- Comics
- Literature
- Social Sciences and Humanities
- All cities
// CANCELED // Author on Tour: Mathias Énard
Books & Ideas
© Marc Melki
// We regret to inform you that Mathias Énard’s US tour has been canceled until further notice. We apologize for any inconvenience and thank you for your understanding. //
Author Mathias Énard will be in the United States to promote the US release of his novel The Annual Banquet of The Gravediggers’ Guild (Le banquet annuel de la confrérie des fossoyeurs, Actes Sud; trans. by Frank Wynne, New Directions, 2023).
About Mathias Énard
Former student at the École du Louvre, Mathias Énard then studied Persian and Arabic and became a translator alongside his career as a writer. Mathias Énard received France’s highest literary distinctions, including the Prix du Livre Inter and the 2008 Prix Décembre for his novel Zone (Zone, Actes Sud; trans. by Charlotte Mandell, Open Letter Books, 2010). In 2015, he won the prestigious Prix Goncourt for his book Compass (Boussole, Actes Sud. trans. by Charlotte Mandell, New Directions, 2017). The Annual Banquet of the Gravediggers’ Guild is his latest novel and was first published in France in 2020 by Actes Sud.
About The Annual Banquet of The Gravediggers’ Guild
(trans. by Frank Wynne, New Directions, 2023)
To research his thesis on contemporary agrarian life, anthropology student David Mazon decides to move from Paris to a small town in the marshlands of Western France. But David doesn’t know that here, people have a very peculiar relationship to Death. Even more peculiar is that once a year, Death and the livings observe a temporary truce during a gargantuan three-day feast, where gravediggers gorge themselves on food, drink, and language…
Written in Mathias Énard’s signature style, marked by clever humor and vast erudition, The Annual Banquet of the Gravediggers’ Guild unfolds as a riotous narrative where the distinction between past and present continually dissolves within a backdrop of exuberant Rabelaisian extravagance.
The Annual Banquet of The Gravediggers’Guild was released in the United States in December 2023.
Program
// We regret to inform you that Mathias Énard’s US tour has been canceled until further notice. We apologize for any inconvenience and thank you for your understanding. //
For more information, please email Valentine Richet at valentine.richet@villa-albertine.org.
In partnership with
New Directions
New Directions Publishing was founded in 1936, when James Laughlin (1914–1997), then a twenty-two-year-old Harvard sophomore, issued the first of the New Directions anthologies.
