Marguerite Duras
LA MALADIE DE LA MORT

Duras’s brief text describes a liaison in which „you“ pay a woman to spend several nights with you.When eventually „you ask if she thinks anyone could love you,“ she replies „No, not possibly.“ You suffer, it seems, from the „malady of death.“ One morning „she isn’t there anymore,“ and the affair ends.

At 5000 words this coolly erotic fragment reads less like a novel than a treatment concluding note, in fact, discusses how it might be staged or filmed. It appeared in France before the publication of Duras’s novel The Lover ( LJ 6/1/85) and presumably owes its translation to that work’s well-deserved success here.

Donald Barthelme
SIXTY STORIES

This excellent collection of Donald Barthelme’s literary output during the 1960s and 1970s covers the period when the writer came to prominence—producing the stories, satires, parodies, and other formal experiments that altered fiction as we know it—and wrote many of the most beautiful sentences in the English language.

Due to the unfortunate discontinuance of many of Barthelme’s titles, 60 Stories now stands as one of the broadest overviews of his work, containing selections from eight previously published books, as well as a number of other short works that had been otherwise uncollected.

Claude Simon
L’ HERBE
(THE GRASS)

Claude Simon is hardly an unknown or obscure author in USA, but very famous in France (Nobel Prize winner in 1985). Readers of his novel translated under the title The Grass think that he could easily be ranked close to the „big four“ of 20th Century literature (Beckett, Faulkner, Joyce, Proust).
His reputation as a „difficult“ writer is somewhat undeserved, and no more than ordinary alertness will allow the reader to enjoy an incredibly supple and rich experience. This
novel tells of a post-World War II family in France, largely three women, and the
narrative is loosely constructed around their memories and experiences, particularly those of a young woman who describes the journey towards death of her husband’s aunt. The book, as other Simon novels, is very death-haunted and is filled with a sense of melancholy and dread.

Junichiro Tanizaki
THE KEY

“That [The Key] is a work of art can never be in doubt. Tanizaki's style in this novel
has been compared...to that of Andre Gide, and Howard Hibbett's translation bears an appropriate resemblance to ... Gide in English."
New Statesman

Scintillating, elegant, darkly comic, The Key is the story of a dying marriage, told in the form of parallel diaries. After nearly thirty years of marriage, a dried-up, middle-aged professor frenziedly strives for new heights of carnal pleasure with his repressed, dissatisfied wife, resorting to stimulants galore for her: brandy, a handsome young lover. During the day, they record their adventures of the previous night.
When they begin to suspect each other of peeping into their respective diaries, it becomes unclear whether each spouse's confessions might not be intended for the other's eyes.