Rentrée littéraire preview

       The French 'rentrée littéraire' -- when they flood the market with the biggest books of the year -- is less than two months away, and the first previews and overviews have started to appear.
       At Livres Hebdo Vincy Thomas has the numbers, in 607 romans pour la rentrée littéraire 2014, as the total number of releases is up again (though still below the heady 2005-2012 period). French novels are up (404, 47 more than last year), first novels down (75, -11), translations about steady (203, +5).
       For overviews, see Magazine Littéraire's La rentrée littéraire de A à X and Le Point's Une rentrée littéraire alléchante pour remonter la pente.

       Titles of note and interest:

• Amélie Nothomb's twenty-second straight rentrée appearance, this year with Pétronille
  
  
• Windows on the World-author Frédéric Beigbeder returns to US-territory, with Oona & Salinger -- Oona being, of course, Nobel laureate Eugene O'Neill's kid, who went on to marry Charlie Chaplin (but not before dating, yes, that Salinger, J.D. himself); see the Grasset publicity page. I assume someone has already bought the US rights ... oh, what am I saying ? Gilles Leroy's Zelda Fitzgerald-novel Alabama song even won the prix Goncourt (2007) and doesn't seem to have been translated yet; Americans don't seem to trust French authors all that much with fictional depictions of well-known American figures .....
  
  
• Maybe Patrick Deville -- whose Plague and Cholera at least made it to the UK ... -- will have more luck with his Viva, intersecting lives of Trotsky and Malcolm Lowry in his novel.
  
  
• I don't know what the hell Emmanuel Carrère is up to with Le Royaume -- 640 pages on ... the early days (30-80 A.D.) of Christianity.
  
  
• Other authors with works to look forward to: Dany Laferrière, Pascal Quignard, and Lydie Salvayre

       I look forward to hearing more.