Ясмина Реза - Babylon

We could not hold back what was happening, It was Jean-Lino Manoscrivi who’d just gone by and at the same time it was any man being carried off. I remembered the sense of belonging to some dim whole that Jean-Lino had felt in the Parmentier courtyard when his father used to read the psalm aloud. I looked at the sky and the people there.

Then I climbed back up the service staircase alone.

Playwright and novelist Yasmina Reza’s work has been translated into more than thirty-five languages. Her play Art was the first non-English language play to win a Tony Award, Conversations After a Burial , The Unexpected Man , and Life X 3 have all been award-winning critical and commercial successes internationally, and God of Carnage , which also won a Tony Award, was adapted for film by Roman Polanski. A new play, Bella Figura , premiered in Germany in May 2015. Her fiction includes Hammerklavier , Desolation , and Adam Haberberg . Reza lives in Paris.

A longtime fiction editor at The New Yorker magazine, Linda Asher (translator) has translated Victor Hugo, Balzac, Simenon, Kundera and many other writers. She has been awarded the Scott Moncrieff, the Deems Taylor, the French-American/Florence Gould Translation Prizes, and is a Chevalier of the Order of Arts and Letters of the French Republic.