Cracher Du Texte

The Booker Prize longlist was announced on the 28th of July, but that’s 12 books! The problem is that once again, I won’t have enough time for the shortlist this year, what with other engagements, laziness etc, etc. So I thought if I can out guess the official jury I can maybe only read 6 and begin on the longlist date. What are my chances I thought? Nailed on to get at least one right, two…

A stranger comes to town. He walks along a dusty road, fields of lavender on one side, a placid green river on the other. The sun beats down on his bare head and he carries only a battered knapsack over one shoulder. He is young, barely twenty, and walks tall and straight like ballet dancer ora soldier who has never seen war. The town is a sleepy hamlet in the south of France. The stranger is…

IRISH ARTIST WINS £50,000 ART AWARD Irish Times, 14 October 1999 Donegal-based artist Saoirse Byrne has become the first Irish woman to win the prestigious Margaret Dowling Art Prize which recognises emerging artists around the world. …. Her work is featured from next month at the Raymond Frank Gallery in Dublin and runs through into the millennium in an exhibition entitled Lost Was…

It was surprising to my mother that I wouldn’t want to go to the honors program at our state university. Surprising, more generally speaking, that I would want to venture outward into the world, when the world so clearly had lost its way. Out in the coastal cities, nuclear families were an endangered species. Children ran barefoot in the streets while their fathers philandered in third-floor…

The new queen is spirited, neat — a totally contained person. Women like her immediately, men think her unfoolish. Her mother had been ambitious in her plans for her daughter’s life — perhaps even spirited enough to secure her a King — but she had said, no, a little freedom, I beg you. So a brother was settled upon — a brother who would certainly never rise so high. I guess you get used to not…

“Don’t be overzealous.” This is what Judge Krause has been told since he was appointed to investigate the case of the Hotel Caumartin. On the night of April 8, 2005, this dilapidated social hotel where African immigrants were crammed together was reduced to ashes by a violent fire. How can we not be zealous when 28 people have lost their lives?*** My fourth book this year for the Readers Prize,…

And then the ministers came and went, they never stayed long, they left for the private sector or in another ministry, or they tried to become presidents or party leaders, and they were replaced by another who would also be just passing through, while the institution endured as it also endured, in the streets and behind the facades of buildings,  violence, misery and madness. A whole despair that…

I hadn’t smelled the perfumed scent of panthers since I was a child, when my mother was eaten by one of them. We had ventured into the forest and let the musky scent of his fur guide us. She looked as if she were dead, harmless. We have continued to move forward. Fast as lightning, the beast had pounced on me because I was young and weak at the time, and its claws had entered my back. My mother…

Another year comes over the horizon and with it the short list for the “Prix des Lecteurs”, Quai du Polar: easy to remember! So let’s begin reading for 2026. Petite-Ville, Mélika Abdelmoumen – Mémoire d’Encrier On ne mange pas les cannibales, Stéphanie Artarit – Belfond Le Livre des Prodiges, d’Olivier Ciechelski – Le Rouergue Les Braises de l’incendie, d’Éric Couty – Liana Levi Bleus,…

She had once believed that in the deepest reaches of everything was a nothing where men had planted god; but now she knew that deeper within that nothing was something else, something made of light and heat. It was this light and heat that endured, that was everlasting. At the center was not nothing, no. Out of the light and the heat all goodness poured. A young girl, in service to a minister,…

It was then that the family particularly insisted on neurosurgery. Dr. Fouquet, who was following the patient, asked Dr. Hécaen for a consultation on the subject. Dr. Hécaen is particularly reticent. After describing the disorders, he adds: “It seems difficult to me to admit the need for a surgical operation of the lobotomy type in a lucid patient, certainly refusing the operation.”*** This…