Introduction

Now seems like a particularly opportune time to be sharing French and Francophone writers with American readers—and not just because their work is excellent and more diverse than ever, though this is true. But in addition, post-Brexit and post-Trump, contemporary French writers feel ahead of the curve. They’ve been chronicling the dark side of American-style free market neoliberalism long before we woke up to it. Thus their work reflects many of the issues—economic dislocation, income inequality, the failures of globalism—that have only now, belatedly, come to dominate the American cultural landscape.

Yanick Lahens is a good example. Her novel Moonbath, winner of the 2014 Femina Prize, was recently published to great acclaim in the U.S., with an introduction from Russell Banks. Her powerful short story “The Ordinary Disaster” offers an uncompromising and deeply affecting portrait of life in Haiti, where Lahens was born and lives, during an American intervention. In it, Lahens chronicles with painful specificity her narrator’s decision to leave behind her friends and family, whom she calls “the defeated.” A similar meditation on defeat and erasure can be found in François Bon’s novel Daewoo, which focuses on the factory workers—primarily women—who lost their jobs after a series of plant closures in Northeastern France. Long known as a forceful voice in French contemporary writing, Bon has published more than thirty works of fiction, nonfiction, and children’s literature. Daewoo, which was awarded the Wepler Prize in France, will be his first novel published in the United States.

Jeanne Benameur’s novel The Child Who tells a story of displacement on a personal level. Benameur, the daughter of a Tunisian father and an Italian mother, focuses on the linguistic and social isolation of a child who is abandoned by his mother—a woman she describes as a “traveler” with an “unpronounceable” name. In an era of exile and migration, Benameur’s protagonist separates himself from his family and society and begins to fashion an interior language all his own. Delphine Coulin, the author and filmmaker, also demonstrates a commitment to social relevance in her work. The excerpt from her novel, To See the World, follows two female French soldiers as they leave Afghanistan for a mandated “vacation” in Cyprus. Most Americans aren’t used to hearing from the other members of George Bush’s “coalition of the willing,” and Coulin’s novel also differs from most American war narratives, particularly in its attention to gender and class—a focus that can be found in all of her books including, most recently, her 2017 novel The Girl in the Jungle.

In 2017, France’s new president, Emmanuel Macron, posed for his carefully curated official portrait with books by Charles de Gaulle, André Gide, and Stendhal on his desk. These are famous French writers, to be sure. But, IMHO, he might be better served by reading the extraordinary authors translated here for a report on the challenges we all are facing today.