Jonathan Littell received the Prix Goncourt for his 2006 novel The Kindly Ones, called by Time magazine "unmistakably the work of a profoundly gifted writer." A former worker for Action Against Hunger in Bosnia, Sierra Leone, the Congo, and Afghanistan, he is the author of more than ten works in French. He lives in Paris.
Charlotte Mandell is the translator of numerous
award-winning works of innovative French literature, among them The
Kindly Ones, Zone by Mathias Enard, Sherlock Holmes Was Wrong by
Pierre Bayard, and works by Proust, Blanchot, and Jacques Rancière.
She lives in New York City.
"Four nightmarish novellas . . . The writing is sinuous and
propulsive; disturbing images are rendered with icy, swift
precision." -- The New Yorker "These stories lead the reader on a
race through the abyss . . ." -- Paul La Farge, author of Luminous
Airplanes "Here genitalia prove as amorphous as the desires they
incite, and slaughter leaves only casual impressions upon its
casualties. . . . As much as we loathe these atrocity exhibits, we
turn every knob. Littell has organized the mechanisms, but our
desire is what fuels the machine." -- BOMB "The stories evoke the
fin-de-siècle sensibility of Baudelaire or Schnitzler."
-- Publishers Weekly "A living, breathing, sublime collection of
novellas that ignite the reader's imagination and entices their
most base of desires to grab control." -- Typographical Era "The
four novellas that comprise this collection deal with a wealth of
themes, but the ultimate one is of unachieved desire and the
isolating mania it spawns. . . . 'Surrealistic' doesn't fully
capture the formal breed of this collection." -- HTMLGIANT
"Littell's stories are structurally elegant . . . The Fata Morgana
Books is a frequently thought-provoking [read]." -- Foreword
Reviews "A gorgeous tour through a world of human excess and
futility . . . exhilarating." -- Numéro Cinq
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