Talk and Book Signing
Gabriële
Anne & Claire Berest in Conversation with Violaine Huisman
Schedule
Tuesday, April 29, 2025
The conversation will be moderated by Violaine Huisman, L’Alliance New York Artistic Director and author of The Book of Mother. Followed by a wine reception.
The Montclair Campus of L’Alliance New York and Succeed2gether’s Montclair Literary Festival invite you to a book signing and conversation with the best-selling author of The Postcard, Anne Berest, and her sister, Claire Berest. The sisters will discuss the collaborative work that went into their novel, Gabriële, newly translated into English by Europa Editions.
About Gabriële
The year is 1908, the height of the Belle Époque, and a brilliant, young French woman named Gabriële, newly graduated from the most elite music school in Europe, meets a volcanic Spanish artist named Francis. Following a whirlwind romance, they marry and fall headlong into a Paris that is experimenting with new forms of living, thinking, and creating. Soon after marrying Francis, Gabriële meets Marcel, another young artist, five years her junior. Soon, Francis, Marcel, and Gabriële are all involved in a fervent affair that will change the course of art history and redefine the avant-garde.
As the Belle Epoque gives way to rebellion and revolution, and the world descends into the devastation of World War I, Francis Picabia, Marcel Duchamp, and Gabriële Buffet revolutionize art and open up new ways of seeing and thinking. Along the way, they pose a vital question for their age and ours: what is the connection between new ways of loving and new ways of creating?
Moving between Paris, New York, Berlin, Zurich, Barcelona, London, and Saint-Tropez, Gabriële is as audacious, uninhibited, intimate, and unforgettable as its central character, the mercurial, pioneering Gabriële Buffet.
Venue
Anne & Claire Berest
Anne Berest: Anne Berest’s first novel to appear in English, The Postcard (Europa, 2023), was a national bestseller, a Library Journal, NPR, and TIME Best Book of the Year, a Vogue Most Anticipated Book of the Year, winner of the Choix Goncourt Prize, and runner-up for the 2024 Dayton Literary Peace Prize. It was described as “stunning” by Leslie Camhi in The New Yorker, as a “powerful literary work” by Julie Orringer in The New York Times Book Review, and as “intimate, profound, essential” in the pages of ELLE magazine. Her new novel, Gabriële (Europa Editions, 2025) is based on the life of Gabriële Buffet, whose extraordinary impact on 20th century avant-garde art and whose remarkable life have largely been obscured. Berest lives in Paris.
Claire Berest: Claire Berest is the author of the novels Mikado, The Empty Orchestra, Bellevue, Rien n’est noir—winner of the ELLE Readers Grand Prize—and two works of nonfiction, Class Struggle: Why I Resigned from National Education, and Lost Children: An Investigation in the Minors Brigade. Her most recent novel is Artifices.
Violaine Huisman
Violaine Huisman was born in Paris in 1979 and has lived and worked in New York for twenty years, where she ran the Brooklyn Academy of Music’s literary series and also organized multidisciplinary arts festivals across the city. Originally published by Gallimard under the title Fugitive parce que reine, her debut novel The Book of Mother (Simon & Schuster) was awarded multiple literary prizes including the Prix Françoise Sagan and the Prix Marie Claire. In August of 2023, Huisman accepted the position of Artistic Director for L’Alliance New York, a 125-year-old NYC based French arts, cultural and language institution. Her most recent novel, Les Monuments de Paris, was published by Gallimard in France (January 2024).
Co-sponsored by the Montclair Public Library and Watchung Booksellers.
Event presented by Suceed2gether‘s Montclair Literary Festival.
Image of Anne & Claire Berest © Marthe Le More
Image of Violaine Huisman © Laura
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