We live in a world of sensations and cursory thought, of appearances, clichés and empty gestures designed to make everything seem lighter, including love, suffering, and even death. What hopes and true desires can remain through the sequence of fleeting images and scenes that make up our existence? The twenty stories gathered here portray an eminently contemporary world of meetings, travel, work, and intimacy, both sweet and intense, a world that reveals and conceals the fundamental issues of life. Written in language that is both subtle and nuanced, in a tone that balances irony and compassion, the stories are notable for their apt observation, lively dialogue and complete trust in the reader’s intelligence and sensitivity. In Fugitives, Lise Gauvin is revealed as a brilliant and original short story writer. Jonathan Kaplansky’s translation of her work is both faithful and lyrical.

“Lise Gauvin’s style is very simple, unpretentious, at times, almost harsh [. . .] one senses that Lise Gauvin intended to reduce her texts to the essential, without sentiment or pathos. This is work done under the microscope, with a scalpel.”
~ Jean Basile, Le Devoir

The best qualities of Lise Gauvin’s art are apparent: formal ingenuity, subtlety of expression, a distillation of emotion that goes far beyond mere surface meanings.”
~ Gilles Marcotte, L’Actualité

“The adroitness of Gauvin’s prose and her vivid inventiveness make for pleasurable reading far away from scholarly lectures.” ~ Ann Bois, The Gazette

Lise Gauvin has published approximately twenty works (non-fiction, fictional essays, interviews, poetry, narratives, and short stories) and contributes to the newspaper Le Devoir as a literary critic. Her collection Fugitives, which won the Prix des Arcades de Bologne, is a kind of triptych with Arrêts sur image (translated as Freeze-frame) and Parenthèses, published in 2015. Her novella Le Sursis, an eBook, has just been published by éditions Libre court (Paris).