June 29
Translated by Linda Asher
Winner of the Prix Renaudot
Shortlisted for the Prix Goncourt
Elisabeth is a woman whose curiosity and passion far exceed the borders of her quiet middle-class life. She befriends a neighbor, organizes a small dinner party, and then, quite suddenly, finds herself embarked with him on an adventure that is one part vaudeville and one part high tragedy. Reza's quiet novel of manners turns into a police procedural thriller. Elisabeth's motivations for risking everything she has are never transparent. In a world where matters of life and death are nearly always transported to a clinical setting, whether it be a hospital or a courtroom, here each character must confront them unassisted. Truly original and absorbing, Babylon is a masterful novel from one of the world’s most inventive and daring artists, playwright/novelist Yasmina Reza.
Linda Asher in her Manhattan apartment. Photo by Bryan Schutmaat.
Remembering Linda Asher
(November 27, 1932 - September 15, 2026)
A friend of Seven Stories, the descerning and hugely talented French translator Linda Asher, died last Tuesday. Linda Asher (November 27, 1932 - September 15, 2026) helped us bring several astonishing and challenging novels into superlative English editions—Yasmina Reza's Babylon, the marvelous late 19th and early 20th century French bestseller Jean-Marie Déguignet's Memoirs of a Breton Peasant, and Martin Winckler's (pseudonym for Marc Zaffran) The Case of Doctor Sachs. Linda also translated Balzac, Simenon, Victor Hugo, Kundera and others. In her previous life as longtime fiction editor at The New Yorker, she worked with Murakami, Louise Erdrich, Beckett and A.S. Byatt among others. She will be missed.
We encourage those with photos and memories and memories to share to email LindaAsherStories@gmail.com.
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.
Linda Asher is a former fiction editor at the New Yorker and the translator of Babylon by Yasmina Reza, Memoirs of a Breton Peasant by Jean-Marie Déguignet, as well as works by Victor Hugo, Georges Simenon, and Milan Kundera, among others.
