child who had to hide during the Holocaust.
1941. Berthe Badehi is 9 years old. Because she is Jewish, she must leave behind Lyon and her parents to seek hiding in a village in Savoie. All she has in her pockets is a fake baptism certificate, made by a vicar friend of her father’s. She finds refuge in a farm held by a woman who protect her at all costs.
After this childhood in hiding, Berthe goes back to Lyon to reunite with her parents. It’s the post-war period, the strange return to “normalcy”, the waiting for those who will never come back from the camps. And then love, marriage, and the departure for Israel. A new life, a new country, new wars too.
An extraordinary and hope-filled account of her life written in the first person, with the participation of Frédéric Métézeau.
The authors
Berthe Badehi was born in France in 1932. She is a survivor of the Holocaust and moved to Jerusalem after the war. She has been working at the Yad Vashem memorial for 25 years, to keep the memory of the genocide alive. At 89 years old, she hopes to keep on telling her story for many more years. She speaks many languages (French, Hebrew, Yiddish and German).
Frédéric Métézeau is the permanent correspondent of Radio France in Jerusalem. He covers the news in Israel, Palestine, Egypt and Jordan. As an author, editorialist and international correspondent, he was previously in charge of the political department of France Culture and afterwards France Inter in Paris.
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Click hereContemporary History
My Fallen King
Laurence Debray
Contemporary History - September 2021 - Approx. 200 pages
Daughter of Marxist intellectuals, Laurence Debray is fascinated by Juan Carlos I of Spain and even wrote his biography in 2013. What can unite a “a daughter of revolutionaries” and a king?
After spending her teenage years in Spain, Laurence Debray became interested in Juan Carlos I in the framework of her research as a historian. She wrote his biography and then interviewed him the day before his abdication, in 2014, for a televised documentary. Since then, she has stayed in touch with him and followed the twists and turns of his life story. She even visited him in Abu Dhabi in 2021, where he fled after various scandals ruined his reputation in Spain and made him too embarrassing a father for King Felipe VI.
This is the story of their unusual relationship.
The author
Born in 1976 to a Venezuelan mother and a French father, Laurence Debray grew up in France and Spain. She worked in finance before going back to Contemporary History and publishing a biography, Juan Carlos of Spain, in 2013. In 2017, Stock published her autobiographical novel Daughter of Revolutionaries (Political Book Prize, Députés Prize, France Culture students’ Prize). For this book, she was exceptionally granted the authorization to meet Juan Carlos in his exile in Abu Dhabi.
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Click hereOur Planet
Repairing Water
Olivier Rey
Philosophy - October 2021 - Approx. 200 pages
The philosopher and mathematician Olivier Rey delivers rigorous criticism of science and signs his most sensitive essay yet.
Who does not know what water is? Everyone has an intimate and immediate knowledge of it. How, then, did we end up summing up this primary element with the abstract chemical formula H2O?
Since the advent of modern science shook our perception of the world, something as simple as water has become an issue of chemical analysis and resource management. Yet, has science kept its promise to reveal the world in all its truth? Has it not, on the contrary, driven us away from it?
In this brilliant essay, Olivier Rey seeks to rediscover the sensitivity to water that we have lost along the way. From Leonardo da Vinci to Bachelard and Ponge by way of Courbet, he follows the stream of water to return its dignity and allow us to feel what cannot be reduced to a formula: the poignant sensuality of being part of this world.
The author
Olivier Rey is a mathematician and philosopher. He is namely the author of Une question de taille (Stock, 2014, Prix Bristol des Lumière), Quand le monde s’est fait nombre (Stock, 2016) and Leurres et malheurs du transhumanisme (Desclée de Brouwer, 2019, Prix Jacques Ellul).
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Click hereRealistic
Bertrand Piccard
Ecology - October 2021 - 180 pages
No, saving our planet does not have to rhyme with self-flagellation. Replacing what pollutes by what protects: that is the market of the future.
No, protecting nature does not necessarily come down to an accumulation of sacrifices. Let’s inverse the trend and support a contrary logic. Let’s once and for all forget the dead-end that is promised to us – with delusional stubbornness – by the supporters of economic degrowth.
It is a losing battle to assume that we can feed on people’s goodwill while depriving them of comfort, mobility, or a decent standard of living. But solutions do exist. The Solar Impulse Foundation delivers 1000 solutions that are all efficient, tested and certified. They prove not only that virtuous economic growth is possible, but that it is also capable of creating jobs and wealth.
So let’s not be pessimistic, not even optimistic: let’s just be realistic!
The author
A psychiatrist and adventurer, Bertrand Piccard is the first man to have gone around the world in a hot air balloon (1999) and in a solar airplane (2015-2016). He is the president of the Solar Impulse Foundation, whose mission is the find solutions to save the environment. He has already published two best-sellers at Stock: Changer d’altitude (2014) and, in collaboration with André Broschberg, Objectif soleil (2017).
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Click hereCinema
Chabrol
Antoine de Baecque
Film Studies/Biography - September 2021 - 736 pages
Nicknamed “The French Hitchcock”, he was one of the key directors of the French New Wave.
He’s a mythical figure in French film who leaves behind chilling psychological thrillers that are constantly being rediscovered on a profusion of new platforms. His masterpieces include Merci pour le chocolat, La cérémonie and Le Boucher.
But Claude Chabrol is both famous and unknown. Until his death in 2010, he was a public figure for half a century: a bon vivant who was by turns a foodie, cheerful and sarcastic. He drew in nearly fifty million filmgoers. And yet his prolific output – fifty-seven films and twenty-three telefilms – was never awarded a César award or a prize at the Cannes Film Festival.
So we urgently need to rediscover Chabrol!
The author
Antoine de Baecque is a historian and a professor at the prestigious École normale supérieure. He has worked as editor in chief for Cahiers du cinéma and has published essays and novels as well as biographies of pioneers of the New Wave: Truffaut, Godard and Rohmer. These have been translated worldwide, including into English. This volume on Chabrol continues his commitment to the history of cinema.
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Click here"My Night in a Museum" Collection
An author is invited to spend a whole night in a museum and writes afterward a book on his/her experience.
The Painter Devouring the Female Nude
Kamel Daoud
Art/Essay - October 2018 - 220 pages
Picasso Museum
Rights sold to Germany (Kiwi), Italy (La Nave di Teseo), Korea (Mujintree), the Netherlands (Ambo/Anthos) and Taiwan (Utopie)
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.
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Click hereWalk on till the Evening
Lydie Salvayre
Art/Narrative - April 2019 - 220 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).
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Click hereSpanish Night
Adel Abdessemed & Christophe Ono-dit-Biot
Art/Narrative - October 2019 - 224 pages, 23 illustrations
Picasso Museum
Rights sold to 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.
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Click hereA Lesson from the Shadows
Léonor de Récondo
Art/Narrative - January 2020 - 160 pages
El Greco Museum
Rights sold to Korea (Mujintree)
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).
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Click hereThere 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.
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Click hereBehind Closed Doors With Picasso
Enki Bilal
Art/Narrative - June 2020 - 96 pages, illustrated
Picasso Museum
Rights sold to Poland (Esperons-Ostrogi).
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.
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Click hereEphemeral
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).
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Click hereA Smell of Flowers in the Night
Leïla Slimani
Art/Narrative - January 2021 - 120 pages
Punta Della Dogana Museum
Over 85.000 copies sold/ Total print-run: 110.000 copies (15 reprints).
Rights sold to Germany (Luchterhand), 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.
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Click hereMuses 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.
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Click hereThe Sky Inside Us
Jakuta Alikavazovic
Narrative Non-Fiction/Art - September 2021 - 160 pages
The Louvre Museum
Prix Médicis-Essay 2021
Longlisted for the Prix Décembre and the Prix Wepler
Rights sold to Germany (Carl Hanser Verlag)
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.
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