JEREMIE GUEZ reads from his new novel EYES FULL OF EMPTY, with JAMES ELLROY

Eyes Full of Empty (Unnamed Press)

From France’s hottest young crime writer, comes a hardboiled noir with the pace of a Chandler novel and the French Algerian literary legacy of Camus.

Idir is not your typical Parisian detective. The son of an Algerian immigrant who made good, Idir’s middle class upbringing places him at the bottom of the food chain when it comes to his rich friends from university, while his street smarts make him just intimidating enough to handle the secret problems of Paris’s elite. Put another way, Idir knows precisely how much pressure to exert on behalf of his wealthy clients, while keeping things low profile. That is, until Oscar Crumley, a powerful media mogul, hires Idir to find his missing younger half-brother, Thibaut. Sent on a wild goose chase through highs and lows of the Paris underground, Idir must navigate upper crust treachery and entrenched criminal rings to discover the truth. Echoing the headlong impulsiveness of Chandler’s Marlowe, and deftly translated by Edward Gauvin, Eyes Full of Emptyintroduces us to an entirely new kind of Parisian mystery.

Jěrěmie Guez was born in Paris in 1988 and has been hailed as the rising star of contemporary French noir. His two previous novels, Balanceě dans les cordes and Paris la unit, were awarded the 2013 SNCF du Polar and 2012 Plume Libre prizes, respectively. Eyes Full of Empty is the highly anticipated first English translation of Jěrěmie Guez’s work. He lives in Paris.

Edward Gauvin is a prolific translator and the recipient of numerous awards. His work has been featured most recent ly inThe New York Times, Tin House, Best European Fiction 2014, PEN America, Words Without Borders, and Gigantic, among others. He lives in San Jose, CA. 

James Ellroy was born in Los Angeles in 1948. He is the author of the L.A. Quartet: The Black Dahlia, The Big Nowhere, L.A. Confidential, and White Jazz,and the Underworld U.S.A. Trilogy: American Tabloid, The Cold Six Thousand, and Blood’s A Rover. These seven novels have won numerous honors and were international best sellers. His newest novel, Perfidia, is the first novel of the Second L.A. Quartet, Ellroy’s fictional history of Los Angeles during World War II.