Editions du Seuil Editions du Seuil i(A127884 works by) (Organisation) assertion
Born: Established: 1935 Paris,
c
France,
c
Western Europe, Europe,
;
The material on this page is available to AustLit subscribers. If you are a subscriber or are from a subscribing organisation, please log in to gain full access. To explore options for subscribing to this unique teaching, research, and publishing resource for Australian culture and storytelling, please contact us or find out more.

Works By

Preview all
4 22 y separately published work icon Too Much Lip Melissa Lucashenko , ( trans. David Fauquemberg with title Celle qui parle aux corbeaux ) Paris : Editions du Seuil , 2023 14069794 2018 single work novel

'Too much lip, her old problem from way back. And the older she got, the harder it seemed to get to swallow her opinions. The avalanche of bullshit in the world would drown her if she let it; the least she could do was raise her voice in anger.

'Wise-cracking Kerry Salter has spent a lifetime avoiding two things – her hometown and prison. But now her Pop is dying and she’s an inch away from the lockup, so she heads south on a stolen Harley.

'Kerry plans to spend twenty-four hours, tops, over the border. She quickly discovers, though, that Bundjalung country has a funny way of grabbing on to people. Old family wounds open as the Salters fight to stop the development of their beloved river. And the unexpected arrival on the scene of a good-looking dugai fella intent on loving her up only adds more trouble – but then trouble is Kerry’s middle name.

'Gritty and darkly hilarious, Too Much Lip offers redemption and forgiveness where none seems possible.' (Publication summary)

2 2 y separately published work icon The Falls B. Michael Radburn , ( trans. Isabelle Troin with title De Cendres Et D'or ) Paris : Editions du Seuil , 2021 10198237 2016 single work novel thriller

'A week of despair - a century of evil. The latest spine-tingling tale from B. Michael Radburn

'Damaged but not yet broken after an ordeal in Tasmania's wilderness, park ranger Taylor Bridges believes his ghosts are in the past until a raging forest fire in an isolated canyon of Eldritch Falls lays bare the remains of a young woman...and a secret killing ground.

'After the police enlist Taylor in their investigation, the evidence bizarrely points to Jacob Muller, a deranged preacher, who reigned over The Falls a century ago. But when a crucial witness disappears, it's clear there is more to the dark history of The Falls. ' (Publication summary)

6 13 y separately published work icon Resurrection Bay Emma Viskic , ( trans. Charles Bonnot )expression Paris : Editions du Seuil , 2020 8683019 2015 single work novel crime

'Caleb Zelic, profoundly deaf since early childhood, has always lived on the outside - watching, picking up telltale signs people hide in a smile, a cough, a kiss. When a childhood friend is murdered, a sense of guilt and a determination to prove his own innocence sends Caleb on a hunt for the killer. But he can’t do it alone. Caleb and his troubled friend Frankie, an ex-cop, start with one clue: Scott, the last word the murder victim texted to Caleb. But Scott is always one step ahead.

'This gripping, original and fast-paced crime thriller is set between a big city and a small coastal town, Resurrection Bay, where Caleb is forced to confront painful memories. Caleb is a memorable protagonist who refuses to let his deafness limit his opportunities, or his participation in the investigation. But does his persistence border on stubbornness? And at what cost? As he delves deeper into the investigation Caleb uncovers unwelcome truths about his murdered friend – and himself.'

Source: Publisher's blurb.

2 5 y separately published work icon The Crossing B. Michael Radburn , ( trans. Isabelle Troin with title L'arbre Aux Fées ) Paris : Editions du Seuil , 2019 Z1763367 2011 single work novel crime mystery

'Redemption is born of guilt, and weighs heavy on even the strongest man.

Traumatised by the disappearance of his daughter Claire, Taylor Bridges' marriage breaks down, and he exiles himself to Glorys Crossing in Tasmania. Taylor is the only ranger in this isolated town adjoining a national park... a town dying a slow death as the rising waters of the new dam project slowly flood it.

Struggling with the guilt of Claire's disappearance, Taylor is a chronic sleepwalker. When another young girl the same age goes missing, Taylor begins to question himself... uncertain of what happens when he sleepwalks.

It's a race against time not just to find the missing girl, but in Taylor's search for redemption and a past better left lying at the bottom of the new lake.' (From the publisher's website.)

10 4 y separately published work icon Scenes from Provincial Life J. M. Coetzee , ( trans. Catherine Glen-Lauga with title Une vie de province ) Paris : Editions du Seuil , 2017 Z1804272 2011 single work novel

J. M. Coetzee's trilogy of fictionalised memoir comprises Boyhood, Youth and Summertime. Although each part has been published separately, they have been collected and revised for publication in this version under the title Scenes from Provincial Life, the sub-title of the component works.

We have decided to list this as a novel, thought it might also have been called autobiography.

20 46 y separately published work icon The Childhood of Jesus J. M. Coetzee , ( trans. Catherine Glen-Lauga with title Une enfance de Jésus ) Paris : Editions du Seuil , 2013 Z1908494 2013 single work novel (taught in 2 units) ''The child is silent. For a while he too is silent. Then he speaks. 'Please believe me—please take it on faith—this is not a simple matter. The boy is without mother. What that means I cannot explain to you because I cannot explain it to myself. Yet I promise you, if you will simply say Yes, without forethought, without afterthought, all will become clear to you, as clear as day, or so I believe. Therefore: will you accept this child as yours?'

David is a small boy who comes by boat across the ocean to a new country. He has been separated from his parents, and has lost the piece of paper that would have explained everything. On the boat a stranger named Simón takes it upon himself to look after the boy.

On arrival they are assigned new names, new birthdates. They know little Spanish, the language of their new country, and nothing about its customs. They have also suffered a kind of forgetting of old attachments and feelings. They are people without a past.

Simón's goal is to find the boy's mother. He feels sure he will know her when he sees her. And David? He wants to find his mother too but he also wants to understand where he is and how he fits in. He is a boy who is always asking questions.

The Childhood of Jesus is not like any other novel you have read. This beautiful and surprising fable is about childhood, about destiny, about being an outsider. It is a novel about the riddle of experience itself.' (Publisher's blurb)
7 13 y separately published work icon Inner Workings : Literary Essays 2000-2005 J. M. Coetzee , ( trans. Jean-François Sené with title De la lecture à l'écriture : chroniques littéraires, 2000-2005 ) Paris : Editions du Seuil , 2012 Z1359603 2007 selected work essay

In this collection of 21 essays introduced by Derek Attridge, most of which have been published in the New York Review of Books, Coetzee reveals his skill as a literary critic in his own right.

23 43 y separately published work icon Summertime : Scenes from Provincial Life J. M. Coetzee , ( trans. Catherine Glen-Lauga with title L'été de la vie ) Paris : Editions du Seuil , 2010 Z1596914 2009 single work novel (taught in 1 units)

'A young English biographer is working on a book about the late writer, John Coetzee. He plans to focus on the years from 1972 - 1977 when Coetzee, in his thirties, is sharing a run-down cottage in the suburbs of Cape Town with his widowed father. This, the biographer senses, is the period when he was finding his feet as a writer. Never having met Coetzee, he embarks on a series of interviews with people who were important to him: a married woman with whom he had an affair, his favourite cousin Margot, a Brazilian dancer whose daughter had English lessons with him, former friends and colleagues. From their testimony emerges a portrait of the young Coetzee as an awkward, bookish individual with little talent for opening himself to others. Within the family he is regarded as an outsider, someone who tried to flee the tribe and has now returned, chastened. His insistence on doing manual work, his long hair and beard, rumours that he writes poetry evoke nothing but suspicion in the South Africa of the time.

Sometimes heartbreaking, often very funny, Summertime shows us a great writer as he limbers up for his task. It completes the majestic trilogy of fictionalised memoir begun with Boyhood and Youth.' (Provided by the publisher.)

24 46 y separately published work icon Diary of a Bad Year J. M. Coetzee , ( trans. Catherine Glen-Lauga with title Journal d'une année noire ) Paris : Editions du Seuil , 2008 Z1421986 2007 single work novel (taught in 10 units) 'J. M. Coetzee's Diary of a Bad Year is about loneliness, friendship and the possibility of love. It takes the reader from Australian democracy to Guantanamo Bay, from the meaning of dishonour to the creative truth of dreams.' (Publisher's blurb)
4 2 y separately published work icon Doubling the Point : Essays and Interviews J. M. Coetzee , David Attwell (editor), ( trans. Jean-Louis Cornille with title Doubler le cap : essais et entretiens ) Paris : Editions du Seuil , 2007 6324232 1992 selected work interview essay

Nadine Gordimer has written of J.M. Coetzee that his “vision goes to the nerve center of being. What he finds there is more than most people will ever know about themselves, and he conveys it with a brilliant writer’s mastery of tension and elegance.” Doubling the Point takes us to the center of that vision. These essays and interviews, documenting Coetzee’s longtime engagement with his own culture, and with modern culture in general, constitute a literary autobiography of striking intellectual, moral, and political force.

Centrally concerned with the form and content of fiction, Doubling the Point provides rigorous insight into the significance of certain writers (particularly modernists such as Kafka, Musil, and Beckett), the value of intellectual movements (from structuralism and structural linguistics on through deconstruction), and the issues of political involvement and responsibility—not only for Coetzee’s own work, but for fiction writing in general. In interviews prefacing each section of the book, Coetzee reflects on the essays to follow and relates them to his life and work. In these interviews editor David Attwell, remarkably well attuned to his subject, prompts from Coetzee answers of extraordinary depth and interest (Harvard University Press).

29 49 y separately published work icon Slow Man J. M. Coetzee , ( trans. Catherine Glen-Lauga with title L'homme ralenti ) Paris : Editions du Seuil , 2006 Z1209346 2005 single work novel Paul Rayment is on the threshold of a comfortable old age when a calamitous cycling accident results in the amputation of a leg. Humiliated, his body truncated, his life circumscribed, he turns away from his friends. He hires a nurse named Marijana, with whom he has a European childhood in common: hers in Croatia, his in France. Tactfully and efficiently she ministers to his needs. But his feelings for her, and for her handsome teenage son, are complicated by the sudden arrival on his doorstep of the celebrated Australian novelist Elizabeth Costello, who threatens to take over the direction of his life and the affairs of his heart. (Publisher's blurb)
27 11 y separately published work icon In the Heart of the Country J. M. Coetzee , ( trans. Sophie Mayoux with title Au coeur de ce pays ) Paris : Editions du Seuil , 2006 6204795 1977 single work novel
3 30 y separately published work icon Moral Hazard Moral Hazard : A Novel Kate Jennings , ( trans. Johan-Frédérik Hel Guedj with title Hasard des maux : roman ) Paris : Editions du Seuil , 2005 Z931717 2002 single work novel (taught in 1 units) 'A liberal young woman finds herself working for arrogant, greedy men on Wall Street while her beloved husband begins to suffer from the early onset of Alzheimer's Disease.' (Publication release) 
32 68 y separately published work icon Elizabeth Costello : Eight Lessons J. M. Coetzee , ( trans. Catherine Glen-Lauga with title Elizabeth Costello : huit leçons ) Paris : Editions du Seuil , 2004 Z1064567 2003 single work novel (taught in 3 units)

In Elizabeth Costello: Eight Lessons, the eponymous protagonist is a retired author of international literary acclaim, who now spends her time giving guest lectures and interviews at scholarly events around the world. Old age has loosened, rather than reified, her ethical and literary convictions, and swelled her emotional reserves; rather than provide the staid academic wisdom expected of her, Costello offers provocative, unsettling opinions on issues such as animal rights, literary censorship, and the nature of belief - opinions she may or may not believe in herself. Profoundly aware of itself, Coetzee's novel is about human morality and mortality, but above all, about literature itself and the ethical responsibilities of writers and readers.

9 28 y separately published work icon A Child's Book of True Crime Chloe Hooper , ( trans. Antoine Cazé with title Un vrai crime pour livre d'enfant : roman ) Paris : Editions du Seuil , 2004 Z945071 2002 single work novel (taught in 2 units)

'Kate Byrne is having an affair with the father of her most gifted pupil, Lucien. Unnervingly, her lover's wife has just published Murder at Black Swan Point, a true crime novel about the brutal slaying of a young adulteress. Suspecting the adult account of Black Swan Point's murder to be wrong, Kate imagines her own version of the novel, for children, narrated by Australian animals. But has her obsession with the crime aligned her fate with that of the murdered adulteress?

'Compelled by the lives of her nine-year-old students, Kate is a misfit among their parents. And though, in scenes of escalating eroticism, Lucien's father brings her to life sexually, he does nothing to penetrate her obsession with the past. Kate is fixated on the crime of passion that occurred years earlier, less and less aware of her own reputation in the present.' (Synopsis)

5 8 y separately published work icon Agapanthus Tango David Francis , ( trans. Alain Defossé with title Le tango des agapanthes ) Paris : Editions du Seuil , 2004 Z823506 2001 single work novel

'Day's mother died with her eyes wide open in 1947, near Maude, New South Wales. No doctor was called. Day watched his father drop her body into the red earth wrapped in a hessian feed sack. He was only twelve. When he rode up Muddy Gates Lane, away from there, he didn't know that he was leaving, but he was sure he wasn't coming back. Day's journey took him to America, travelling as groom for a horse called Unusual. On the Eastern Shore of Maryland he meets Callie, who wants to be the world's first woman jockey. There is no doubt in her eyes, she knows about things that Day has never seen. He is stranded by a love for Callie that takes him back to the harshness of his childhood in Australia, to the dark secrets of his family.'

Source: Publisher's blurb.

27 10 y separately published work icon Youth : Scenes from Provincial Life J. M. Coetzee , ( trans. Catherine Glen-Lauga with title Vers l'age d'homme ) Paris : Editions du Seuil , 2003 Z1212327 2002 single work novel (taught in 1 units)

"The narrator of Youth, a student in the South Africa of the 1950s, has long been plotting an escape from his native country: from the stifling love of his mother, from a father whose failures haunt him, and from what he is sure is impending revolution. Studying mathematics, reading poetry, saving money, he tries to ensure that when he arrives in the real world, wherever that may be, he will be prepared to experience life to its full intensity, and transform it into art." "Arriving at last in London, however, he finds neither poetry nor romance. Instead he succumbs to the monotony of life as a computer programmer, from which random, loveless affairs offer no relief. Devoid of inspiration, he stops writing. An awkward colonial, a constitutional outsider, he begins a dark pilgrimage in which he is continually tested and continually found wanting" (Source: Viking publisher's blurb)

47 43 y separately published work icon Disgrace J. M. Coetzee , ( trans. Catherine Glen-Lauga with title Disgrâce ) Paris : Editions du Seuil , 2001 6173241 1999 single work novel (taught in 11 units)

After years teaching Romantic poetry at the Technical University of Cape Town, David Lurie, middle-aged and twice divorced, has an impulsive affair with a student. The affair sours; he is denounced and summoned before a committee of inquiry. Willing to admit his guilt, but refusing to yield to pressure to repent publicly, he resigns and retreats to his daughter Lucy's isolated smallholding. For a time, his daughter's influence and the natural rhythms of the farm promise to harmonise his discordant life. But the balance of power in the country is shifting. He and Lucy become victims of a savage and disturbing attack which brings into relief all the faultlines in their relationship.' (Publisher's blurb)

29 8 y separately published work icon Boyhood : Scenes from Provincial Life J. M. Coetzee , ( trans. Catherine Glen-Lauga with title Scènes de la vie d'un jeune garçon : récit ) Paris : Editions du Seuil , 1999 6309688 1997 single work novel

Coetzee has been reluctant to talk about himself. Now, revisiting the South Africa of a half century ago, he writes about his childhood and his own interior life. Boyhood's young narrator grew up in a new development north of Cape Town, tormented by guilt and fear. With a father he did not respect, and a mother he both adored and resented, he led a double life - at school the brilliant and well-behaved student, at home the princely despot, always terrified of losing his mother's love. His first encounters with literature, the awakenings of sexual desire, and a growing awareness of apartheid left him with baffling questions; and only in his love of the veld ("farms are places of freedom, of life") could he find a sense of belonging. Bold and telling, this masterly evocation of a young boy's life is the book Coetzee's many admirers have been waiting for, but never could have expected (Source: Libraries Australia).

26 4 y separately published work icon The Master of Petersburg J. M. Coetzee , ( trans. Sophie Mayoux with title Le maître de Pétersbourg : roman ) Paris : Editions du Seuil , 1995 6204024 1994 single work novel

In the fall of 1869 Fyodor Mikhailovich Dostoevsky, lately a resident of Germany, is summoned back to St. Petersburg by the sudden death of his stepson, Pavel. Half crazed with grief, stricken by epileptic seizures, and erotically obsessed with his stepson's landlady, Dostoevsky is nevertheless intent on unraveling the enigma of Pavel's life. Was the boy a suicide or a murder victim? Did he love his stepfather or despise him? Was he a disciple of the revolutionary Nechaev, who even now is somewhere in St. Petersburg pursuing a dream of apocalyptic violence? As he follows his stepson's ghost - and becomes enmeshed in the same demonic conspiracies that claimed the boy - Dostoevsky emerges as a figure of unfathomable contradictions: naive and calculating, compassionate and cruel, pious and unspeakably perverse. (Source: Libraries Australia)

X