We’d love for you to join us on November 11 at 5PM EST for a virtual conversation between Paul Eprile, Bill Johnston, and Edmund White. Eprile and Johnston will be discussing their new translations of Jean Giono‘s work: Ennemonde, translated by Johnston and out from Archipelago, and The Open Road, translated by Eprile and out from NYRB Classics. This event is co-presented by Archipelago, NYRB, Community Bookstore, and Albertine Bookstore and will stream live on Zoom.

You can find the link to register for this virtual event here.

On Ennemonde, Duncan Stuart wrote, “Ennemonde is a novel of nature, a novel that might tells us something about the gap between humanity and its environs . . . The sky is black, the trees – beeches, chestnuts, sessile oaks – are infinite, the rocks reverberate, and the peasants are murderous . . . Giono troubles us, asks us to pay attention, and shows us what one can see if one looks.”

Andre Gidé, Giono’s friend and collaborator, wrote, “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.”

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.

Bill Johnston is a translator from Polish and French, and Professor of Comparative Literature at Indiana University. In 2019, he won the National Translation Award for Poetry for his translation of the Polish epic, Pan Tadeusz, published by Archipelago.

Edmund White is the author of twenty-five books, including The Unpunished Vice: A Life of Reading, which was published in the spring of 2018.