Flora & les sept garçons

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Presentation

A tenderhearted female ogre who fills the dishwasher while her duped husband prepares to eat his own children; two men who are in love before the era of gay marriage and plan for one to marry the other’s sister; a girl in biology class dissecting a cow’s eye at the moment that a series of bloody terrorist attacks engulf Paris; a battered woman and a man who is a killer; an arranged marriage in a bourgeois setting, with a runaway bride; a little girl who refuses to visit her mother who is in a coma; the wife of Cronos, the God of Time, who runs away across Europe to keep her newborn away from her infantidal husband; a Syrian child who is made to believe that things will be better tomorrow…

There is death and cruelty in these thirteen short stories that revisit canonized myths – of Charles Perrault and Antiquity – as well as modern myths – war, terrorism, domestic violence – and also dreams: the hope of a window opening onto another world, only minus the laws of reality.

Designed to surprise readers, written in a language that is both poetic and precise, even surrealist, baroque or naturalist, the bittersweet short stories of Dominique Dussidour delight the world by revealing the darkest of motivations. To better explore the subjects that haunt her, the author has a single weapon: creativity. She has yet again succeeded in writing a singular work that is both disturbing and jubilatory, pushing us to think, and above all, to dream.

Dominique Dussidour was born in 1948 in Boulogne-Billancourt. After studying philosophy and ethnology, she was a teacher in Paris and French professor in Saida, Algeria. She is the author of several novels, including Les Matins Bleus (La Table Ronde, 2002) and an account of her time in Algeria called S.L.E. (La Table Ronde, 2012). She lives in Paris and is on the editorial committee of the online literary review Remue.net.

"Dussidour’s writing is astonishing, a true work of art. Such valuable proses are getting rarer and rarer." Soonckindt.com