Douglas Parmee

Maupassant merges fact and fiction, dream and documentation in this seemingly simple logbook of a sailing cruise along the French Mediterranean coast.

Vallès's book is one of the funniest books in French literature, a triumph of insubordinate comedy over the forces of order and the self-appointed defenders of decency.

Opposites attract, and Helmut Holk and Christine Arne, the attractive married couple at the center of this engrossing novel by one of Germany's greatest novelists, could not be more unalike. Irretrievable is a nuanced, urbane, affectionate, and profoundly humane reckoning with the blindness of love.