Publisher's Synopsis
The literary counterparts to Zidane and Desailly, to Air and Daft Punk, in an exciting collection of the fifteen best new writers in France under 40.
Ah, la belle France - Brie and baguettes, cafes and calvados, Sartre and Satie, easy existentialism and casual infidelity, Matisse and merlot, chateaux and chic little poodles… Well, yes, certainly, that's still part of what France is about, but it's by no means the whole story any more. Rather as Britain did in the 1980s, France has in the 1990s seemingly begun to accept and analyse, rather than resist and deny, the irrefutable fact that it is now a bubbling bouillabaisse of cultures, attitudes, faiths, languages and traditions - the increasing confidence of the beurs and all the children of immigrants has begun to make its mark culturally. For the first time since, ooh, the beginning of time, France now puts out some credibly cool and interesting pop music; its World Cup-winning national football team now has more exotically surnamed, fantastically loose-limbed players than any other; its film directors are getting less cerebral and more visceral (viz Kassovitz's La Haine), all the great Theoreticians have been toppled from their pedestals and a political philosopher is no longer the only thing any self-respecting bright young French thing yearns to be… And all this alteration is, of course, being reflected and refracted in its literature, which - like its music - has woken from decades of barren formalism and joyless experimentalism to new life, new energy and new subjects. In short, the friendly enemy across La Manche is not the creature it was, and it's time to take stock of that in literary terms.
So, here's the very crème de la crème of the rising young stars of French literature, from the brutal post-feminism of Virginie Despentes via the brutally perpendicular tendencies of Michel Houllebecq to the noir thrills of Tonino Benacquista. This is a bulletin direct from the literary barricades: these are the hottest French writers now at work , but as yet unknown and unpublished in English.
Twenty-first century French literature: a sneak preview
