FP Staff List: PANICS and French translations we love
A close friend and protégé of Marguerite Duras, French author Barbara Molinard (1921–1986) wrote and wrote feverishly, but only managed to publish one book in her lifetime: the surreal, nightmarish collection Viens (Panics). In the unsettling tradition of Franz Kafka, Djuna Barnes, and Leonora Carrington, Panics recovers the work of a tormented writer who often destroyed her writing as soon as she produced it, and whose insights into violence, mental illness, and bodily autonomy are simultaneously absurdist and razor-sharp.
Educator and award-winning translator Emma Ramadan brings this collection to English readers for the first time. To celebrate Panics being accessible to a whole new audience, we’ve rounded up our favorite Feminist Press books translated from the French, just like Panics!
Barbara Molinard
A haunting, bizarre short story collection about violence, mental illness, and the warped contradictions of the twentieth-century female experience.
Virginie Despentes
The search for a missing girl provides a scathing commentary on contemporary life.
Gerty Dambury
A young girl's curiosity about her teacher's sudden disappearance sets the stage for a resonant analysis of 1960s Pointe-à-Pitre.
Mireille Gansel
This half memoir, half philosophical treatise is a humanist meditation on translation.
Ananda Devi
This novel of post-9/11 London is a masterful dissection of racism, aging, and the perturbing nature of desire.
Virginie Despentes
Psychiatric institutions and class difference doom two young lovers from the start in this dark romantic comedy.
Violette Leduc
This hidden classic, censored for half a century, follows the obsessive pleasures and repressed secrets of two schoolgirls in love.
Darina Al-Joundi and Mohamed Kacimi
The wild ride of a young woman’s sexual rebellion in war-torn Beirut.
Werewere Liking
Noma Award-winning novel called "a deeply felt presentation of the female condition in Africa."
Virginie Despentes
A pulpy tale of mismatched twins struggling to embody the "perfect woman."