The Monroe Girls: Archipelago Books

One of the most important figures in France’s contemporary literary landscape, Antoine Volodine writes under at least four heteronyms, including Lutz Bassmann and Manuela Draeger. He taught Russian in French secondary schools for many years before his debut novel, Comparative Biography of Jorian Murgrave, appeared in France in 1985. Most of his prolific output, including The Monroe Girls, take place in a post-apocalyptic world where members of the “post-exoticism” writing movement have been arrested for their subversive literary efforts.

Alyson Waters is a prize-winning translator of French and francophone literary fiction, art history, philosophy, and children's books. She has translated works by Albert Cossery, Louis Aragon, René Belletto, Jean Giono, Eric Chevillard, Jean-Patrick Manchette, Emmanuel Bove, Claude Ponti, and many others. She has received a National Endowment for the Arts Translation Fellowship, a PEN Translation Fund grant, and was awarded the French-American Foundation Translation Prize twice. She taught literary translation at Yale for three decades and currently teaches at Columbia University. She lives in Brooklyn.