Funny Birds

High up in the treetops, strange birds are hatching from their eggs, craning their necks toward their mothers, and exploring their new environment. In this enchanting book, paper artist Philippe UG has created an avian paradise comprising 14 unique and delightful birds. READ MORE

The Other Face of the Moon

Gathering for the first time all of Claude Lévi-Strauss’s writings on Japanese civilization, The Other Face of the Moon forms a sustained meditation into the French anthropologist’s dictum that to understand one’s own culture, one must regard it from the point of view of another. READ MORE

Anthropology Confronts the Problems of the Modern World

Anthropology Confronts the Problems of the Modern World is the first English translation of a series of lectures Claude Lévi-Strauss delivered in Tokyo in 1986. Written with an eye toward the future as his own distinguished career was drawing to a close, this volume presents a synthesis of the author’s major ideas about structural anthropology, a field he helped establish. Critiquing insights of his earlier writings on the relationship between race, history, and civilization, Lévi-Strauss revisits the social issues that never ceased to fascinate him. READ MORE

Bitter Almonds

Édith can hardly believe it when she learns that Fadila, her sixty-year-old housemaid, is completely illiterate. How can a person living in Paris in the third millennium possibly survive without knowing how to read or write? READ MORE

Figures of Medicine

What does the infamous face transplant in France in 2005 share with the examination of “swollen faces” in Latin America in the 1930s? What does blood transfusion in Europe during the 17th century have in common with the discovery of mosquitoes as parasitic vectors in China at the close of the 19th century? And, last, how does the reconstruction of noses using skin flaps in Bologna in the 16th century relate to the opening of a forehead cyst in Guatemala in 1916? READ MORE

My Beautiful Bus

Poetic, comic, obsessed with minutiae, My Beautiful Bus is a welcome dose of serious frivolity at the expense of the contemporary novel. Based on an actual bus trip taken by Oulipo-member Jacques Jouet in the late '80s, his fictional reconstruction of the experience twenty years later focuses not so much on the scenery as on the possibilities offered an author by the eponymous vehicle and its occupants. READ MORE

An Enchantment

Beautifully constructed in a semi-classical style, this graphic novel features a light-spirited romantic story. This latest installment in the Louvre collection tells the tale of a museum director in a waking dream after his retirement dinner where he wanders the vast halls of the museum before eloping with a muse. The magic of the vast museum melds with the ethereal storytelling to create a unique graphic novel that stands as an unforgettable experience. READ MORE

The Past Ahead

The Past Ahead is the story of the destinies of two people after their experiences of the genocide in Rwanda. Isaro is orphaned, exiled, and now returned to her native country. Niko is a character in a novel that Isaro writes to help her understand her country's recent horrific past. READ MORE

A Box of Photographs

In this book that is equal parts memoir and intellectual and cultural history, French writer Roger Grenier contemplates the ways that photography can change the course of a life, reflecting along the way on the history of photography and its practitioners. READ MORE

The Library of Unrequited Love

One morning a librarian finds a reader who has been locked in overnight. She starts to talk to him, a one-way conversation that soon gathers pace as an outpouring of frustrations, observations and anguishes. Two things shine through: her shy, unrequited passion for a quiet researcher named Martin, and an ardent and absolute love of books. READ MORE

The Initiates: A Comic Artist and a Wine Artisan Exchange Jobs

A graphic novel that explores the nature of one’s vocation, this book offers a look at the daily devotion to craft in two dissimilar professions. Étienne Davodeau is a comic artist—he doesn’t know much about the world of winemaking. Richard Leroy is a winemaker—he’s rarely even read comics. But filled with good will and curiosity, the two men exchange professions, and Étienne goes to work in Richard’s vineyards and cellar, while Richard, in return, leaps into the world of comics. READ MORE

Mr Leon's Paris

Mr Leon, a Parisian taxi driver of many years, spends his days ferrying colourful characters to designations corresponding to his passengers' personalities and nationalities. From behind the wheel of his little yellow taxi, Mr Leon travels the world: from the North Pole to the Eiffel Tower to the Congo. READ MORE