Georges Simenon (1903-1989) was born in Liège, Belgium. He went to work as a reporter at the age of fifteen and in 1923 moved to Paris, where under various pseudonyms he became a highly successful and prolific author of pulp fiction while leading a dazzling social life. In the early 1930s, Simenon emerged as a writer under his own name, gaining renown for his detective stories featuring Inspector Maigret. He also began to write his psychological novels, or romans durs—books in which he displays a sympathetic awareness of the emotional and spiritual pain underlying the routines of daily life. Having written nearly two hundred books under his own name and become the best-selling author in the world, Simenon retired as a novelist in 1973, devoting himself instead to dictating several volumes of memoirs. »

William T. Vollmann was born in Los Angeles in 1959 and attended Deep Springs College and Cornell University. He is the author of many works of fiction, long and short, including The Royal Family, You Bright and Risen Angels, Whores for Gloria, and The Rainbow Stories, as well as an ongoing series of seven novels, collectively entitled Seven Dreams: A Book of North American Landscapes, about the collision between the native populations of North America and their colonizers and oppressors. (Four volumes have been published so far: The Ice-Shirt, Fathers and Crows, Argall: The True Story of Pocahontas and Captain John Smith, and The Rifles.) Vollmann has also written two works of non-fiction: An Afghanistan Picture Show, which describes his crossing into Afghanistan with a group of Islamic commandos in 1982, and Rising Up and Rising Down, a treatise on violence. He lives in California. »

Dirty Snow

By Georges Simenon
Translated from the French by Marc Romano and Louise Varese
Afterword by William T. Vollmann

Nineteen-year-old Frank Friedmaier lives in a country under occupation. Most people struggle to get by; Frank takes it easy in his mother's whorehouse, which caters to members of the occupying forces. But Frank is restless. He is a pimp, a thug, a petty thief, and, as Dirty Snow opens, he has just killed his first man. Through the unrelenting darkness and cold of an endless winter, Frank will pursue abjection until at last there is nowhere to go.

Hans Koning has described Dirty Snow as "one of the very few novels to come out of German-occupied France that gets it exactly right." In a study of the criminal mind that is comparable to Jim Thompson's The Killer Inside Me, Simenon maps a no man's land of the spirit in which human nature is driven to destruction—and redemption, perhaps, as well—by forces beyond its control.

Read the afterword (PDF)

Reviews

Dirty Snow is an astonishing work.
— John Banville, The New Republic

A truly wonderful writer . . . marvelously readable, lucid, simple, absolutely in tune with that world he creates.
— Muriel Spark

The best mystery writer today is a Belgian who writes in French. His name is Georges Simenon.
— Dashiell Hammett

Also see:

Three Bedrooms in Manhattan
By Georges Simenon
Translated from the French by Marc Romano and Lawrence G. Blochman
Introduction by Joyce Carol Oates

An actor and a divorcée meet in a deserted New York City bar. With little in common save loneliness, middle age, and a presentiment of escape, they improvise a love story.
Monsieur Monde Vanishes
By Georges Simenon
Translated from the French by Jean Stewart
Introduction by Larry McMurtry

Unsurpassed as an evocation of milieu, whether of staid bourgeois propriety or waterfront seediness, Monsieur Monde Vanishes is another triumph by the twentieth century's greatest popular novelist.
Tropic Moon
By Georges Simenon
Translated from the French by Marc Romano
Introduction by Norman Rush

In Tropic Moon, Simenon, the master of the psychological novel, offers an incomparable picture of degeneracy and corruption in a colonial outpost.
The Man Who Watched Trains Go By
By Georges Simenon
Translated from the French by Marc Romano
Introduction by Luc Sante

How different are the cautious routines of ordinary life from the compulsions of a killer? How reliable is even the most reliable man's identity? What finally is the truth about a person?
Red Lights
By Georges Simenon
Translated by Norman Denny
Introduction by Anita Brookner

Red Lights, one of Simenon's romans durs, is a dark and brilliant gaze at marriage, and is Simenon writing the American psyche at his best.
The Strangers in the House
By Georges Simenon
Translated by Geoffrey Sainsbury
Introduction by P.D. James

In The Strangers in the House, Georges Simenon, master chronicler of the dark side of the human heart, gives us a detective story that is also a tale of an improbable redemption.
The Engagement
By Georges Simenon
Afterword by John Gray
New translation by Anna Moschovakis

One of the most chilling and compassionate of Simenon's extraordinary psychological novels, The Engagement explores the mystery of a blameless heart in a compromised soul.
The Widow
By Georges Simenon
Translated from the French by John Petrie
Introduction by Paul Theroux

Two outcasts, a widow and a recently released murderer, become involved in a love triangle with the girl next door. Published in the same year and often compared to The Stranger, The Widow is one of Simenon's most powerful and disturbing romans durs.

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Format: Paperback
Retail Price: $14.00
Price: $10.50 (25% off)


Aug 31, 2003
272 pages
ISBN: 1590170431
9781590170434
All Literature in Translation
NYRB Classics
Suspense & Crime
Literature in French

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