Small press focus: LES FUGITIVES
This small press has published some of our favourite books!
Les Fugitives champions the publication in English of both new and established voices from the Francophone literary world, especially female authors who have never before been published in English. Working with a variety of internationally acclaimed and new translators, Les Fugitives brings a new kind of writing to Anglophone readers: literary works defying categorisation, texts that tell a certain kind of ‘fugitive’ story. Les Fugitives is an independent literary press based in London, founded in 2014 by French translator Cécile Menon.
To encourage you to discover these excellent books, use the code FUGIT when checking out for a 10% discount (offer expires 22.6.23).
Click through to find out more about the books:
Blue Self-Portrait by Noémi Lefebvre (translated by Sophie Lewis): A woman’s feelings of shame and failure desplay Lefebvre’s exquisite fugue-like sentences. >>Read Thomas’s review.
Poetics of Work by Noémi Lefebvre (translated by Sophie Lewis): The narrator stuggles to find a way to live, overhwelmed by their father and by a society slipping towards fascim. >>Read Thomas’s review.
Chicanes by Clara Schulmann: As she collects them for an essay she is writing, the author becomes the channel for many women’s voices, which affect her in unexpected ways. >>Read Stella’s review. >>Find out more.
Translation as Transhumance by Mireille Gansel (translated by Ros Schwartz): A humanist meditation on the art of translation. >>Read Thomas’s review.
We Still Have the Telephone by Erica van Horn: A wonderfully well-observed mosaic of short pieces on the author’s mother, evoking the slippage of the remembered world from that lived in old age.
No.91/92: Notes on a Paris Commute by Laurn Elkin: Ordinary and infraordinary observations made on a repeated bus route test the relationship between private and shared experience. >>Read Thomas’s review.
Now, Now, Louison by Jean Frémon (translated by Cole Swensen): A second-person ventriloquised autobiographical fiction ‘by’ the artist Louis Bourgeois. >>Read our reviews.
Nativity by Jean Frémon (translated by Cole Swensen), drawings by Louise Bourgeois: A conseration of flesh and anatomy in paintings of the infant Jesus, with five radical drawings by Bourgeois.
Portrait Tales by Jean Frémon (translated by John Taylor): Why do we have an urge to parry death with images?
Selfies by Sylvie Weil (translated by Ros Schwartz): Thirteen exquisite pieces of memoir springing from looking at self-portraits by women. >>Read Thomas’s review.
This Tilting World by Colette Fellous (translated by Sophie Lewis): Deciding to leave Tunisia for good, Fellous looks back at her childhood in the Jewish community of Tunis in the context of the death of a friend and a terrorist attack. >>Read Thomas’s review.
Suite for Barbara Loden by Nathalie Léger (translated by Natasha Lehrer and Cécile Menon): A searing exploration of women’s agency and passivity, centred on the remarkable film Wanda. >>Read Thomas’s review.
The White Dress by Nathalie Léger (translated by Natasha Lehrer): The fate of the artist Pippa Bacca becomes the centre of an exploration of the relationship between art and violence. >>Read Thomas’s review.
Exposition by Nathalie Léger (translated by Amanda DeMarco): A meditation on the half-truths of portrait photography, and the possibilities of (self)(mis)representation. >>Read Thomas’s review.
The Fool, And other moral tales by Anne Serre (translated by Mark Hutchinson): Four astounding stories about the ‘perils’ of desire.
The Governesses by Anne Serre (translated by Mark Hutchinson): A dreamlike tale of desire, power and ambivalence.
Eastbound by Maylis de Kerangal (translated by Jessica Moore): A desperate Russian conscript hopes a chance encounter with an older French woman on the Trans-Siberian Railway will offer him a line of flight.
Eve Out of Her Ruins by Ananda Devi (translated by Jeffrey Zuckerman): Four young people react against their hazardous future in a Mauritian slum (young adults’ edition).>>Read Thomas’s review.
The Living Days by Ananda Devi (translated by Jeffrey Zuckerman): An elderly white woman and a British-Jamaican boy find their relationship threatened by white supremacy, desperation and class conflict on the streets of London.
Down With the Poor! by Sumona Sinha (translated by Teresa Lavender Fagan): A woman (herself an immigrant) tries to understand the rage that led her to attack a refugee.
May the Tigris Grieve for You by Emilienne Malfatto (translated by Lorna Scott Fox): A poetic account of war, loss, tradition and the oppression of women in rural Iraq.
The Child Who by Jeanne Bonameur (tranlsted by Bill Johnston): A child loves to wander a forest where his mother may have disappeared. His father is speechless with anger; his grandmother is concealing her own story.
Little Dancer, Aged Fourteen by Camille Laurens (translated by Willard Wood): An exploration of the life of the model for the famous work by Degas, revealing the misogyny and hypocrisy of their time (and ours).
Absence by Lucie Paye (translated by Natasha Lehrer): A painter obsessively attempts to resolve a figure who keeps appearing under his brush, and a woman adresses letters to an absent loved on.
A Respectable Occupation by Julia Kernion (translated by Ruth Diver): A twining of French and English literary traditions in this account of the writer’s childhood.