On March 4th, 2022 at 3 PM EST (12 PM PST), join us as we celebrate the life and work of French writer Jean Giono (1895-1970) with translators Jody Gladding and Paul Eprile and editor Jack Shoemaker. This conversation will be moderated by Point Reyes Books‘ owner Stephen Sparks.

Giono, author of the classic works The Man Who Planted Trees, Joy of Man’s Desiring, and others, has been rediscovered in the English-speaking world over the past few years thanks to new translations published by Archipelago Books and New York Review of Books Classics.

“Giono’s writing possesses a vigor, a surprising texture, a contagious joy, a sureness of touch and design, an arresting originality, and that sort of unfeigned strangeness that always goes along with sincerity when it escapes from the ruts of convention.” —André Gide, unpublished letter, 1929

This event will be streamed on Crowdcast. For more information, and to register for the event, please visit Point Reyes Books’ website here.

Jean Giono was born in Manosque in 1895 and spent most of his life in that part of Provence, which is also the setting for his immense body of work, over fifty novels, as well as poems, essays and plays. During World War II, he turned to political writing and was jailed for pacifist activities. He is best known in North America for his autobiographical Blue Boy, The Horseman on the Roof, and The Man Who Planted Trees.

Jody Gladding is a poet and translator. Her most recent collection of poetry is Rooms and Their Airs. She has translated over twenty books from French, including The Serpent of Stars by Jean Giono. She teaches in the MFA program at Vermont College of Fine Arts and lives in Vermont. Gladding and Elizabeth Deshays were awarded the French-American Foundation/Florence Gould Translation Prize in 2008 for their rendering of Michon’s Vies Miniscules (Small Lives).

Paul Eprile is a publisher, poet, and translator. He was a co-winner of the 2018 Annual Translation Prize of the French-American Foundation for his translation of Jean Giono’s Melville, which was published by NYRB Classics. He lives on the Niagara Escarpment in Ontario, Canada.

Jack Shoemaker is the Founding Editor and Senior Vice President of CounterPoint Press, based in Berkeley. He began his literary career as a bookseller in 1963 in Santa Barbara, California. In 1979 he co-founded North Point Press with William Turnbull and served as the company’s editor-in-chief. In 1981 he won the Carey-Thomas Award for creative publishing and has also served as the West Coast Editor of the Knopf Publishing Group. In 1994 he joined Frank Pearl in founding Counterpoint Press.

Stephen Sparks was a manager and new book buyer at Green Apple Books in San Francisco for nearly ten years. In 2014, he opened and ran Green Apple Books on the Park, the newest branch of the 50-year-old institution. In the middle of his tenure at Green Apple, he spent a year in Champaign-Urbana, Illinois, where he finished graduate school (an MLIS degree from San Jose State) and worked for a non-profit literary publisher, Dalkey Archive Press. Before coming west, Stephen ran a bookstore in Ocean City, New Jersey that was part of a small regional chain along the NJ shore. He and his wife, Molly Parent, have owned Point Reyes Books since 2017.