If you want to use, in any form, a translation from one of the books published by LES EDITIONS AUX FORGES DE VULCAIN, you must secure a written translation from us. Please direct you inquiry to this email address: editeur@auxforgesdevulcain.fr 

Please find below our complete Foreign Rights catalogue (March 2016): fiction, non-fiction and art.

FICTION

THE TALE OF THE LOSER WHO BECAME A GURU
Author: Romain Ternaux
Genre: Satire
Keywords: satire, comedy, trash, sexually explicit content
Link to original page
Summary:

In this burlesque farce, a nameless antihero is presented as the archetype of the modern loser whom society has defeated: alcoholic, unemployed, and utterly deprived of any sex and love life whatsoever.

Following his parents’ advice, he accepts a job as a handyman in a wealthy foundation that turns out to be a cult. After a series of misunderstandings, he becomes the leader of this cult, mainly frequented by a public of rich bourgeois erotomaniacs. However, this subversive inversion of values and positions does not make our hero feel any better: once at the top of the social and sexual pyramid, he discovers that he doesn’t want to be a master any more than he wanted to be a slave.

In this falsely innocent tale fraught with trash humor and extravagant scenes, Romain Ternaux carries out a methodical destruction of society in all its aspects: family, work, love… An adventure written like a surrealisitc vaudeville that entraps both the antihero and his reader in a vertiginous climb from which no one will survive.

A blend of Gaston Lagaffe, the Deschiens and the beautiful losers typical of a certain type of American literature (Bukowski and Hunter S. Thompson, for instance), The tale of the loser who became a guru is a giant outburst of laughter powerful enough to shatter our contradictions and false pretenses.

 

WE ALL ARE INNOCENT
Author: Cathy Jurado-Lécina
Genre: Drama.
Keywords: drama, tragedy, madness, art brut.
Link to original page.

Winner of numerous awards. 
Summary:

Les Passereaux, May 1958. Jean is a young peasant who likes inventing stories and dreams of becoming a school-teacher and moving to the city. He longs for new horizons, but one does not get to choose one’s life, at Les Passereaux, where everybody seems dead set on preventing Jeannot from fulfilling his dreams: his father, who forbids him to leave the farm, Odette’s family, who is against their marriage… Until he is drafted into the French army and sent to fight the Algerian war, which will not leave him unscarred. When he returns home, Jean isolates himself and gradually slips into madness.

Based on a true story, We all are innocent tells the harrowing story of a man plagued by tragedy and, through his eyes, the fate of a family containing the germs of its own doom. Are we all innocent? Up to his very last breath, Jean tries with all his might to let out the muffled scream he has never ceased carrying within himself.

 

AND THEN I HID
Author: Geoffrey Lachassagne.
Genre: Drama.
Keywords: drama, family, childhood, teenage years.
Link to original page.
Summary:

Titi, a boy of fourteen, and Jérémie, his seven-year-old brother, live at their grandmother’s in a small town in Corrèze, France. When their older brother Jules left several years earlier, he promised Titi he would come back and get him. Now, that day has arrived at last. While Titi and his friends wander around the covered market and artificial lake waiting for Jules to show up, Jérémie is left alone in his own imaginary world and – whenever his grandmother is not reading the Bible to him – spends his days battling ceaselessly against Indians and miscreants. In a course of three days, the wait for the prodigal brother – along with Titi’s frustration, Jérémie’s clumsiness and a series of unexpected encounters – prompts the two brothers to turn the town into an amazing adventureland.

And then I hid is a novel at once rough and poetic that justly reproduces the everyday speech and imaginary worlds of childhood and adolescence. Titi and Jérémie appear as the remote Correzian heirs of Huckleberry Finn and Holden Caulfield.

 

A CHRONICLE OF ASHEN DAYS
Author: Louise Caron
Genre: Drama.
Keywords: Irak war, love story, army, resistance, invasion, Jihad.
Link to original page.
Summary:

Baghdad, 2007. Naïm is a young antiwar artist whose father is killed in an American intervention. Overtaken by grief and hatred, the young man joins an armed band. His girlfriend Sohrab unsuccessfully tries to stop him and ends up following him in his quest for revenge. However, Naïm’s budding doubts keep growing as Sohrab reminds him of the absurdity of the situation. On the other side of the conflict, Niko Barnes, an American soldier, is having second thoughts about his commitments. He fills his notebooks with thoughts, memories, doubts regarding his hierarchy and guilt towards Iraqis.

Naïm and Niko’s paths eventually cross, after a series of random events all senseless and brutal, which appear as the uncontrollable offsprings of an unjust and inhuman war. What is really an enemy? And when does the spiral of revenge end?

 

 

THE DAY IT ALL CAVED IN
Author: Michèle Astrud
Genre: Drama
Keywords: crime, teenage years, blidungsroman, noir
Link to original page
Summary:

« The place where he fell became an abyss. A hole of dark water that soaks up all light. The center of my memory. The waters froth and devastate the sand-banks. Tomorrow, I shall come back and dive here, at this very spot. Tomorrow… by daylight. »

A young man returns home, on the banks of the river where he killed his best friend, five years earlier. In a state of fascination, he rediscovers the city where he grew up, at once strange and familiar, and remembers that tormented friendship, until the fatal event that brought it to an end.

The day it all caved in is a chiaroscuro-filled tale in which human passions are seen reflected in nature, an intense and fervent novel that sweeps away the reader until its resolution and final note of appeasement.

 

VAGABONDING PROMETHEUS
Author: Alexis David-Marie
Genre: Historic drama
Keywords: history, religion, adventure
Link to original page
Summary:

1674. Paul, a student seeking redemption is sent looking for Larpenteur, a theologian turned author of ungodly pamphlets. Far from the splendors of Versailles, both men start out on a journey through the mud and the snow, in the company of occasional fellow travelers. From one mishap to the next, a friendship is forged between the two wanderers, as they travel through France and the Holy Empire. Following the example of Prometheus, they must transcend their suffering and burn their certainties if they hope to bring back the light from their trials and tribulations.

Vagabonding Prometheus is a picaresque novel that questions the necessity and difficulty of thinking for oneself, in the face of all habits, majorities, and despite the heaviness of the world – the hardest task being that of rebuilding on the ashes of the beliefs we have decided to burn.

 

 

MEN WHO DRINK
Author: François Szabowski
Genre: Comedy
Keywords: dark humour, satire
Link to original page
Summary:

François Chabeuf is a naive and inexperienced novice in the working world, with only his stupidity and hopeless bad faith as weapons. He is determined to keep his job at all costs and unscrupulously manipulates his entourage as a means to an end. However, his clumsiness triggers off a series of incidents each more extraordinary than the next. Successively kidnapper, seducer, poet and parasite, François spares no effort and displays incomparable cunning and dexterity in his trials and tribulations that lead him from one catastrophe to the next.

Men who drink, with its devastating black humor, is the joyful portrait of an antihero and an exhilarating satire of human relationships all rolled into one.

 

 

MEN WHO DRINK II
Author: François Szabowski
Genre: Comedy
Keywords: dark humour, satire
Link to original page
Summary:

François Chabeuf is a young man with an innate talent for scheming and a rock-solid case of bad faith. His one and only ambition is that of becoming a kept man. He succeeds in seducing a retired woman and expertly manipulates her into driving her husband out of the house so he can move in with her. However, this new cohabitation turns out to be more difficult than anticipated. François sinks into downright misery until he meets Vera, a drifting young Russian woman with vodka-blue eyes and misleading secrets. This encounter changes his life: with a hitherto unexpected sense of heroism, François embarks on an adventurous quest.

François Chabeuf, the mythomaniac anti-hero of Men who drink, reaches a grandiose dimension in this epic and frantically euphoric sequel, a part whodunit, part love story novel seeped in vitriolic humor.

 

 
YOU MUST BELIEVE IN YOUR CHANCES
Author: François Szabowski
Genre: Comedy
Keywords: dark humour, satire
Link to original page
Summary:

Jean Martinez is a happy man. He works as a high-school teacher in a provincial town and lives in a nice house. He has a sweet wife, well-behaved children and an established – although small – reputation as a local writer, until one day, his Parisian publisher comes up with an extravagant project: a pornographic tale set in a concentration camp. Bewitched, bothered, bewildered, Martinez begins to have doubts about the nature of his everyday happiness and starts dreaming of a different life, a life of literary glory and sentimental conquests. He gradually loses track of himself, as the reality of his simple, everyday happiness soon wanes in the face of that other lifestyle that perhaps awaits him.

As Jean Martinez gets tossed around between his pipe dreams and plain, ordinary existence, his story sheds light on our own existential doubts. A coldly humorous and cruelly ironical novel, You have to believe in your chances deals with the state of confusion that may become our own, whenever we start to wonder if we are living the life we ought to live.

 

 

MAJORETTES REALLY KNOW HOW TO TALK ABOUT LOVE
Author: François Szabowski
Genre: Comedy
Keywords: dark humour, satire
Link to original page
Summary:

Benoît Bonvin, a young, dynamic exectutive – or the exact opposite – leaves Paris with a hangover to attend a family luncheon in the quiet town of Grandville. However, the party meticulously organized by Benoît’s mother is suddenly jeopardized when his sister Nathalie locks herself up in her room following a squabble and refuses to come out. This causes long-forgotten stories to resurface, and the atmosphere becomes more and more heavy as dishes and bottles – especially bottles – keep coming in… Soon, the situation is out of control. As the novel progresses, the hypocrisy, vices, mental blocks and unspoken truths gradually appear among this group of strangers conventionally known as a family.

 

 

GEORGES-GUY LAMOTTE
Author: Fernand Bloch-Ladurie
Genre: spoof
Keywords: dark humour, satire, politics
Link to original page
Summary:

Every observer agrees on that point: Georges-Guy Lamotte (1929-2007) is an essential character of the fifth Republic. A Resistance fighter from the outset, he subsequently became parliamentary attaché for Guy Mollet, François Mitterand’s éminence grise, and was finally elected Senator… In short, he took part in every battle for progress led by the left in the second half of the 20th century.

He nevertheless remains an all too little-known figure on the French political and intellectual scene. For who today has ever heard of Georges-Guy Lamotte? No one. And why has our national memory so utterly disowned him? Is it because of his visionary insights that led him, in the early 1980s, to present a major reworking of socialist thought combining the ideas of Karl Marx and Margaret Thatcher? Is it on account of his tumultuous life? His advocacy of free love in the Limousin? His ambiguous posture in May 1968? His mental health problems? His extraordinary escape to Portugal?

Fernand Bloch-Ladurie has resolved to fathom the Lamotte mystery in a politically incorrect biography that retraces fifty years of socialism and French history, and attempts to rehabilitate the memory of a man whom a certain conformist and narrow-minded Left has discarded.

 

 

A SETBACK
Author: Charles Marie
Genre: Crime story
Keywords: fantastic, crime, detective story, surreal
Link to original page
Summary:

A Setback relates the poetic and crepuscular adventures of Melvin Epineuse, a dandy by vocation and private eye out of necessity. Melvin is hired by a strange secret society to find Bruno Bar, one of his eccentric friends whose main activity consists in baptizing anticlerical activists by force. His investigation leads him from Paris to Florence, from Florence to Budapest… He never sets foot in an airplane as he only travels by train, never eats anything but the most refined dishes, drink anything but the noblest beverages. He meets women, explores ancient catacombs, gets shot at without shooting back and tries to bring his enemies down with improvised aphorisms.

 

 

FEMININE BEAUTY AND THE QUESTION OF BEING
Author: Jérémy Nabati
Genre: short stories collection
Keywords: love, humour
Link to original page
Summary:

The comical and poetic adventures of Aldo, a pensive – yet not melancholic – young man who courts Flora, a young woman. In relating this relationship, Feminine Beauty and the Question of Being cuts loose from the codes and conventions of classical love stories and away toward poetry, humor and a – slightly – surrealistic lyricism, with a tone reminiscent of Vian, Queneau and Pérec.

Feminine Beauty and the Question of Being is followed by How are you roaming ?, a collection of short prose poems that wear on their faces the same bloody smile of innocence and tackle such themes as the end of the world, past love affairs and holidays in the South.

 

 
THE ANGELS DESPISE YOU
Author: Laurent Crone
Genre: Drama
Keywords: transfiction, sci-fi, satire
Link to original page
Summary:

What common trait is there between Hermann Goering discovering upon his death that Hell is no fiery furnace but an endless waiting line in an air-conditioned building, a rabbit hiding in the bushes in the middle of a red desert inhabited by fierce cats, a group of anarchist students taking the MEDEF’s head office by storm, and a dismayed 130-year-old man who suddenly realizes that the recent discovery of immortality will only benefit prepubescent children?

A common outlook on earthly life and what lies beyond, the same glance – successively dreamlike and realistic, but always fraught with humor – cast on our times and times to come.

In this rich and profuse first novel, Laurent Crone guides us through a singular universe haunted by the figure of Philip K. Dick.

 

 
THERE AIN’T NO CONSIDERATION
Author: Jean-Charles Hue
Genre: short stories collection
Keywords: art, social
Link to original page
Summary:

There ain’t no consideration brings together for the first time the writings of Jean-Charles Hue, who conceived this work as a journey through his artistic universe, from the Gypsy world to the Mexico of Tijuana and dogfights. In order to do this, he created a dialogue between his texts and several pictures taken from his films, videos and photographic series – one of which was specially produced for the occasion.

The reader will recognize Jean-Charles Hue’s at once epic and comical stories and characters that pervade his films and videos. His texts are suffused with a particular kind of oral speech and slang that remind one of old French and take the reader on a trip to a timeless world. The recurring objects in his artistic vocabulary – gun, knife, car, soldier’s cup – serve as landmarks in an atmosphere at once crude and sensual.

NON-FICTION

DISOBEYING THE LAW IN A DEMOCRACY
Author: Manuel Cervera-Marzal
Genre: Essay
Keywords: civil disobedience, Thoreau, Martin Luther-King, non-violence
Link to original page
Summary:

Is disobeying the law compatible with the democratic process?

This interrogation probes the foundations of our society. An increasing number of contemporary political movements present themselves as « disobeying » and call into question the principle which leads us to unconditionally respect the decisions taken by democratically elected representatives, in the name of a transcendent logic, of common interest, or of a conscience clause.

In this work, Manuel Cervera-Marzal demonstrates that this attitude, far from being a simple refusal to obey the law, has profound philosophical and theoretical roots leading back to several 19th and 20th century thinkers – Thoreau, Gandhi and Martin Luther King, among others. The author thus retraces the birth and assertion of a trend of thought that gradually defined the conditions of legitimacy and efficiency of civil disobedience.

What emerges from this analysis is the following: civil disobedience, far from breaching democracy, is one of its essential components.

 
HAWTHORNE
Author: Antoine Traisnel
Genre: Critical theory
Keywords: Hawthorne, transcendantalism, biography, American classics
Link to original page
Summary:

Blasted Allegories confront a question that has haunted Nathaniel Hawthorne’s critical reception from the outset: that of allegory. In this book, Antoine Traisnel asks why Hawthorne risked literary marginalization to embrace allegory at a time when Romanticism had declared it obsolete. Hawthorne’s allegory, Traisnel argues, is not a “failed symbol” but a critical “power of figuration” used to contest the providential rhetoric of the Jacksonian era and to trouble traditional notions of authorship, meaning, ethics and history. Applying the fourfold structure of medieval allegoresis to Hawthorne’s four major works, Blasted Allegories attempts to “re-blast” the dormant critical dimensions of long-held debates over the allegorical character of Hawthorne’s fiction, and of American Literature more broadly. Indeed, Hawthorne’s “blasted allegories,” Traisnel suggests, bring into view previously unseen affinities between the senseless efflorescence of the Baroque and what Tony Tanner has called the “unchecked paranoid semiology” of the early Puritans, laying the foundations for something like an “American Baroque.”

The Author
Antoine Traisnel is Assistant Professor of Literary and Cultural Theory in the Departments of English and Comparative Literature at University of Michigan. He holds a doctorate in Comparative Literature from Brown University (2013) and a doctorate in American Literature from the Université Lille 3 (2009). He has published on topics in the fields of American and French literature and philosophy, critical theory, cultural studies, and the posthumanities. He is currently working on a book project titled The Rule of Capture: Animal Pursuits in Early America, which traces the emergence of capture as the representational grammar of Western modernity, asking how it came to saturate our aesthetic and epistemological idioms and practices, especially those concerning animals.

 

CHILDREN AND PHILOSOPHY
Author: Marie Agostini
Genre: Essay
Keywords: philosophy, teaching, education
Link to original page
Summary:

Is philosophy for adults only? Certainly not. Drawing on her experience in primary classes, Marie Agostini shows that children may not only be open to philosophy, but also become philosophers themselves and consequently change their outlook on the world. This book gives prominence to the words of children and demonstrates that learning how to live in a society is above all a matter of knowing oneself.

 
SCIENCE FICTION AND EXTRO-SCIENCE FICTION

Author: Quentin Meillassoux
Genre: Philosophy
Keywords: philosophy, science-fiction, Asimov
Link to original page

Rights sold in: The United States, China and Poland.
Summary:

In Science Fiction and Extro-Science Fiction, Quentin Meillassoux addresses the problem of chaos and of the constancy of natural laws in the context of literature. With his usual argumentative rigor, he elucidates the distinction between science fiction, a genre in which science remains possible in spite of all the upheavals that may attend the world in which the tale takes place, and fiction outside-science, the literary concept he fashions in this book, a fiction in which science becomes impossible. With its investigations of the philosophies of Hume, Kant, and Popper, Science Fiction and Extro-Science Fiction broadens the inquiry that Meillassoux began in After Finitude, thinking through the concrete possibilities and consequences of a chaotic world in which human beings can no longer resort to science to ground their existence. It is a significant milestone in the work of an emerging philosopher, which will appeal to readers of both philosophy and literature. The text is followed by Isaac Asimov’s essay “The Billiard Ball.”

 

ART

 

EDGAR
Author: Elena Vieillard and Ariel Pelaprat
Genre: Comics
Keywords: post-apocalypse, dark, dark humour
Link to original page
Summary:

« When you lug yourself on foot halfway around the globe only to end up with a rope around your neck, you reckon you shoulda stayed home. »

Edgar, a cynical young man with a sinister face, has one last drink before being hung. He has no illusions left when he tells a decrepit bartender about the trials and tribulations that led him to this dire extremity. How, in the vague hope of finding a patch of land where he could live in peace, he set off on foot to see the world and, after some aimless wandering through a decaying Europe, he crossed the Mediterranean and wound up in the far reaches of the East.

Edgar the exile is selfish and mean, although not fundamentally bad. He is, however, utterly alone and has no qualms about using others to get what he wants. He struggles as best he can and tries to make do with the cards he is dealt with, but he will soon learn that even the simplest dreams come at a heavy price.

Edgar is a cruel and desperate dystopia set in an agonizing world, a sarcastic tale of initiation, the chronicle of a death foretold suffused with a dark sense of humor that scathingly derides our condition as humans living in modern times.

 
FAMILY IS A SENTENCE OF LIFE IMPRISONMENT
Author: Elena Vieillard and François Szabowski
Genre: Humour
Keywords: humour, dark humour
Link to original page
Summary:

Looking for a gift for an obnoxious mother-in-law? A tormented teenager? Or a young couple planning to have a child (what thoughtless idiots!)?

Well, stop looking, this book will do the trick.

The development of social networks has brought about the resurgence of maxims as a literary genre per se, through the systematic diffusion of advice for daily living, often formulated in a spirit of naive sincerity.

François Szabowski and Elena Vieillard reacquaint us with this ancient art form – born in Rome and brought to perfection by the French moralist writers of the 17th century – in a collection of their own subverted brand of maxims by turns ironical, caustic, absurd and silly, where black humor and downright idiocy go hand in hand.

La Rochefoucauld, La Bruyère, La Fontaine… and now, Szabowski and Vieillard, who present us with one hundred or so maxims fit for all occasions, dealing with an exhaustive range of topics: for instance, social life (« A solid argument is less convincing than a kick in the shins »), good neighbor relations (« You can’t fight jackals with Q-tips »), the working world (« A well-trained sparrow is more dangerous than a snake »), sportscasting (« You can’t run a marathon with a a wooden leg »), politics (« It is easier to love thy neighbor when he is clean »), life lessons (« There are days when you’d rather be a crustacean »)…

These maxims for living a good life embrace human experience in all of its diversity and are destined to become – as so many gems, beautifully set – an indispensable handbook for all persons of quality in the 21st century: the Little Red Book of dandies, the hipsters’ Bible, the Vermot almanac of our modernity.