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      • Literary essays
        January 2021

        A Smell of Flowers in The Night

        by Leïla Slimani

        Leïla Slimani, winner of the 2016 prix Goncourt, doesn’t like leaving home and prefers solitude to entertainment. So why agree to spend a sleepless night in the Punta della Dogona Museum in Venice? Reflecting upon the “impossibility” of a book whilst subtly digressing in the Venetian night, Leila Slimani talks about herself, about imprisonment, intimacy, identity, being caught in the middle, between East and West. A discreet, sensitive confession in which the author mentions her father who was once imprisoned. But this book – with its intensity and inner fire – is also about beauty disappearing and how urgently we must make the most of it. It is about the glory of the ephemeral. At dawn, although awake and alert, the author emerges from the building as if from a dream, and all that is left of her night is the smell of flowers.

      • Biography & True Stories
        February 2020

        In Siberia's Prisons

        by Yoann Barbereau

        Midnight Express in Siberia. A gripping contemporary story of escape. “The scene unfolds not far from Lake Baikal, where I live and love and am lucky enough to be loved, in Irkutsk, the capital of eastern Siberia. It’s morning, men in balaclavas appear out of nowhere. My daughter screams. She’s five years old. I’m arrested right in front of her, then beaten – expertly – and interrogated. Worst of all I’m branded with that ignominious word I struggle to commit to paper: paedophile. These men hidden behind balaclavas and shadows want my skin. They have set in motion an implacable and brutish process of destruction that has a name, a name I know, invented by the KGB: Kompromat.” Inside Siberia’s prisons, I try to understand. In the psychiatric hospital where I’m later interned, I try to understand. I’m guaranteed fifteen years of a gruelling camp. The story of my escapes can begin.

      • Biography: arts & entertainment
        January 2021

        The One and Only

        Maria Casarès

        by Anne Plantagenet

        The little-known story of Maria Casarès, a Spanish exile in France, actress, free spirit and Albert Camus’s lover. With her monstrous appetite, raucous laugh and scorching sensuality, Maria Casarès was born and grew up in Galicia, fled Franco in 1936, and came to Paris at 14. She very soon wanted to learn the unforgiving French language, become an actress, express herself physically, dance, love… Nothing could stop her, not rejection from the Conservatoire, nor Paris etiquette. Her talent swiftly earned recognition, and she became one of the greatest tragedians of the second half of the Twentieth Century. She was also Albert Camus’ “One and only”. They had a sixteen-year relationship, a tormented love kept in the shadows, but it flourished through a fascinating correspondence.

      • Literary essays
        October 2018

        The Painter Devouring the Female Nude

        by Kamel Daoud

        One of the greatest Arabic writers revisits the theme of nudes, desire and women. Kamel Daoud spent a night alone in the Picasso Museum, a singular experience that inspired him to write this essay in which he juxtaposes the image of a female nude with the painter and a Jihadist. To Picasso, a woman was a body that could be truly captured only in terms of desire and erotic associations. The nude is also like a self-portrait imprinted on his subject’s flesh. In fact, she devours him, like a cannibal. But how does a Jihadist view this painting? In his view, the woman painted by Picasso is a scandalous anticipation of dream woman who awaits him in paradise, when he dies. She therefore incites disobedience and sin. For the former, she evokes dying of desire. For the latter, killing desire itself or dying in order to satisfy it.

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