European Women Writers
5 total works
This mesmerizing novel is about a sixteen-year-old girl who lives in a rectory and works in a dance hall. Gradually she embarks upon a "personal project": she digs pits in the rectory garden and "looks for the dead." Her story, which has brevity and magical intensity of a fairy tale, is marked equally by tragedy and dark humor.
Forever Valley is one of three novels that are the first works to appear in English by Marie Redonnet, one of France's most original new authors (the other novels are Hôtel Splendid and Rose Mellie Rose, both also available from the University of Nebraska Press). Translator Jordan Stump notes that these books "unmistakably fit together, although they have neither characters nor setting in common." In all three novels, Redonnet has said, "it is the women who fight, who seek, who create."
Like traveling a very long, very dark tunnel into a blinding bright beautiful light—Kirkus
Hôtel Splendidrecounts the daily life of three sisters who live in a decrepit hotel on the edge of a swamp. The narrator, the youngest of the sisters, struggles to preserve the hotel in the face of insurmountable dilemmas: the decay of the building, the indifference and illness of her sisters, the remorseless expansion of the swamp. Confronted with dissolution and death, she displays a tireless persistence that is nearly as mysterious as it is moving.
This is one of three novels that are the first works to appear in English by Marie Redonnet, one of France's most original new authors (the other novels are Forever Valley and Rose Mellie Rose, both also available from the University of Nebraska Press). Translator Jordan Stump notes that these books "unmistakably fit together, although they have neither characters nor setting in common." In all three novels, Redonnet has said, "it is the women who fight, who seek, who create."
This is the story of Mellie, who as a baby is found in a grotto, then raised in a souvenir shop by Rose. At age twelve Mellie goes to the dying town of Oât, where she enters premature adulthood and assembles a photographic and written record of her life. Enchanting, realistic, comic, tragic—all these words describe this spellbinding novel that, like all genuine fables, takes us to a world that is utterly strange and very much our own.
Rose Mellie Rose is one of three novels that are the first works to appear in English by Marie Redonnet, one of France's most original new authors (the other novels are Hôtel Splendid and Forever Valley, both also available from the University of Nebraska Press). Translator Jordan Stump notes that these books "unmistakably fit together, although they have neither characters nor setting in common." In all three novels, Redonnet has said, "it is the women who fight, who seek, who create."
