Description
Half-way between fiction and auto-fiction, Cécile Oumhani evokes the different worlds her multi-cultural family always opened for her. She is also a keen observer of life and its unexpected encounters. Walking the streets of Paris can become a sudden dive into the past. Some of the female characters in these stories yearn to write, to paint, beyond social and family constraints. Others cross new borders, mental and physical, in the turmoil of North African revolutions.
Early praise for the book
Each story in this poetic collection, fragile and evocative as the gossamer wings of a dragonfly, reads as letters from beyond, as fragments of a broken landscape that the author tries to reassemble with the powers of memory, of imagination, of dreams, offering us glimpses of long-gone or current faces and places, smells — ink, wax, Jell-O, forests, old books — unique portraits of people lost between borders, between countries, between selves, mapping the unknown that is at the heart of the familiar. — Ananda Devi
A young mother, out on an evening walk, is entranced when she hears a poem about trees, accompanied by the poignant notes of a violin; another, silently supported by her husband, finds in her dreams the inspiration to draw and paint; a German weaver’s visit lights up a North African village; a book of anonymous, handwritten translations of South Asian poetry summons up an entire multilingual literary heritage. In the intimate, luminous stories of her first collection in her mother tongue English, Francophone poet and novelist Cecile Oumhani moves between North Africa, Canada and France, but her gaze is on the small moments and fleeting incidents that illuminate the lives of her protagonists and lead them out of the trap of the present into the light of a clearer day. — Aamer Hussein
Understated and powerful, portraits of women’s lives in transition in several countries, languages, all animated by a spirit of outreach and what Adrienne Rich named “the will to change”. — Marilyn Hacker
Cécile Oumhani’s short stories are deep and intimate in familial resonance and seeped in lingering nostalgia. With her elegant prose, she deftly blurs the lines between worlds and identities, the past and the present, contouring shapes of seamless memorability with these stories and its people. — Rochelle Potkar
Cecile Oumhani’s short stories redeem memories of the ruin of man’s estate with a proximate love. They traverse three continents and plumb the three continents of time. You can hear an understated, sibilant, crafted humanism threading the foraging of human hearts for peace, content and happiness. Never too far away from the ardency of a memoir, Cecile’s narratives are cadent reflections on the rootlessness of a woman’s desire and the malleable and courageous constancy in them to go seek it, in Paris and its World. — Debashish Lahiri
About the author
Cécile Oumhani was born in Belgium and grew up in France between her father’s French and her mother’s English. She has strong personal connections with Tunisia through marriage. A former Associate Professor at the University of Paris-Est Créteil, she holds a PhD in British literature. Her novels include Tunisian Yankee, Les racines du mandarinier, Une odeur de henné, L’atelier des Strésor, winner of the special mention of the Franco-Indian Gitanjali Prize in 2012, Le café d’Yllka, Un jardin à La Marsa. Her recent poetry collections include La ronde des nuages, Mémoires inconnues, Passeurs de rives, Marcher loin sous les nuages, La nudité des pierres. She received the Francophone European Virgil Prize in 2014 for her writings as a whole. She is also a member of the board of the journal Apulée.
About RED RIVER Story
Edited by Sucharita Dutta-Asane, Red River Story Series is a series of limited edition fiction titles from Red River, a publishing outfit based in Delhi dedicated to publishing poetry in English and English translation. Established in 2017, Red River is known for its discerning selection of titles and experimental design. Red River is managed solely by poet, writer and translator Dibyajyoti Sarma, with the help of his friends and colleagues, because for everyone involved, Red River is not just a business, but a passion — an abiding love for poetry. This passion for poetry keeps Red River going, and thanks to the discerning readers of poetry in India and abroad, over the years, it has built a reputation as a niche publisher of poetry.
RED RIVER Story hopes to convey stories from the hinterland and the heartland, from metros and larger towns of the subcontinent — stories that are submerged in the rush of those that are more popular, more immediately acceptable, recognisable.
About the Editor
Sucharita Dutta-Asane is an award-winning writer and independent book editor based in Pune. Her short story collection, Cast Out and Other Stories, was published by Dhauli Books in 2018. It was among Amazon’s “Best of Summer from India, 2018” and was reviewed widely. It is part of the Bengaluru-based Indian Institute of Human Settlements’ (IIHS) library selection. The titular story of Sucharita’s collection is the subject of two international research papers around Gender Politics and Postcolonial Representations of Menstruation. Sucharita is the recipient of the international Dastaan Award and the Oxford Bookstores debuting writers’ (second place) award. Her fiction and reviews have appeared in various literary journals and anthologies. As independent editor she has worked with publishing houses, literary agencies as well as individual authors. From September 2017 to March 2019, she edited the online literary magazine Kitaab, published from Singapore. At present she edits fiction for the Bangalore Review, and teaches a postgraduate course in Writing and Editing at Symbiosis College of Arts and Commerce, Pune.
