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Jean Giono (1895-1970) was born and lived most of his life in the town of Manosque, Alpes-de-Haute-Provence. Largely self-educated, he started working as a bank clerk at the age of sixteen and reported for military service when World War I broke out. After the success of Hill, which won the Prix Brentano, he left the bank and began to publish prolifically. During World War II his outspoken pacifism led some to accuse him, unjustly, of defeatism and collaboration with the Nazis. After France's liberation in 1944, he was imprisoned and held without charges. Despite being blacklisted after his release, Giono continued writing and achieved renewed success. He was elected to the Acade mie Goncourt in 1954. NYRB Classics publishes Giono's Hill and Melville. Alyson Waters has translated several works from the French by Albert Cossery, Louis Aragon, Rene Belletto, and others. She teaches literary translation in the French department of Yale University and is the managing editor of Yale French Studies. For NYRB Classics, Waters has translated Emmanuel Bove's Henri Duchemin and His Shadows and, for The New York Review Children's Collection, The Tiger Prince by Chen Jiang Hong. She lives in Brooklyn, New York.
""Langlois is as mysterious as Sam Spade....The haunting beauty of this novel lies precisely in its lacunae. This is a book rich with details . . . everything except what we are most longing to know, Langlois’s thoughts. We must do all the work ourselves.” —Edmund White, The New York Review of Books “Strange and disquieting . . . the twisting narrative reads like a game of telephone passed through generations, with Langlois at the center as a sort of legendary totem to the villagers.” —Publishers Weekly “This immersive novel creates a memorably delirious sense of mystery, obsession, and altered perceptions.” —Kirkus “For Giono, literature and reality overlap the way that waves sweep over the shore, one ceaselessly refreshing the other and, in certain wondrous moments, giving it a glassy clearness.” —Ryu Spaeth, The New Republic “Giono’s writing possesses a vigor, a surprising texture, a contagious joy, a sureness of touch and design, an arresting originality, and that sort of unfeigned strangeness that always goes along with sincerity when it escapes from the ruts of convention.” —André Gide, unpublished letter, 1929
