Happy are the Happy

The internationally acclaimed playwright and novelist Yasmina Reza stages a band of eighteen characters at war with their lives, with only humor to sustain them                                          Happy are the loved ones and the lovers and those who can do without love. Happy are the happy. —Jorge Luis BorgesSchnitzler’s La Ronde gives these twenty short chapters their shape while Borges’s poem gives them their content. As we move from story to story, thrilled to reconnect with an old acquaintance from an earlier scene, we can’t help but admit that we are very much at home in this human comedy that understands all too well the passing thoughts, desires, actions, fears, and mistakes that we have and make day after day, but that we would be incapable of rendering with such acuity and compassion.

Literature & Fiction

Reza, Yasmina

Contemporary

Vintage

An enormous success in France and a media sensation around the world, Yasmina Reza’s Dawn, Dusk or Night will startle English-language readers with its utterly unorthodox (and candid and witty) portrait of a man in his quest for ultimate power. In 2006, Yasmina Reza, the most celebrated playwright in France, asked Nicolas Sarkozy a simple question: Would he allow her to spend the next year with him and his team as he campaigned for the French presidency? His response was an unqualified yes. To the alarm of his advisers, and the consternation of many of her friends, who feared she was making a pact with the devil, she picked up her notebook and her pencil, and off she went. It is not enough to say that she was an observer of Sarkozy’s rise to power. Rather, hers is the account of a brilliant woman of letters dancing in orbit with the most powerful man in France. Their casual exchanges, her remarkable insights, their phenomenal experience exist as a play of words and glances, framed as scenes from a headlong drama. Through the greenrooms, bus rides, and flights, along the campaign trail; in strategy sessions and at meetings with heads of state;, in all hours of the day and night, they develop a relationship that knows no parallel, bridging the arts and politics, abiding within a purely intellectual sphere without judgment, conflict, or competition. The groundbreaking Dawn, Dusk or Night defies genre to offer a spellbinding look at the interplay between two formidable champions bound by intellect and nation.

Dawn Dusk or Night: A Year with Nicolas Sarkozy

Biographies & Memoirs

Leaders & Notable People

KNOPF

From celebrated playwright-novelist Yasmina Reza comes an unprecedented account of her year spent with French president Nicolas Sarkozy. This utterly unorthodox portrait is written in a captivatingly impressionistic style: their exchanges exist as a play of words and glances, framed as scenes from a headlong drama. Along the campaign trail, in strategy sessions, and at meetings with heads of state, writer and politician develop a relationship that knows no parallel.

Historical

Samuel Perlman, the elderly narrator of Yasmina Reza’s deliriously dyspeptic novel, is surrounded by happy people. His wife Nancy is thrilled to be a member of the human race. His grown son is content crisscrossing the world to “sample exotic fruit with the savages.” But Samuel himself refuses to be happy and his attempt to explain his refusal (half to his son and half to himself) generates an epic, blasphemous, and hilarious rant against the compromises of his life. Whether he is recounting his pal Lionel’s heroic battle against impotence; lamenting the loss of his great love, the irresistible Marisa Botton; or pondering the possibility of a new love in the person of one Genevieve Abramowitz, the droll, irascible Perlman is one of the great talkers of contemporary fiction. And Desolationis one of the most dazzling performances ever written for one voice.

Desolation

Dramas & Plays

Serge has bought a modern work of art for a large sum of money. Marc hates the painting and cannot believe that a friend of his could possibly want such a work. Yvan attempts, unsuccessfully, to placate both sides with hilarious consequences. The question is: Are you who you think you are or are you who your friends think you are?

Art: A Play

Farrar. Straus and Giroux

A train compartment. A man and a woman. In a series of dazzling internal monologues, the man, a novelist, muses on his latest work, and considers life and the futility of writing. The woman thinks of her life in the full knowledge that the man she is facing is the novelist she admires and whose latest work she has tucked in her handbag.

The Unexpected Man: A Play

Faber&Faber

Hammerklavier, the first novel by the internationally acclaimed playwright Yasmina Reza, became an instant bestseller on its publication in France. Narrated in the main by the author herself, Hammerklavier opens with a description of her dead father failing to play Beethoven on the self-same instrument and suffering admonishment from the maestro himself in a bizarre encounter in heaven. A series of forty-four autobiographical and fictional vignettes ensue in which the narrator's memories and fantasies of people - real and imagined - combine to stunning effect.

Hammerklavier

Humor & Entertainment

From the Author of The Tony Award-Winning Art, a Moving Play About Family and Memory Simon Weinberg is dead. And, on a November morning, he is buried in accordance with his wishes on the Loiret family estate. Gathered together at his funeral are six people--brothers and sisters, lovers, husbands and wives. Mourning allows them special privilege and, for a few hours, they are isolated in another world under a lingering sun, in the shadow of the deceased. Conversations After a Burial explores that ineffable moment of mourning, wherein the newly deceased is still almost palpable, the moment in which one can still maintain the memory of a breath, the intense moment between the absence and the return to every day existence, between loss and life

Conversations After a Burial: A Play

From the celebrated writer of Art, a scathingly hilarious commentary on vanity, professional insecurity, and the vicissitudes of marriage.
Life X 3 presents three versions of two couples (and an offstage six-year-old) trying to make a success of one evening despite the fact that they neither like nor respect one another. When Hubert and Inès arrive a day early to dinner at the home of Henri and Sophie, Sophie barely has time to change out of her robe and Inès is in a foul mood about a run in her stocking-from there, the evening can only go downhill. Over an improvised meal of chocolate fingers, potato chips, and wine, the couples trade insults on every social and professional level and loyalties are changed with the same rapidity that glasses of Sancerre are drained. However, as she has so astutely done in the past, Yasmina Reza uses these acidic exchanges to illuminate the innate desire for love and acceptance in us all.

Life x 3: A Play (Faber Plays)

Now in one volume, the works of "the most successful international playwright of her generation" (Vogue).
Yasmina Reza's plays reflect the razor sharp wit, social commentary, and impeccable comedic timing that have earned the praise of critics throughout the world, none more so than the Tony Award-winning Art, an eccentric and clever play of ideas that took the American theater community by storm. In this sly critique of contemporary relationships, Reza skillfully picks apart the friendship of three men via a bowl of olives and a white-on-white painting. Now translated into more than 30 languages, Art continues to be performed worldwide, even as Reza's other plays have garnered similar acclaim. Life x 3, Reza's most recent offering, again highlights her satirical wit as two couples face off in three different versions of the dinner from hell. Praised as "compact, cool and clever" by Christopher Isherwood of Variety, Reza uses the acidic exchanges of her characters to illuminate their inner desire for love and acceptance. Also included in this edition are two earlier plays, The Unexpected Man and Conversations After a Burial. Each elucidates the startling difference between public and private life, be it in the confines of a train compartment or a country estate in the aftermath of a loved one's passing.

Yasmina Reza: Plays 1: Art, Life x 3, The Unexpected Man, Conversations After a Burial (Contemporary Classics (Faber & Faber))

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

Books by Reza, Yasmina

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

Happy are the Happy

Dawn Dusk or Night: A Year with Nicolas Sarkozy

Dawn Dusk or Night: A Year with Nicolas Sarkozy

Desolation

Art: A Play

The Unexpected Man: A Play

Hammerklavier

Conversations After a Burial: A Play

Life x 3: A Play (Faber Plays)

Yasmina Reza: Plays 1: Art, Life x 3, The Unexpected Man, Conversations After a Burial (Contemporary Classics (Faber & Faber))