More Manchette in English
With a hat tip to Spintetingler comes the welcome news that a third novel by Jean-Patrick Manchette will be published in English translation on April 26, 2011.
Fatale is the book, New York Review of Books Classics is the publisher, and Donald Nicholson-Smith is the translator.
I've raved about Manchette's The Prone Gunman and Three to Kill (and about the graphic-novel adaptation of the latter, called West Coast Blues). In one such rave, "The most influential crime writer?", I wrote that:
© Peter Rozovsky 2010
Fatale is the book, New York Review of Books Classics is the publisher, and Donald Nicholson-Smith is the translator.
I've raved about Manchette's The Prone Gunman and Three to Kill (and about the graphic-novel adaptation of the latter, called West Coast Blues). In one such rave, "The most influential crime writer?", I wrote that:
"Manchette's time, an age that saw assassinations, cover-ups at the highest levels, and revelations of the violence that attended colonialism and its end, could no longer be shocked by small-town or even big-city corruption of the Hammett and Chandler kind. Manchette restored that ability to shock, with tales of what power can do to those it finds convenient to crush. And he did it while remaining true to the roots of pulp. Heck, the guy even loved American movies and played the saxophone. How much more genuine can you get?"So I'd call this good news.
© Peter Rozovsky 2010
Labels: France, Jean-Patrick Manchette
posted by Peter Rozovsky at 1:20 PM
6 Comments:
That NYRB imprint has just done some great, great stuff in the way of reprints.
I've read Nicolas Bouvier in an NYRB edition, and they have also issued books by Simenon, Kenneth Fearing ("The Big Clock") and Leonardo Sciascia, so this will not be their first venture into crime writing.
Yes, it's the breadth of their commitment that's a bit staggering.
"The Big Clock" is probably the most surprising of their titles to me. I didn't know it had the cachet of Sciascia or of Simenon's non-series books. Manchette surprised me at first, too, but less so the more I think about it.
I visited the Brooklyn Book Festival on Sunday. NYRB Classics had a table. Had I known than they were going to publich Manchette, I'd have asked questions,
They really think outside the normal classic reprint box, I think.
Joseph Fox, an independent bookshop here in Philadelphia, always has a nice rack of NYRB books.
By the way, I talked to an editor at Europa Editions at the festival who said -- and damn me, I can't remember now if he was talking about their overall imprint or about "Zulu" in particular -- that they had done very well at independent bookshops.
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