Maylis de Kerangal is the award winning and critically acclaimed author of several books, including Naissance d'un pont (Birth of a Bridge), winner of the Prix Franz Hessel and Prix Médicis; Réparer les vivants, which won the Grand Prix RTL-Lire and whose English translation, The Heart, was one of the Wall Street Journal's Ten Best Fiction Works of 2016 and the winner of the 2017 Wellcome Book Prize; and Un chemin de tables, whose English translation, The Cook, was a New York Times Book Review Editors' Choice. Mend the Living was Longlisted for the Booker International Prize 2016.

Jessica Moore is a poet, singer-songwriter, translator, and author. A former Lannan writer-in-residence and winner of a PEN America Translation Award for her translation of Turkana Boy, by Jean-François Beauchemin, her first collection of poems, Everything, now, was published in 2012. She lives in Toronto.

"This stylish collection opens with a narrator getting her jaw molded while a dentist shows her a photo of 'a human jawbone from the mesolithic, ' an image that establishes the oral and historical fixations that give de Kerangal's mostly plotless stories their energy. A deep sensitivity to language elevates the mundanity of these narrators' lives." --The New Yorker

"De Kerangal's voice in Canoes and Moore's, as it did in her translation of de Kerangal's Eastbound, exudes exquisite language captured in balanced phrasing, nuanced word choice, and vivid specific details. Together they develop indelible characters and evoke a mesmerizing group of provocative, unforgettable stories." --Robert Allen Papinchak, World Literature Today

"The characters in Maylis de Kerangal's haunting stories are impassioned detectives or solitary archaeologists taking the measure of those traces by which we find our way. In their immersive observation they track the minute changes that transform everything they thought they knew about the way we're both jettisoned and anchored by those around us." --Jim Shepard

"Maylis de Kerangal's [Canoes] collects small, poignant worlds. Spun in long, stream-of-consciousness sentences, her text snakes like a stream. The stories' common thread is voices--changed, unrecognized, lost . . . Jessica Moore's translation is seamless and poetic." --Theodore Anderson, Newcity

"De Kerangal's masterful collection examines alienation and grief at pivotal moments in her characters' lives . . . Each story is richly complex, and the collection's recurring canoe imagery gives it the feel of a treasure map . . . This understated volume packs a powerful punch." --Publishers Weekly, starred review

"The stories capture fleeting ideas and moments . . . Above all there's an appealing tone of exploration, of reaching for the ineffable in the past, present, and future . . . An accomplished braid of explorations into sound and significance." --Kirkus Reviews

"Exquisite . . . De Kerangal pairs gloriously sensuous and caustically incisive visual descriptions of interiors, cities, highways, sprawling suburbs, land, and sky with uncanny and revealing soundscapes that capture the layered timbres of nature, humans, and machines. These unusual and vibrant stories are poetically recalibrating, droll, and intriguing." --Donna Seaman, Booklist starred review

"These are beautiful stories; their narrators are thoughtful, interested in the world around them and the remains below their feet, hidden from view but crucial and foundational . . . [Canoes] traffics in a kind of matter-of-fact, unsentimental wonder--the kind of work that makes you more alert, critical, and curious." --Chloe Pfeiffer, BookBrowse

Publisher: Archipelago Books

Pub date: 2024-10-29

Length: 197 pages