Recensori in anteprimaTimothée Demeillers

From the introduction by Hervé Delouche: The term “Greater Paris” is in vogue today, for it has an administrative cachet and seems to denote a simple extension of the capital—as if a ravenous Paris need only extend her web. However, it was not our goal to embrace the tenets of the metro area’s comprehensive plan, aka the Grand Projet, envisioned as a future El Dorado by the planners and developers. Rather, our aim was to depict the Parisian suburbs in all their plurality and diversity, as illustrated by the stories in this collection. Without pretending to encompass every spot on the map, we instead opted to give voice and exposure to the localities chosen by the writers who have been part of this adventure. Thus, we decided to adopt the word “suburbs”—in the plural, obviously, for the periphery of the capital is not a homogeneous block, nor is it reducible to a cliché like “the suburban ring” . . . In 1992, in the publication Gulliver, created by Michel Le Bris in the spirit of the Étonnants Voyageurs literary festival, the late Jean-Bernard Pouy, a longtime resident of Ivry, offered up a story, “Transports en particuliers,” in which he wrote, “And perhaps the love of the suburbs persists, thanks to those who knew them before, that is to say, before they became bedroom communities, when the smallish cities all around Paris still operated as the ‘Red Belt,’ preventing the huge, blubbery stomach of Paris from spilling over into the countryside. But it’s surely true that everyone now living there is in search of new myths and that the housing projects will inspire as many colorful tales as the detached homes or vacant tracts of yesteryear.” Here are thirteen such stories, decidedly noir, to be savored without sugar or sweetener.