The Class by Francois Begaudeau, Linda Asher (Translator)

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Synopsis

"François Bégaudeau's award-winning Entre les murs . . . trains the reader to look anew at the republican school and study the republican legacy with fresh eyes."—Yale Review

François Bégaudeau's autobiographical novel of trying to teach the French language to a rowdy classroom of African teenagers on the outskirts of Paris is a tour de force. Winner of the Prix France Culture/Télérama prize, The Class explores timely issues of race, class, identity, and colonial history against the backdrop of a turbulent French society grappling with a controversial immigration policy and its social consequences. The novel's eponymous film version (translated into English) is directed by Laurent Cantet, stars Bégaudeau himself, and received the Palme d'Or at the 2008 Cannes Film Festival.

François Bégaudeau is a movie critic and the author of two novels: Jouer juste (2003) and Dans la diagonale (2005). In 2005, he published a fictional biography of the Rolling Stones, titled Rolling Stones: Un démocrate Mick Jagger 1960–1969.

Linda Asher, a former fiction editor for The New Yorker, has translated into English Victor Hugo, Georges Simenon, and Milan Kundera. Her translations for Seven Stories Press include Martin Winckler's The Case of Dr. Sachs (La maladie de Sachs), which won the French-American Foundation Translation Prize in 2000; Memoirs of a Breton Peasant; and, most recently, Evolution.

Biography

This is François Bégaudeau's third novel, after Jouer juste (2003) and Dans la diagonale (2005), as well as a fictional biography of the Rolling Stones: Un démocrate Mick Jagger 1960-1969. In the Palme D'Or winning movie (Sony Classics 2009) by Laurent Cartet, Mr. Begaudeau plays himself.