FOREIGN RIGHTS 2019
The 2019 Edition of our complete foreign rights catalog.
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
POCKET-SIZED MIRAGES
Author: Gilles Marchand
Original title : Des mirages plein les poches
Genre: general fiction, short stories.
Keywords: short stories, magic realism, music.
Summary: in this award-winning short story collection, beloved writer Gilles Marchand comes back with all the magic, hope, fun, melancholy and rock’n roll that made French readers fall in love with his novels.
DEATH TO THE PROUD
Author: Marie-Fleur Albecker.
Original title : Et j’abattrai l’arrogance des tyrans
Genre: general fiction.
Keywords: history, feminism, politics, England.
Summary: Joanna is a young woman during the Peasants’ Revolt of 1381 in England. She sees the men marching to the Tower of London and decides to join in. But after a few days, she comes to this realization : men want justice, but justice for men, and they do not seem to care about the injustice towards women… In her debut novel, Marie-Fleur Albecker took by surprise many readers, in this mock-history novel, child of the metoo time. Funny, radical and lyrical.
THEN END OF THE WORLDS APPEARS TO BE NOT AS STRAIGHTFORWARD AS YOU WOULD HAVE EXPECTED
Author: Franck Thomas
Original title : La fin du monde est plus compliquée que prévu
Genre: general fiction.
Keywords: comedy, end of the world, satire, humour.
Summary: The leader of North Korea suddenly dies. And the world is left with his psycho-teenage soon. The brat grabs the mic, and announces that he has decided to destroy the whole world before the end of the week. Our story follows the life of a few losers and lost souls in a small French village, during the seven days before the Armageddon. A brillant, funny and clever satire about our complete inability, as a species, to make tough and selfless decision when the end of times comes. First novel.
WHO THE MONSTERS ARE ?
Author: Jean-Luc A. d’Asciano
Original title : Souviens-toi des monstres
Genre: general fiction.
Keywords: magic realism, Italy, adventure, family.
Summary: Gabriel and Raphael are Siamese twins. They are born in a family of thieves and pirates, in an imaginary Italy. They have one magic gift. When they sing together, miracles happens. They become a kind of local attraction, both feared and despised. They travel. They love, They fight. And they finally come back to their small village. An epic and magical first-novel, critically-acclaimed – a true love letter to all things Italian : music, food, literature and cinema. A tale like no other, that will left you wondering : but who are the true monsters ?
UTER PANDRAGON
Author: Thomas Spok
Original title : Uter Pandragon
Genre: fantasy.
Keywords: politics, adventure, sword, dragons, Graal, Arthur.
Summary: Uter and Pandragon are two brothers. They are the true heirs of the Brittany throne. As children, they have to flee their homeland. As teenagers, they grow up in Constantinople. As men, they go back to the land of their fathers and form an uneasy alliance to win back what belongs to them. Uncanny, for the two brothers have little in common. As the battle rages, a shadowy figure plays the puppet-master behing the scenes : Merlin. Critically-acclaimed first novel, both epic and poetic, deep and exciting. A new take on a beloved story.
BY NATURE
Author: Jean-Baptiste de Froment
Original title : État de nature
Genre: general fiction.
Keywords: politics, comedy, revolution, satire, current affairs, unchrony.
Summary: One upon a time in an uchronian France where the President is a woman and has been for the last 21 years, Claude, the Prime Minister, decides his time has come and he should step up, become President. Alas, far from Paris, in the heart of the country, a woman, Barbara, comes up with the same idea. Claude and Barbara have nothing in common and will fight to the death to conquer the hearts and souls of the people in this witty, dry and dark comedy – which was hailed as one the best books of 2019 and the best picture painted of contemporary France.
THE SCREAMING RUINS
Author: Alexandra Koszelyk
Original title : À cirer dans les ruines
Genre: general fiction.
Keywords: drama, love story, history, Ukraine.
Summary: Lena and Ivan are teenagers when Chernobyl happens. During the events of 1986, they are separated. Lena is told her boyfriend is dead. She leaves with a her family to France. She intends never to go back to this terrible place. She grows up, tries to fit in, but, almost twenty years after her exile has started, she realizes she has to go back. Has Ivan waited for her return ? A moving love story about what you can and what you cannot leave behind. First novel.
I AM VAMPIRE
Author: Romain Ternaux
Original title : I Am Vampire
Genre: general fiction.
Keywords: horror, satire, trash, punk, bizzaro.
Summary: Bert is a wannabe painter. Well, he does paint but his paintings are see as utterly rubbish. He’s poor and spends most of his time drinking with an old pal. But one day, or should we say one night ?, he gains new powers. He is stronger, faster and has a new fondness for blood. Is he turning into a vampire ? Withe these powers comes a newfound self-confidence and his painting career seems to take off. On a whim, he decides to quit France to find his wealthiest buyer, a secretive man from Romania. A dark fable, very violent, very sexual, twisted and funny by a young and up-and-coming writer.
THE FLYING WOMAN
Author: Michèle Astrud
Original title : La nuit je vole
Genre: general fiction.
Keywords: Magic realism, coming of age story, family drama.
Summary: Michèle is a 30-something woman. Her life is rather unsatisfying. As she sleeps in a motel with her husband, traveling back from abroad, she discovers she has a strange power: when she sleeps, she starts flying. At first, she tries to hide this new-found ability. But when her secret is found out, she seizes this miracle as an opportunity to review her whole existence in this touching and magic coming of age story.
SPARTACUS
Author: Romain Ternaux
Original title : Spartacus
Genre: general fiction
Keywords: humor, satire, trash, history.
Summary: Spartacus is a gladiator. But he is also a sex-addicted, cheating, sneaky coward. His life is a series of fights in the roman arena. One day, he appears to be the right man at the right place – and becomes the living symbol of freedom and insurrection. He tries over and over to give up this mantel, of leader of men, but is quite stuck in this role. So he fights an empire and, maybe, the gods who conspire to make in a hero, in this dark and funny fable.
PILLS NATION
Author: Adrien Pauchet
Original title : Pills Nation
Genre: crime, thriller.
Keywords: Magic realism, crime, thriller, Noir, Paris, drugs.
Summary: A new drug appears. Orpheus is the direct ticket for an imaginary plane, where everyone can see, and talk to, the loved ones that are dead. The drug is a scary success and, after a few weeks, a large chunk of the people of Paris are junkies. A police officer is picked to head a task force and stop this traffic. But she is also secretly addicted to orpheus. Will she be up to the task in this grim and magical crime story set in Paris?
MISSISSIPPI
Author: Louise Caron
Original title : Les rumeurs du Mississippi
Genre: general fiction.
Keywords: realism, America, the Fourth estate, war, Irak, Vietnam.
Summary: Sarah works at the New York Times. A former Marine, who made several tours in Irak, reaches out to her, accusing himself of a crime. But someone has already been convicted of this horrible crime. Sarah decides to investigate the story. But she also have an ulterior motive : her very own father came back a broken man from Vietnam and she might get the long-awaited opportunity to vindicate him.
THE FRENCH MARTYRS
Author: Alexis David-Marie
Original title : #MartyrsFrançais
Genre: general fiction.
Keywords: politics, racism, migrations, conservatism, family drama.
Summary: A migrant kills a man in Paris. Racists extremists decide to publicize the event to make the man a martyr and overthrow the government. The son of the deceased, a schoolteacher, tries to save the memory of his beloved father and dissociate his name from this frenzy. To do so, he starts investigating the dark edges of the political spectrum and tries to understand why a part of European society feels threatened by migrants.
THE BIRDS DO NO TALK THAT MUCH
Author: Gilles Marchand
Original title : Un funambule sur le sable
Genre: general fiction
Keywords: Magic realism, bildungsroman.
Summary: Stradi is born with a rare condition. He has a violin in his head. A true, fully-formed, violin. A violin that plays, making it impossible for him to hide his feelings. But Stradi has one trick up his sleeve : he is an optimist and he will, against all-odds, live, and be happy.
MOUTH OF NO ONE
Author: Gilles Marchand
Original title : Une bouche sans personne
Genre: general fiction
Keywords: Magic realism, history, bildungsroman.
Summary: A man spends his evening in a French café. A scarf hides his face. One day, he pours coffee on the scarf, removes the scarf and reveals to all his burned face. His friends question him with so much instance that he ends up telling them where he comes from.
Winner of numerous awards. Translated into german.
INTO THE LIGH WE WILL GO
Author: Michèle Astrud
Original title : Nous entrerons dans la lumière
Genre: general fiction
Keywords: post-apocalypse, science-fiction, family drama, climate change.
Summary: The Sun is too hot. French society collapses. Antoine takes a car, picks up his daughter and makes a run for it – to the sea and, maybe salvation in this touching post-apocalyptic psychological novel about youth and hope.
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.
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.
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, Spain, South Korea 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.
Tweeter