Black Village

(Paperback)

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Description

Tassili, Goodmann, and Myriam. Two men and a woman dressed in ragsformer poets, and former members of a dystopian military servicewalk the bardo, the dark afterlife between death and rebirth. The road is monotonous and seemingly endless. To pass the time, they decide to tell each other stories: bizarre anecdotes set in a post-apocalyptic world, replete with mutant creatures, Buddhist monks, and ruthless killers. The result is a mysterious, dreamlike series of events, trapped outside of time as we know it, where all the rules of narrative are upended and remade.

Lutz Bassmann is one of the heteronyms of French author Antoine Volodine. Black Village gives readers of science fiction and experimental literature another exciting look into post-exoticism, one of the most ambitious and original projects in contemporary literature.

Reviews

"With Black Village, Lutz Bassmann, a heteronym of Antoine Volodine, pens a collection of rare intensity, carried by writing of staggering power. By breaking the codes of narrative, by upsetting genres, he offers, within the disaster that this book tells, a literature that reinvents and affirms the infinite potential of language."--Art Press

"Ambiguity and gloom blend in this collection of stories to work the reader into a wonderful confusion. But it's a useful confusion, one that expresses something fundamentally true about the world."--Full Stop

"Bassmann crafts a subtle and lively reflection on the weight of literature in the face of the dramas of our time."--Livres hebdo

"From book to book, Volodine has been building a multifaceted universe for thirty years, deeply original, arguably one of the most opinionated and ambitious in French literature today."--L'Opinion

"Disturbing, funny, and poetic, this narrative nebula reminds us that a story ends above all in the minds of those who receive it."--Lire

Author Bio

Lutz Bassmann is one of French author Antoine Volodine's numerous heteronyms belonging to a community of imaginary authors that includes Manuela Draeger and Elli Kronauer. Since 2008, Bassmann has authored five books, including We Monks & Soldiers (University of Nebraska). This is his second book to be translated into English.

Jeffrey Zuckerman is a translator of French and the Digital Coordinator at Music & Literature Magazine. His translations include Ananda Devi's Eve Out of Her Ruins, Radiant Terminus by Antoine Volodine, and Jean Genet's The Criminal Child. He has also contributed shorter pieces to Frieze, The New Republic, The NYRDaily, The Paris Review Daily, The White Review, and VICE. Jeffrey studied English literature and literary translation at Yale University, and has served as a judge for the PEN Translation Prize and the National Translation Award. He is a recipient of a PEN/Heim Translation Fund grant for his ongoing work on the complete stories of Herv Guibert.