Leaving Van Gogh by Carol Wallace

Having been obsessed with Vincent van Gogh since my early teens, I’ve read most of the books about him over the years. So I was pleased to see this new one. Older books, such as the overwrought Lust for Life,  portrayed Vincent as a wild, out of control bohemian, consuming paint and absinthe in equal [...]

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The Tapestry of Love, by Rosy Thornton

Rosy Thornton’s new novel, The Tapestry of Love, starts with an arresting scene: its heroine, Catherine, is marooned in her car in the midst of a sea of sheep. They are going one way; she was going the other, until they engulfed her. It is the Autumn transhumance, the age old movement of flocks from [...]

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Histoires inédites du Petit Nicolas, vol 1, by Goscinny and Sempé

Reviewer’s note: While translations of the other Nicolas books exist, I am unaware of any English translation for this collection.  All translations in this article are my own.  I would estimate, however, that Le Petit Nicolas is accessible to readers with an intermediate level of French (and a dictionary to check the slang). “At our [...]

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Jean Rhys – Good Morning Midnight

Fiction shares much with its narrative siblings drama, film, epic, myth and non-fiction, but what makes it unique is that it can let us into someone’s mind, and into more than one person’s at that. If you want to point out that so, too, can memoir, the crossover genre which uses the techniques of fiction to write autobiography, [...]

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Coming Up on Vulpes Libris

There’s a variety of creatures on Vulpes Libris this week, we have a Woolf and werewolves, hedgehogs, kings and sportsmen. Monday–On President’s Day, Jackie looks at Teddy Roosevelt’s interactions with European leaders in The King and the Cowboy by David Fromkin. Tuesday–Lisa has a natter with novelist and Virginia Woolf expert, Susan Sellers. Wednesday–Ken Owen [...]

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Architect and Engineer: A Study in Sibling Rivalry, by Andrew Saint

Article by Michael Carley Without engineers nothing would stand up; without architects, we would not want it to. The world we live in is the world engineers have made;  the world we see is the architects’. How could we possibly expect such  people to get along? Yet they do: sometimes well, sometimes grudgingly, sometimes badly. [...]

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Guest Article: Jane Aitken on Marketing French Translation in the UK

The first of our two guest pieces this week is from Jane Aitken, Managing Director of Gallic Books. What has French fiction got to offer to an English-speaking audience, and what are the challenges in marketing it? Read on to find out… Why bother to try to market translated French fiction? As the founder of [...]

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Suite Française by Irène Némirovsky

It is impossible to read Suite Française without being strongly influenced by the context in which it was written and by the subsequent fate of its author. Irène Némirovsky was from a wealthy Russian Jewish family who fled Russia to escape the Bolshevik revolution. (Interesting that Kirsty’s piece yesterday dealt with the other side of [...]

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The Private Lives of the Impressionists by Sue Roe

There have been dozens of books about The Impressionists, but none so vividly transports you to the France of the late 1800’s as Sue Roe’s masterpiece. Her rich tapestry dispels the stereotype of the isolated artist sitting at the café table before grabbing his smock and rushing to his easel in a frenzy. Instead, we [...]

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Luncheon of the Boating Party by Susan Vreeland

Susan Vreeland once again opens her paint box to give us a peek inside the inspiration and personality of an artist, this time, Auguste Renoir. While her most recent books such as the excellent The Forest Lover have been encompassing biographies, here she focuses on the creation of a single work, Renoir’s most famous work, [...]

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