Seven short stories by the Prix Goncourt winner—“the most distinctive voice of his generation . . . master magician of the contemporary French novel” (The Washington Post).
France’s preeminent fiction writer, Jean Echenoz is celebrated for his ability to craft stories with such precision that readers are caught off guard by the intense emotion and imagination just beneath the placid surface of his writing. As Gary Indiana put it in his essay “Conjuror of St. Germain”, “Echenoz risks everything in his fiction, gambling on the prodigious blandishments of his voice to lure his readers into a maze of improbabilities and preposterous happenings.”
The Queen’s Caprice—seven stories available in English for the first time—reveals Echenoz at the height of his talents, taking readers on a journey across radically different landscapes. The title story explores a tiny corner of the French countryside; “Nelson” offers a brilliant miniaturist portrait of the hero of the Battle of Trafalgar; “In Babylon” sketches the ancient city of Mesopotamia, based on trace descriptions from Herodotus; and other stories visit the forests of England, the Luxembourg Gardens in Paris, Tampa Bay, and the interior of a submarine. Amid the thrill and allure of this voyage of words, “again and again we pause to savor the richness of Echenoz’s startling, crystalline observations” (Lydia Davis).
“[A] terrific sense of humor tinged with existential mischief.” —L’Express
Publisher: The New Press
Original Binding: Hardcover
Pages: 128 pages
ISBN-10: 1620970651
Item Weight: 0.5 lbs
Dimensions: 5.3 x 0.38 x 7.5 inches
Praise for Jean Echenoz: "The most distinctive voice of his generation and the master magician of the contemporary French novel." —The Washington Post
"Writing lives! [Echenoz's] words are full of grace and surprises, and he has the ability to throw relationships among them just off-center enough to make the images of people they convey seem all the more compelling and fresh." —The New York Times Book Review
"Rarely has the difficult craft of storytelling been as well mastered." —Times Literary Supplement
"A gentle tending to perversity links Echenoz to that other master of perverse detail, Vladimir Nabokov." —Los Angeles Times
"[A] miniaturist who paints frescoes." —Journal du Dimanche
"Jean Echenoz's short short stories are quirky, playful and subversive: Admiral Nelson is always seasick, the statues in the Luxembourg Garden wear baffling expressions, a beautiful woman swims underwater to an assignation. Once again, Echenoz masterfully reinvents the world by creating the illusion that improbable events might in fact be probable." —Lily Tuck, author of The News from Paraguay
"There is an echo of García Márquez in these simple yet enigmatic pages. Echenoz gives us a slim series of elegant, tightly written tales, achieving a simple kind of magic.” —Kirkus Reviews
Jean Echenoz won France's prestigious Prix Goncourt for I'm Gone (The New Press). He is the author of eleven novels in English translation—including 1914, Big Blondes, Lightning, Piano, Ravel, and Running, all published by The New Press—and the winner of numerous literary prizes, among them the Prix Médicis and the European Literature Jeopardy Prize. He lives in Paris. Linda Coverdale's most recent translation for The New Press was Jean Echenoz's 1914. She was the recipient of the French-American Foundation's 2008 Translation Prize for her translation of Echenoz's Ravel (The New Press). She lives in Brooklyn.
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