Best Selling Books by Alice Kaplan

Relates the story of the only French writer to be executed for treason during World War II, from his rise during the 1930s to his trial and death in front of a firing squad.

"[A] cultural odyssey, a brave attempt to articulate the compulsions that drove [Kaplan] to embrace foreignness in order to become truly herself." — The Washington Post Book World Brilliantly uniting the personal and the critical, French Lessons is a powerful autobiographical experiment. It tells the story of an American woman escaping into the French language and of a scholar and teacher coming to grips with her history of learning. In spare, midwestern prose, by turns intimate and wry, Kaplan describes how, as a student in a Swiss boarding school and later in a junior year abroad in Bordeaux, she passionately sought the French "r," attentively honed her accent, and learned the idioms of her French lover. When, as a graduate student, her passion for French culture turned to the elegance and sophistication of its intellectual life, she found herself drawn to the language and style of the novelist Louis-Ferdinand Celine. At the same time, she was repulsed by his anti-Semitism. At Yale in the late 70s, during the heyday of deconstruction she chose to transgress its apolitical purity and work on a subject "that made history impossible to ignore": French fascist intellectuals. Kaplan''s discussion of the "de Man affair" —the discovery that her brilliant and charismatic Yale professor had written compromising articles for the pro-Nazi Belgian press—and her personal account of the paradoxes of deconstruction are among the most compelling available on this subject. French Lessons belongs in the company of Sartre''s Words and the memoirs of Nathalie Sarraute, Annie Ernaux, and Eva Hoffman. No book so engrossingly conveys both the excitement of learning and the moral dilemmas of the intellectual life.

No story of World War II is more triumphant than the liberation of France, made famous in countless photos of Parisians waving American flags and kissing GIs, as columns of troops paraded down the Champs Élysées. Yet liberation is a messy, complex affair, in which cultural understanding can be as elusive as the search for justice by both the liberators and the liberated. Occupying powers import their own injustices, and often even magnify them, away from the prying eyes of home. One of the least-known stories of the American liberation of France, from 1944 to 1946, is also one of the ugliest and least understood chapters in the history of Jim Crow. The first man to grapple with this failure of justice was an eyewitness: the interpreter Louis Guilloux. Now, in The Interpreter, prize-winning author Alice Kaplan combines extraordinary research and brilliant writing to recover the story both as Guilloux first saw it, and as it still haunts us today. When the Americans helped to free Brittany in the summer of 1944, they were determined to treat the French differently than had the Nazi occupiers of the previous four years. Crimes committed against the locals were not to be tolerated. General Patton issued an order that any accused criminals would be tried by court-martial and that severe sentences, including the death penalty, would be imposed for the crime of rape. Mostly represented among service troops, African Americans made up a small fraction of the Army. Yet they were tried for the majority of capital cases, and they were found guilty with devastating frequency: 55 of 70 men executed by the Army in Europe were African American -- or 79 percent, in an Army that was only 8.5 percent black. Alice Kaplan''s towering achievement in The Interpreter is to recall this outrage through a single, very human story. Louis Guilloux was one of France''s most prominent novelists even before he was asked to act as an interpreter at a few courts-martial. Through his eyes, Kaplan narrates two mirror-image trials and introduces us to the men and women in the courtrooms. James Hendricks fired a shot through a door, after many drinks, and killed a man. George Whittington shot and killed a man in an open courtyard, after an argument and many drinks. Hendricks was black. Whittington was white. Both were court-martialed by the Army VIII Corps and tried in the same room, with some of the same officers participating. Yet the outcomes could not have been more different. Guilloux instinctively liked the Americans with whom he worked, but he could not get over seeing African Americans condemned to hang, Hendricks among them, while whites went free. He wrote about what he had observed in his diary, and years later in a novel. Other witnesses have survived to talk to Kaplan in person. In Kaplan''s hands, the two crimes and trials are searing events. The lawyers, judges, and accused are all sympathetic, their actions understandable. Yet despite their best intentions, heartbreak and injustice result. In an epilogue, Kaplan introduces us to the family of James Hendricks, who were never informed of his fate, and who still hope that his remains will be transferred back home. James Hendricks rests, with 95 other men, in a U.S. military cemetery in France, filled with anonymous graves.

The first biography of the Algerian artist Baya Mahieddine, celebrated in mid-twentieth-century Paris, her life shrouded in myth. On a flower farm in colonial Algeria, a servant and field worker known as Baya escaped the drudgery of her labor by coloring the skirts in fashion magazines. Three years later, in November 1947, her paintings and fanciful clay beasts were featured in a solo show in Paris. She wasn''t yet sixteen years old. In this first biography of Baya, Alice Kaplan tells the story of a young woman seemingly trapped in subsistence who becomes a sensation in the French capital, then mysteriously fades from the history of modern art—only to reemerge after independence as an icon of Algerian artistic heritage. The toast of Paris for the 1947 season, Baya inspired colonialist fantasies about her "primitive" genius as well as genuine appreciation. She was featured in newspapers, on the radio, and in a newsreel; her art was praised by Breton and Camus, Marchand and Braque. At the dawn of Algerian liberation, her appearance in Paris was used to stage the illusion of French-Algerian friendship, while horrific French massacres in Algeria were still fresh in memory. Kaplan uncovers the central figures in Baya''s life and the role they played in her artistic career. Among the most poignant was Marguerite Caminat-McEwen-Benhoura, who took Baya from her sister''s farm to Algiers, where Baya worked as Marguerite''s maid and was given paint and brushes. A complex and endearing character, Marguerite—and her Pygmalion ambitions—was decisive in shaping Baya''s destiny. Kaplan also looks closely at Baya''s earliest paintings with an eye to their themes, their palette and design, and their enduring influence. In vivid prose that brings Baya''s story into the present, Kaplan''s book, the fruit of scrupulous research in Algiers, Blida, Paris, and Provence, allows us to see in a whole new light the beloved artist who signed her paintings simply "Baya."

A New York Times Notable Book. A literary exploration that is "surely destined to become the quintessential companion to Camus''s most enduring novel" ( PopMatters). The Stranger is a rite of passage for readers around the world. Since its publication in France in 1942, Camus''s novel has been translated into sixty languages and sold more than six million copies. It''s the rare novel that''s as likely to be found in a teen''s backpack as in a graduate philosophy seminar. If the twentieth century produced a novel that could be called ubiquitous, The Stranger is it. How did a young man in his twenties who had never written a novel turn out a masterpiece that still grips readers more than seventy years later? With Looking for The Stranger, Alice Kaplan tells that story. In the process, she reveals Camus'' achievement to have been even more impressive—and more unlikely—than even his most devoted readers knew. "To this new project, Kaplan brings equally honed skills as a historian, literary critic, and biographer . . . Reading The Stranger is a bracing but somewhat bloodless experience. Ms. Kaplan has hung warm flesh on its steely bones." — The New York Times "For American readers, few French novels are better known, and few scholars are better qualified than Kaplan to reintroduce us to it . . . Kaplan tells this story with great verve and insight, all the while preserving the mystery of its creation and elusiveness of its meaning." — Los Angeles Review of Books "The fascinating story behind Albert Camus'' coldblooded masterpiece . . . A compelling companion to a novel that has stayed strange." — Kirkus Reviews

Originally published in hardcover in 2012.

They wrote States of Plague in response-as a guide to these moments where the written and the real collide. For many people, The Plague feels personal now. And through this lens, certain features became vital: Camus''s sensitivity toward illness, his experience of a contagious disease, the cost of separation in his own life, and the psychology and politics of the city in quarantine. Because they come to the book from different perspectives, Kaplan and Marris alternate their voices so that their chapters offer two complementary ways of looking at Camus. They find that their sense of Camus evolves under the force of a new reality, alongside the pressures of illness, recovery, concern, and care in their own lives. Kaplan herself is struggling with a case if Covid as the book opens; as it closes, Marris receives her first vaccine shot. In between, they find, aspects of Camus''s novel that once seemed merely literary spoke directly to their own fear and grief. .

Bloch-Dano argues that Marcel Proust''s mother is central to the meaning of his masterpiece ''In Search of Lost Time'', and has always held a special role in literary history, both as a character and as a decisive influence on her son''s career.

La lecture de L''Etranger tient du rite d''initiation. Partout dans le monde, elle accompagne le passage à l''âge adulte et la découverte des grandes questions de la vie. L''histoire de Meursault, cet homme dont le nom même évoque un saut dans la mort, n''est simple qu''en apparence, elle demeure aussi impénétrable aujourd''hui qu''elle l''était en 1942, avec ses images à la fois ordinaires et inoubliables : la vue qui s''offre depuis un balcon par un dimanche d''indolence, les gémissements d''un chien battu, la lumière qui se reflète sur la lame d''un couteau, une vue sur la mer à travers les barreaux d''une prison. Et ces quatre coups de feu tirés en illégitime défense. Comment un jeune homme, qui n''a pas encore trente ans, a-t-il pu écrire dans un hôtel miteux de Montmartre un chef-d''oeuvre qui, des décennies après, continue à captiver des millions de lecteurs ? Alice Kaplan raconte cette histoire d''une réussite inattendue d''un auteur désoeuvré, gravement malade, en temps d''occupation ennemie. "J''ai bien vu à la façon dont je l''écrivais qu''il était tout tracé en moi". Le lecteur repère les premiers signes annonciateurs du roman dans les carnets et la correspondance de Camus, traverse les années de son élaboration progressive, observe d''abord l''écrivain au travail, puis les mots sur la page, accompagne l''auteur mois après mois, comme par-dessus son épaule, pour entendre l''histoire du roman de son point de vue. En quête de L''Étranger n''est pas une interprétation de plus : c''est la vie du roman.