Crazy Genie

“Part fairy tale, part incantation, this devastatingly beautiful story teeters between innocence and menace. The young narrator must interpret her elusive, impenetrable mother by paying vigilant close attention, and the result is a story of exquisite observation, taut with longing, in a landscape pulsing with terrors real and imagined. I held my breath until the final word.” —Sonya Walger“Inès Cagnati’s debut Free Day is the only novel I recommend to everyone I know. I have prayed for another Cagnati translation, and I am grateful Liesl Schillinger has now brought Crazy Genie to us. Here Cagnati summons another unshakable voice to tell a story that is brutal, pure, and alive. Here is the violence of rural poverty and rejection. Here is how imagination survives.” —Ashleigh Bryant Phillips”[Cagnati] dazzles and devastates in equal measure with this tragic 1976 novel of life in the French countryside … Cagnati captures the seasons of agricultural life in short, poetic chapters that use repetition to great effect, conveying the characters’ slim chances of escaping their brutal world. This will leave readers in awe.” —Publishers Weekly, starred review

In s Cagnati (1937-2007) was born in Monclar, France, and died in Orsay. The child of Italian immigrants, she became a French citizen but never considered herself French. With a bachelor’s degree in modern literature and a certificate for secondary-school instruction, she worked as a professor of literature at the Lycee Carnot in Paris. Cagnati was the author of four prize-winning books, including Free Day.

Liesl Schillinger is a literary critic, writer, and translator, and teaches journalism and criticism at the Eugene Lang College of Liberal Arts of the New School for Social Research in New York City. For NYRB Classics, she translated In s Cagnati’s Free Day.