Financial Times Book of the Year The extraordinary artist, the spider woman, the intellectual, the rebel, the sly enchantress, and the “good girl” sing together in this exuberant, lithe text beautifully translated by Cole Swensen. This brilliant portrait of the renowned artist Louise Bourgeois (1911–2010) shows a woman who was devoted to her art and whose life was also that of her century. The art world’s grande dame and its shameless old lady, spinning personal history into works of profound strangeness, speaks with her characteristic insolence and wit, through a most discreet, masterful writer. From her childhood in France to her exile and adult life in America, to her death, this phosphorescent novella describes Bourgeois’s inner life as only one artist regarding another can. Included as an afterword is Frémon’s essay about his own “portrait writing” and how he came to know and work with Louise Bourgeois.

Now, Now, Louison

Arts & Photography

Frémon, Jean

Individual Artists

New Directions

Literary Nonfiction. Art. Translated from the French by Cole Swensen. Jean Frémon writes about painters he loves, contemporary and otherwise, about writers, whose books are sometimes named, and who at other times stay unnamed. He visits each one at a crucial moment of his life, creating thus an essential and spiritual biography of each. The particular elegance of his writing and the form he uses make us privileged witnesses of his investigations."Jean Frémon's REAL LIFE OF SHADOWS delivers its dazzling récits with delicately calibrated irony. Frémon writes in "the words of others" tales of stunning quiet mystery. His painterly journey, ably translated by Cole Swensen, portrays a parallel present of chance and circumstance, where fragmented narrative, or narrative fragments, fall into the gaps as well as the text, intervals fulfilling inscription."—Norma Cole

The Real Life of Shadows

Literature & Fiction

Contemporary

The Post-Apollo Press

Cultural Writing. Poetry. Jean Fremon was born in Asnieres, outside Paris, in 1946. Poet, novelist, art critic, he has published numerous books in France and has been translated into English by Lydia Davis, Stacy Doris, Tom Mandel, and Norma Cole. PAINTING, translated by fiction writer Brian Evenson, is his first single-author volume to appear in English. Composed of three lyrical essays, Eclipse, Painting, and Summer (Been), PAINTING explores the divide between experience and representation, event and narrative. Saddlestapled chapbook.

Painting

Poetry

Black Square Editions

Biographies & Memoirs

Arts & Literature

Les Fugitives

Like Jean Frémon's 1994 novel Island of the Dead (winner of the PEN Translation Prize), Frémon's earlier Le jardin botanique (The Botanical Garden) is a rich, philosophical work filled with the petty jealousies, gossip, and the intellectual joys of the workers of Paris' Jardin de Plantes. A darkly joyous celebration of individuals and their language.

The Botanical Garden (Green Integer)

Literary

Green Integer

Poetry. Translation. Translated from the French by Norma Cole, Lydia Davis, Serge Gavronsky and Cole Swensen. The serial poems in DISTANT NOISE present spare scenes shot through with surprise and the kind of truth found only in disorientation. Emperors and students gaze across landscapes of uncertainty, and ordinary human interaction has become a game of stilted gestures and official regulations. "Sublime and compelling and like no other work that exists today--whether French, American or Chinese. Jean Fr‚mon is a wholly singular artist, a writer who lives in the radiant zone where poetry, philosophy and storytelling meet"--Paul Auster. Cover by Louise Bourgeois.

Distant Noise

Avec Books

As Jean Fremon describes, "He muses, he mopes, he immerses himself in atlases, he recites the names of lakes, he observes insects, he listens to the sounds of fountains, he reads Leibniz. This man, known here by the initials of a name that is not his own, is not without a certain resemblance to the writer Robert Walser. He could almost be his avatar, his emanation, his apparition." Who is he? Or, more important, who is the I of these first-person vignettes? Walser? Fremon? or the translator? This layering of voices is echoed through the bilingual presentation of these short, musing prose poems.

The Posthumous Life of R.W.

Omnidawn

Cultural Writing. Art. Translated from the French by Brian Evenson. Jean Fremon's THE PARADOXES OF ROBERT RYMAN is a collection of essays about the American abstract painter, Robert Ryman. Robert Ryman's remarks were written down by Fremon during the course of many visits to his studio in 1989 and 1990. Fremon wrote down his thoughts and Ryman's remarks in French, even though their conversations were spoken in English. From these notes Fremon wrote a collection of essays that were then retranslated into English for this book, and thus they may differ slightly from the original. Fremon is the author of many novels, works of criticism, and volumes of poetry, including PAINTING (Black square editions, 2000), DISTANT NOISE (Avec Books, 2003), and ISLAND OF THE DEAD (Green Integer, 2003), all of which SPD carries.

The Paradoxes of Robert Ryman

History & Criticism

Trilogie new-yorkaise

AUSTER, PAUL.

Chénetier, Marc

Actes-sud

Calme-toi, Lison (French Edition)

Essays & Correspondence

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Frémon, Jean. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Books by Frémon, Jean