On Thursday, October 15, join novelist Mathias Énard as he will be in conversation with Christopher Byrd to present his book Perfecting the Shot (La Perfection du tir, Actes Sud, 2003; trans. by Charlotte Mandell, New Directions, 2026). 

 In an unnamed city completely torn apart by civil war, a teenage sniper has only one goal: to fire the perfect shot. He sublimates himself into his weapon, controls his breath, stays serenely calm, and listens to his body and the beat of his heart. Lying in wait on rooftops, he shoots at civilians while his mentally ill mother cowers in their apartment. But the violence eats away at any sense of morality as he kills indiscriminately, for the sake of killing itself. His routine is eventually disrupted by the arrival of Myrna, a fifteen-year-old girl hired to care for his mother, and his increasingly disturbing obsession with Myrna threatens to push them all over the brink. This unrelenting book, whose harrowing urgency belies its piercing lyricism, exposes the disastrous effects of extreme violence on society. 

 Mathias Énard is the author of Compass (winner of the Prix Goncourt, the Leipzig Prize, and the Premio von Rezzori, and shortlisted for the 2017 Man Booker International Prize), Zone, and The Deserters (longlisted for the International Booker Prize, and winner of the FAF Translation Prize)—as well as being a translator from Persian and Arabic. 

Christopher Byrd is a Brooklyn-based writer. His work has appeared in The New York Times, The New Yorker, and The New York Review of Books.   

 This event is in English and is free. Please click here to RSVP.