Playwright and novelist Yasmina Reza's work has been translated into more than thirty-five languages. Her play ART was the first non-English language play to win a Tony Award, CONVERSATIONS AFTER A BURIAL, THE UNEXPECTED MAN, and LIFE X 3 have all been award-winning critical and commercial successes internationally, and GOD OF CARNAGE, which also won a Tony Award, was adapted for film by Roman Polanski. A new play, BELLA FIGURA, premiered in Germany in May 2015. Her fiction includes HAMMERKLAVIER, DESOLATION, and ADAM HABERBERG. Reza lives in Paris.A longtime fiction editor at The New Yorker magazine, Linda Asher (translator) has translated Victor Hugo, Balzac, Simenon, Kundera and many other writers. She has been awarded the Scott Moncrieff, the Deems Taylor, the French-American/Florence Gould Translation Prizes, and is a Chevalier of the Order of Arts and Letters of the French Republic.
Starting always with real, concrete things, written in a style as clean and precise as an assassin's, and with a ravishing elegance, Reza draws us into her sarcastic digressions. She skewers our empty presumptions, and manipulates the paradoxes with an irresistible instinct for the dialectic. There is pain here, tears of great loss and abandonment. . . . And, throughout, a sense of exile--from self, from others. . . . Reza manages to express our most deeply hidden secrets, our subterranean feelings of anguish, the ones we are least able to share with others. --Telerama (five-star review) For Reza truth is often to be found in the dark dance of the tragic and the absurd which fires all her writing. . . . Babylon [tells] the story of how the comfortable ordered lives of two middle-aged couples in the suburbs of Paris unravel over the course of an evening. But it is also a touching study of people living in exile from themselves. Everyone . . . has been cut adrift from their youth and their dreams. --The Times of Israel For me Babylon represents . . . that lost world, all that we could have lived, all that humanity that is behind us. --Yasmina Reza