Month: October 2024

‘The Last Dream,’ short stories scattered with the seeds of Pedro Almodovar films – Waterbury Republican American

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Post date 29th October 2024

‘The Last Dream,’ short stories scattered with the seeds of Pedro Almodovar films Waterbury Republican American

Comrade Papa

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Post date 27th October 2024

Book cover for the novel COMRADE PAPA by Gauz' showing black and red text on a yellow background, with a black beret with a red star Following the death of his parents, Dabilly, a young white man, seeks a life of colonial adventure in Cote d’Ivoire. It is 1880 and Dabilly joins a beleaguered French general trying to set up trading routes into a coast as yet untouched by colonisation.

A century later, a Black boy born to communist parents in Amsterdam begins to research his family history. When he is sent to Cote d’Ivoire to visit his grandmother, he will discover traces of an ancestor he never knew existed.

GauZ’ looks across continents and centuries to create a portrait of two very different men, tracing the paths and histories that connect them and plunging us deep into the history of colonisation in the Cote d’Ivoire.

Gauz’: author of STANDING HEAVY – shortlisted for the International Booker Prize 2023

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French terribleman.com Translation Virginie Despentes

Dear Dickhead

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Post date 27th October 2024

Dear Dickhead,
I read the piece you posted on Insta. You’re like a pigeon shitting on my shoulder as you flap past. It’s shitty and unpleasant. Congratulations: you’ve had your fifteen minutes of fame! You want proof? Here I am writing to you.

Rebecca Latté is a famous actress in her fifties, perhaps past the peak of her career.

Oscar Jayack is a middle-aged, moderately successful author who, in the wake of the #MeToo movement, has been accused of sexual harassment by his former publicist-turned-feminist blogger Zoé Katana.

When Oscar insults Rebecca’s appearance on Instagram, she sends a scorching reply and the pair fall into a spiral of mutual antipathy. In back-and-forth emails, they vie for the last word, finding common ground in their experiences of addiction, assessing the changing world around them as Covid locks down Paris, and reluctantly beginning to lean on one another.

A novel of rage, irreverence and vulnerability, exploring ageing, gender, privilege, addiction and consent, Dear Dickhead is an excoriating encapsulation of our times and of the broken human beings trying to make sense of it.

Dear Dickhead by Virginie Despentes, translated from the French by Frank Wynne.

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Pedro Almodóvar Spanish terribleman.com Translation

The Last Dream

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Post date 27th October 2024

Book cover of THE LAST DREAM by Pedro Almodóvar, translated by Frank Wynne. The cover is a pink vase of flowers with a pair of black sunglassed, making it look like Almodóvar's trademark pompadour hair.

Pedro Almodóvar’s The Last Dream brings together twelve unpublished stories from his personal archive, written between the late sixties and the present day. Delivering a tantalising glimpse into Almodóvar’s world, this wildly inventive collection reflects his most intimate obsessions, as well as his daring evolution as an artist.

Ranging from ‘The Last Dream’ – a beautiful chronicle of the death of Almodóvar’s mother – to a love story between Jesus and Barabbas;, a cult film director out in search of painkillers on a bank holiday weekend, the original story behind the film Bad Education, and a gothic tale of a repentant vampire, these stories delight and surprise.

The Last Dream is a celebration of the relationship between life and art, fiction and reality from an artist unafraid to write about our most intimate moments.

Translated by Frank Wynne.

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Times Literary Supplement

Stories and vignettes from a celebrated film-maker – TLS | Times Literary Supplement

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Post date 25th October 2024

Stories and vignettes from a celebrated film-maker TLS | Times Literary Supplement

Times Literary Supplement

Stories and vignettes from a celebrated film-maker – Times Literary Supplement

Post author By Webmaster
Post date 25th October 2024

Stories and vignettes from a celebrated film-maker Times Literary Supplement

French Mathias Énard terribleman.com Translation

The Annual Banquet of the Gravediggers’ Guild

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Post date 24th October 2024

Cover image of the US edition of the novel The Annual Banquet of the Gravediggers’ Guild, by Mathias Énard, translated by Frank Wynne WINNER OF THE 2024 FRENCH-AMERICAN FOUNDATION TRANSLATION PRIZE

To research his thesis on contemporary agrarian life, anthropology student David Mazon moves from Paris to La Pierre-Saint-Christophe, a village in the marshlands of western France. Determined to capture the essence of rurality, the intrepid scholar shuttles around on his moped to interview local residents. Unbeknownst to David, in these nondescript lands, once theatres of wars and revolutions, Death leads the dance. When an existence ends, the Wheel of Life recycles its soul and hurls it back into the world as microbe, human or wild animal, sometimes in the past, sometimes in the future. Only once a year do Death and the living observe a temporary truce, during a gargantuan three-day feast where gravediggers gorge themselves on food, libations and language. Brimming with Mathias Énard’s characteristic wit and encyclopaedic brilliance, The Annual Banquet of the Gravediggers’ Guild is a riotous novel where the edges between past and present are constantly dissolving against a Rabelaisian backdrop of excess – and a paradoxically macabre paean to life’s richness.