“But what is owed to you, dear Odysseus? And what, because you consider it your due, are you responsible for? For now, you sink with the others, you suffocate, you groan and turn pale, perhaps even turquoise beyond the iris, your face and your whole body, swallowed by the waters.” Fluid, it’s the return of Ulysses to his homeland, an Odyssey then, yet another rewriting, a desire to redeploy the myth and dream of Homer’s legacy, or rather to derail the poet’s song, to integrate the grotesque, the absurd, the saturation of asses and cunts, and to restore light to the female figures who mark the path of this anti-hero. >> Details

The protagonist of this book is a French teacher who strives to keep all sorts of contradictory impulses hidden deep within him. A lover of young women and classical music, an avid reader, and a devotee of a well-tempered epicureanism, he intends to make the most of the pleasures of middle age. Yet, one spring day, the carousel of delights grinds to a halt and begins to wander aimlessly. The unfortunate man realizes that our era is singularly lacking in style and elegance. He must grapple with a sordid reality whose existence he never even suspected. Thus begins a journey that will lead him to the very depths of his being. Beyond masks and appearances, into the heart of a chaotic mess, he will ultimately discover a happiness he never dared to dream of. >> Details

There are gaps between my opinion and my intuition. Everyone will experience what I experience. Between such thoughts, there is no rest. I cannot reveal what I know. Any truth coming from me risks being attributed to pathology. Asking the impossible of words and rebelling so fiercely against aphasia that the words begin to speak. Words that know better than the speaker. Words through which it speaks, through the dazzling writing of Luminitza C. Tigirlas, ceaselessly spiral through this fiction, from the darkness of suffering to the exit, to deliverance. >> Details

Gilbert Bourson's *States and Places of Eros* is one of the author's major works, certainly in the tradition of Bataille, and also of Mallarmé. The carnival of love, of the split sex, gives birth to a renewed language, churned with abandon. A wild syntax of unparalleled evocative power. Let us emphasize, as Foucault did with Roussel, the "unforeseen" nature of creation, the randomness of sound. These portraits of Eros embrace all bodies, especially dreamt bodies, tortured, grasped from every angle. But *States and Places of Eros* is not only that. It is the search for Eros lost in the wrinkles of aging; what becomes of lost Eros, the blind voyeur of the little girl swinging on the swing? Perhaps he went to Kitezh (this book doesn't mention it, which isn't a reason not to mention it here) so as not to die, never to die, in the invisible city, the place of unfolding retreat. Who knows… Philippe Thireau >> Details

This novel is a fantasy, a plea for miracles. It begins in childhood and takes off where the narrator wished it to end: here! This novel is also fiction, and if it were possible for us to listen to its pages, then it would write itself: I wish I were a science of fiction! Syrine Krichen >> Details

One must be wary of such a narrative. Dissimulation is both necessary and exposing. In this sense, its "truth" remains as derisory as it is precious, as fallacious as it is real. Anyone can enter into this game. It's like, as some of the characters do, taking a train. In the dance of the boogie-boogies, memories, dreams, fantasies, and sorrows become entangled. Who hasn't felt the desire to shield such a private universe from the world's gaze, a universe that would escape the laws of the world? However, the nudity that the writing displays is only a trace, a smear. A disguise. An adornment. It is therefore not necessarily the body that appears. It would like to be a sucker-like mollusk, but it is only a literary octopus. One could be content with less. Jean-Paul Gavard-Perret >> Details

Anne Perrin's surprising little book, with its blunt title that leaves no room for doubt, "Tu la baises" (You Fuck Her), could be read as the erotic version of her superb collection "Lui dit-elle/Pour un absent" (She Tells Him/For an Absent Man). She meets a man who presents himself as ephemeral, a vagabond of the night who immediately goes to her head and her stomach. I won't reveal the stages of this harsh and wild sex story, which is also, and perhaps above all, a moving love story that tries to stem the tide of feelings through the rawness of its dialogue. What strikes you first in this short text is its frenetic pace, like a vertigo where reality and virtuality merge in a ceaseless dance of words—words considered dirty, but which, under the novelist's fingers, acquire a purity like a stream that, at the end of the tale, sweeps us away. Pierre Lepère >> Details

Back from the planet Julien Boutreux, and after a fragmented time spent amidst a constellation of territories and creatures with strange customs, the author's thoughts inform us about an Earth proud of its ignorance of fifty texts—the day after tomorrow—dystopias for everyone; it is read on the path of expected deaths, but standing, on the border of the most precise now. Christophe Esnault >> Details