Shipwrecked on a Traffic Island: and Other Previously Untranslated Gems

A collection of Colette's best writings that have never before appeared in English.

The French writer Colette (1873-1954) is best known in the United States for such classic novels as Gigi and Cheri, which were made into popular movies, but she was a prolific author. This meticulously translated collection offers some of her best fiction, personal essays, articles, and talks, all appearing in English for the first time. The pieces showcase Colette's gifts as a writer: her deep wisdom about every age of human life, her skill as a storyteller, her wry humor, her persuasive powers, and her foresight as a social critic of issues such as gender roles.

The translators combed through journals and past editions of Colette's work to cull these gems, which cover an enormous array of topics-from French wines and perfumes to her friendships with Marcel Proust and Maurice Chevalier to uncanny insight into the curious habits of cats and dogs. Selections from an advice column that Colette wrote for the French women's magazine Marie Claire are also included, and her savvy suggestions for the lovelorn stand the test of time. Moving articles written during the two world wars, along with her memories of being an actor and playwright, reveal facets of her writing that are less often celebrated. The first new work by Colette to appear in English in half a century, it will delight devoted fans and new readers alike.

"Clearly the translators have poetic gifts themselves, a necessary quality to render Colette's airy, evocative, protean shifts in tone and voice, from the flippant to the heartrending in the turn of a phrase. This book reveals in a single volume many luminous facets of Colette as a woman, a French woman, and a writer." - Lynn Hoggard, translator of Marie d'Agoult's Nelida

"Little gems indeed-this garland of hitherto untranslated short texts by Colette is expertly rendered into idiomatic English by Zack Rogow and Renée Morel, who succeed in retaining the flavor, piquancy, sensuousness, wit, and whimsy of the author's poetic and chiseled prose. Colette, foremost French woman writer of the first half of the twentieth century, is here represented by a range of sketches, mini-essays, reminiscences, portraits, personal confessions, and journalistic pieces including some war articles. The selections, preceded by helpful notes, provide rapid insights into Colette's sense of the human comedy, her love of nature and animals, and her enticing exuberance." - Victor Brombert, author of Musings on Mortality: From Tolstoy to Primo Levi

Zack Rogow is Associate Faculty member in the Department of Creative Writing and Literary Arts at the University of Alaska Anchorage. He is the author, editor, or translator of many books and plays, including award-winning translations of George Sand, Colette, and André Breton. Raised in Paris, Renée Morel is a translator and an instructor in French and linguistics at City College of San Francisco. She lectures throughout the Bay Area on French culture, art, and civilization, from the Gauls to de Gaulle.