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. »

Marc Romano is a writer living in New York City. He has translated two other novels by Georges Simenon, both published by New York Review Books: Dirty Snow (with Louise Varèse) and Three Bedrooms in Manhattan (with Lawrence G. Blochman). »

Norman Rush was raised in Oakland, California, and graduated from Swarthmore College in 1956. He has been an antiquarian book dealer, a college instructor, and, with his wife Elsa, he lived and worked in Africa from 1978 to 1983. They now reside in Rockland County, New York. His stories have appeared in The New Yorker, The Paris Review, and Best American Short Stories. Whites, a collection of stories, was published in 1986, and his first novel, Mating, the recipient of the National Book Award, was published in 1991. Mortals is his second novel. »

Tropic Moon

By Georges Simenon
Translated from the French by Marc Romano
Introduction by Norman Rush

Newly translated for this edition.

A young Frenchman, Joseph Timar, travels to Gabon carrying a letter of introduction from an influential uncle. He wants work experience; he wants to see the world. But in the oppressive heat and glare of the equator, Timar doesn't know what to do with himself, and no one seems inclined to help except Adèle, the hotel owner's wife, who takes him to bed one day and rebuffs him the next, leaving him sick with desire. But then, in the course of a single night, Adèle's husband dies and a black servant is shot, and Timar is sure that Adèle is involved. He'll cover for the crime if she'll do what he wants. The fix is in. But Timar can't even begin to imagine how deep.

In Tropic Moon, Simenon, the master of the psychological novel, offers an incomparable picture of degeneracy and corruption in a colonial outpost.

Reviews

A truly wonderful writer...marvelously readable.
— Muriel Spark

The most extraordinary literary phenomenon of the twentieth century.
— Julian Symons

Also see:

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

Dirty Snow, widely acknowledged as one of Simenon's finest books, is a study of the criminal mind comparable to Jim Thompson's The Killer Inside Me.
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.
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: $12.95
Price: $9.71 (25% off)


Aug 31, 2005
224 pages
ISBN: 159017111X
9781590171110
All Literature in Translation
NYRB Classics
Literature in French

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