The Queen's Caprice: Stories

(Paperback)

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Description

France's pre-eminent fiction writer is frequently credited with a kind of literary magic, an ability to craft stories with such precision and detail that readers are caught off guard by the powerful currents of emotion and imagination that lie just beneath the surface of his writing. The Queen's Caprice - seven new stories presented in English for the first time - reveals Echenoz at the height of his talents. The author takes us on a journey across radically different places and landscapes, giving free rein to a terrific sense of humour tinged with existential mischief' (L'Express).'

Reviews

Praise for Jean Echenoz:
"The most distinctive voice of his generation and the master magician of the contemporary French novel."
The Washington Post

"Writing lives! [Echenoz's] words are full of grace and surprises, and he has the ability to throw relationships among them just off-center enough to make the images of people they convey seem all the more compelling and fresh."
The New York Times Book Review

"Rarely has the difficult craft of storytelling been as well mastered."
Times Literary Supplement

"A gentle tending to perversity links Echenoz to that other master of perverse detail, Vladimir Nabokov."
Los Angeles Times

"[A] miniaturist who paints frescoes."
Journal du Dimanche

"Jean Echenozs short short stories are quirky, playful and subversive: Admiral Nelson is always seasick, the statues in the Luxembourg Garden wear baffling expressions, a beautiful woman swims underwater to an assignation. Once again, Echenoz masterfully reinvents the world by creating the illusion that improbable events might in fact be probable."
Lily Tuck, author of The News from Paraguay

"There is an echo of Garca Mrquez in these simple yet enigmatic pages. Echenoz gives us a slim series of elegant, tightly written tales, achieving a simple kind of magic.
Kirkus Reviews

Author Bio

Jean Echenoz won Frances prestigious Prix Goncourt for Im Gone (The New Press). He is the author of eleven novels in English translationincluding 1914, Big Blondes, Lightning, Piano, Ravel, and Running, all published by The New Pressand the winner of numerous literary prizes, among them the Prix Mdicis and the European Literature Jeopardy Prize. He lives in Paris. Linda Coverdales most recent translation for The New Press was Jean Echenozs 1914. She was the recipient of the French-American Foundations 2008 Translation Prize for her translation of Echenozs Ravel (The New Press). She lives in Brooklyn.