4 Books Translated from The French To Celebrate Pride Month
Pride is many things: celebration, remembrance, rebellion, joy. It’s also a story—of becoming, of shedding masks, of daring to speak in one’s own voice. This month, we honor Francophone queer voices that challenge conventions, rewrite the rules of literature, and expand the possibilities of identity.
From Hervé Guibert’s quietly subversive Suzanne and Louise, to Abdellah Taïa’s luminous fugue on survival and sovereignty in Living in Your Light; from the scorched-earth reckoning of Constance Debré’s Nom, to Mohamed Leftah’s haunting, humane, and unforgettable Endless Fall, to the searching, soul-baring Change: A Novel by Édouard Louis—these are works that refuse to fit in and testify to the radical power of language and self-invention.
They’re not just stories of queerness—they’re stories of life, lived fiercely, truthfully, on one’s own terms.
Reading List
Equal parts haunting and tender, Suzanne and Louise is a photographic reverie like no other. In this singular “photo novel,” Hervé Guibert turns his lens—and his prose—toward his two reclusive great-aunts, capturing their intimate, secluded world with sensitivity and subversive charm. Originally published in 1980 and long treasured by Guibert devotees, this English-language edition is a revelation: the portraits are exquisite, the storytelling quietly radical, and the atmosphere lingers like memory. A meditation on aging, control, devotion, and the gaze—Suzanne and Louise is as provocative as it is profound.
Suzanne and Louise by Hervé Guibert, translated by Christine Piccinin, DAP
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Few books manage to pierce the heart with such quiet force. In Endless Fall, Mohamed Leftah revisits the suicide of a high school classmate in 1960s Settat—a moment that seared itself into his memory and ultimately shaped his literary path. What unfolds is both a raw coming-of-age memoir and a blistering portrait of a society rife with silence, shame, and repression.
Leftah’s prose is luminous and unsparing, confronting taboos like homosexuality, adultery, and suicide with unflinching grace. More than a reflection on a single life lost, Endless Fall is a reckoning with the moral hypocrisies of a world that punishes difference while worshiping appearances. It’s haunting, humane, and unforgettable.
Endless Fall by Mohamed Leftah, trans by Eleni Sikelianos, Other Press
Audacious, tender, and formally daring, Change: A Novel is Édouard Louis’s most ambitious and emotionally resonant book to date. Tracing his extraordinary journey from a childhood in working-class Picardy to the heights of international literary fame, Louis crafts not a self-help manual—but a luminous reckoning with transformation.
Part memoir, part philosophical fugue, part love letter to the people and places that shaped him, this is a book about ruptures, reinventions, and the high cost of becoming oneself. Louis writes with both fire and melancholy, gratitude and grief, as he navigates class betrayal, queer becoming, and the bittersweet metamorphosis of shedding one world to enter another.
powerful ode to literature as survival, and to identity as something we write—again and again—in our own hand.
Change: A Novel, by Edouard Louis, translated from the French by John Lambert, FSG
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Fierce, uncompromising, and gloriously defiant, Nom is Constance Debré’s boldest statement yet—a literary act of erasure, reinvention, and resistance. In clipped, incisive prose, Debré dismantles everything: her name, her lineage, her legacy. With the rigor of a monk and the fire of a rebel, she writes not to explain, but to destroy—and through that destruction, to liberate.
This is a manifesto masquerading as autofiction, a radical treatise on identity, class, and the unbearable weight of inheritance. Debré doesn’t ask to be understood or liked—she demands to be heard. Nom is not a memoir, but a reckoning. It will unsettle you, provoke you, maybe even infuriate you. And that’s exactly the point.
A spare and electrifying work from one of France’s most singular literary voices.
Nom by Constance Debré, translated from the French by Lauren Elkin, Semiotext(e)
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A dazzling, multi-layered portrait of a woman—and a country—Living in Your Light is Abdellah Taïa at his most ambitious and tender. At the heart of this novel is Malika: mother, widow, fighter, queen in rags. Through her voice and her solitude, Taïa unfolds a sweeping narrative of Moroccan life, marked by the ghosts of colonialism, the violence of patriarchy, and the daily heroism of survival.
Written in a series of intimate monologues, the novel doesn’t just tell a story—it composes a fugue of identity, resistance, and power. Malika is both subject and agent, shaped by the world and defiant of it. Her struggle is deeply personal, but also unforgettably political.
A profoundly moving, formally bold, and politically charged novel, Living in Your Light confirms Taïa as one of the most vital voices in contemporary literature—one who dares to write not only from the margins, but for them.
Living in Your Light by Abdellah Taïa, trans from the French by Emma Ramadan, Seven Stories
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