All My Friends: Stories Reprint Edition

Praise for All My Friends:

“NDiaye, who received France’s most prestigious literary prize for Three Powerful Women and may be that nation’s most startling new literary voice, brings to life an electrifying rogue’s gallery of social outcasts, disgruntled wives, and loony strivers. . . . Stump’s perfectly calibrated translation captures the rich timbre and fearsome bite of NDiaye’s chiseled prose.”
— Publishers Weekly

“A superb short story collection. . . . Her oneiric tales suggest a necessary truth about contemporary life that explains why she is increasingly–and justly–recognized as a major world writer.” — Rain Taxi Review of Books

“Woah. These stories are not linked, but the emotional force that pervades them is so consistent you feel that Marie NDiaye’s fantastic characters belong together. This book is a world.” — SF Weekly

“[NDiaye’s] is a unique voice among other contemporary French writers, and her fictional vision both intricate and distinctive. She is an example of exactly the kind of non-Anglophone writer who should have already been translated in full. Hopefully, this new translation will renew interest in her work, prompt further translations and give English readers the chance to experience her entire contribution to world letters.”
— The Rumpus

“All five of the stories that make up this slim book are masterful. . . . NDiaye creates a portable unease that slips from one story to the next, never losing its force, or its accusatory tone–You don’t see anything? You ought to see something.”
— The Collagist

Praise for Three Strong Women:
“NDiaye is a hypnotic storyteller with an unflinching understanding of the rock-bottom reality of most people’s lives.”
— The New York Times Book Review

“Passionate and unsettling. . . . Rich, sensuous. . . . Three Strong Women is a major work of world literature. . . . A rare novel, capturing the grand scope of migration, from Africa to Europe and back, and the inner lives of very different people caught between pride and despair. And NDiaye is a rare novelist, whose arrival in America is long overdue.”
— NPR

“Gorgeous, fearless prose . . . NDiaye’s storytelling approaches something of the power and simplicity of folklore. There is good and evil here, and as in the world they are blended confusingly and only slowly revealed. In the interplay between Europe and Africa, between men and women, NDiaye finds both beauty and beast.”
— The Boston Globe

Marie NDiaye was born in 1967 in Pithiviers, France. She is the author of around twenty novels, plays, collections of stories, and nonfiction books, which have been translated into numerous languages. She’s received the Prix Femina and the Prix Goncourt, France’s highest literary honor, and her plays are in the repertoire of the Comédie-Française.

Jordan Stump is a Professor of French at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln; he has translated some thirty works of (mostly) contemporary French fiction, by such writers as Marie Redonnet, Eric Chevillard, and Scholastique Mukasonga, as well as seven works by Marie NDiaye, including the forthcoming Vengeance Is Mine.  His translation of her The Cheffe was awarded the annual translation prize for fiction by the American Literary Translators’ Association.