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Homepage >
French Selection > Non Fiction > Biographies
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Manolete
by Anne Plantagenet
Published by Ramsay
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Born in 1917 in Cordova, Manuel Rodriguez Sanchez grew up under the strict eye of his mother and five sisters. His mother was already the widow of two bullfighters, so Manolete was determined not to let her down. Despite a weak physique, he rose to stardom against the backdrop of the Spanish Civil War. more |
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| This is the remarkable story of how Lenin might have met the Dadaists in Zurich in 1916—the year of the movement´s birth—and been influenced and transformed by them. Dominique Noguez takes as a departure point for this suggestive historical musing the fact that while in Switzerland, Lenin lived steps away from the famous Cabaret Voltaire, where the future surrealists gathered. more |
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Lénine dada
by Dominique Noguez
Published by Le Dilettante
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Le coeur n´est pas un genou que l´on plie
by Mariama Barry
Published by Gallimard
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“Between the Dakar School for Girls, the study of law at the Université de Paris-II Assas and the center for professionaltraining and a notary´s degree, I set to my studies, and not with the least significant of mentors: Lenin, Marx, Che Guevara, Nkrumah. This could have been in Mao´s China or Castro´s Cuba, but it was in Guinea, under Sékou Touré. For pre-university studies, the president enlisted the help of envoys from Eastern Bloc.There was a rush of Bulgarians, Poles, East Germans, Rumanians, etc.” So begins the poignant narrative of Mariama Barry, who is well known for the autobiography ofher early life, La Petite Peule [The LittlePeul Girl], where she recalls, among other things her painful circumcision. more |
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| This critically acclaimed self-portrait tells the true story of a liberated young woman growing up in war-torn Beirut. Darina Al-Joundi was born in Lebanon in 1968 to a Shiite Lebanese mother and a secular Syrian father. Her father, a political refugee and journalist, was an anarchist and wanted his three daughters to be raised free of religious constraints and dogmatism. He was known to have said that “the day when churches and mosques will be turned into brothels, we will finally have some peace.” From her first glass of Bordeaux at age 8 to A Clockwork Orange, Baudelaire, and Maïakovski, his influence brings her to defy all taboos—religious, political, and sexual. more |
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Le jour où Nina Simone a cessé de chanter
by Darina Al-Joundi & Mohamed Kacimi
Published by Actes Sud
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Coma
by Pierre Guyotat
Published by Gallimard
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Pierre Guyotat is one of the greatest living French writers. One could also call him a survivor. His existence and his work have indeed gone through multiple hardships, which have in turn fueled his writing and still show today through his use of themes such as violence, war, and death. Guyotat has pushed the limits of language as far as he could, from Tombeau pour cinq cent mille soldats (1967) to Progénitures (2000) – to the boundaries of the unreadable, to the invention of another language. If his older works recounted his own life, transforming it into a fantastical linguistic endeavour, his more recent books prove to be a formally tamer autobiographical reminiscence. more |
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