With an extremely graphic and fluid prose, whose quiet audacity and freedom is reminiscent of the writings of Anaïs Nin and Henry Miller, Emma Becker examines her love and sex life from every angle, with staggering frankness. "Le Mal Joli" is also a deep exploration of the bounds between experience and writing.

At the invitation of the collection Ma Nuit au Musée (éd. Stock) - which has produced such little jewels as Jakuta Alikavazovic's Like a Sky in Us and Lola Lafon's Quand tu entendras cette chanson) - Mauritian writer Ananda Devi spent a night in Lyon's Montluc Prison Museum.

Julia Deck's formidable narrative borrows from every genre (family investigation, memoir, formative novel) to put into words her mother's life and their relationship, at once complex and changing, fusional and distant, loving and conflicted. A stubborn and impossible love, like the mission the author sets herself, except that impossible is not Julia Deck!

Over the course of a day, our narrator walks around Le Havre, surrounded by phantoms of her past (a past lover who ghosted her) and of literature (Woolf’s To The Lighthouse). She observes the movement of the waves that mimic that of her memories and of her writing. Maylis de Kerangal's way with words, rhythms and sounds turns everything she…

These Arizona diaries are an invitation to live life as an adventure, to open up to the world and embrace its beauty. Like an epicurean promise, renewed on every page.