The Transparent Girl and Other Stories (After the Empire: The Francophone World and Postcolonial France)

Stephanie Corinna Bille, a Swiss short-story writer, playwright, poet, and novelist and winner of the 1975 French Prix Concourt, is often considered the major contemporary Franco-Swiss woman writer. As a writer, Bille excelled at rendering the woman’s experience. She stands out as an elegant writer, a compassionate observer of early twentieth-century Catholic rural life, and a precise painter of the beauty of the natural environment. In over thirty volumes of creative writing, she favored short narrative forms from five lines to eighty pages, exploiting her dreams and fantasies in the wake of the Surrealist revolution. Yet despite her many successes, little has been published about her life and work in English. In The Transparent Girl and Other Stories Monika Giacoppe and Christiane Makward have assembled and translated a magnificent collection of Bille’s work that strives to fill this void. Within these pages they expose an English-speaking audience―many for the first time―to Bille’s exotic, captivating, mystical, and sexually provocative stories, which will delight scholars of Literature, Francophone Studies, and Women’s Studies.