'Street of Thieves is a feat of the imagination propelled by deep cultural familiarity and experience, an extraordinary animation of another person ... Taken together with Zone, I'll read everything Enard writes from now on: his language jumps across and down the page, he doesn't fear engaging with complicated ideas, and he manages to animate living, breathing characters who savor the complexities and ambiguities, the beauties and horrors, of life.' - Lee Klein, 3:AM Magazine Praise for Zone '[Zone is] an ambitious study of twentieth century conflict and disaster - Enard's novel is to be seen within a tradition of French avant-garde writing ... The result is a modern masterpiece.' - David Collard, Times Literary Supplement '[T]he brilliance of Zone lies in its brutal refusal to stop. Again and again, Mathias Enard's white-knuckle narrative plunges us back into the battle-scarred past, forcing us to confront its horrors ... a relentlessly inventive novel.' - David Winters, Literary Review '[T]he material of a conventional thriller has been sublimated into an atmosphere of violence, power and cruelty; humanity here is little more than a vector through which various kinds of insanity flow.' - Nicholas Lezard, Guardian

Mathias Enard studied Persian and Arabic and spent long periods in the Middle East. A professor of Arabic at the University of Barcelona, he won the Prix des Cinq Continents de la Francophonie and the Prix Edmee de la Rochefoucault for his first novel, La perfection du tir. He has been awarded many prizes for Zone, including the Prix du Livre Inter and the Prix Decembre. Charlotte Mandell has translated fiction, poetry, and philosophy from the French, including works by Proust, Flaubert, Genet, Maupassant, Blanchot, and many other distinguished authors. She has received many accolades and awards for her translations, including a Literature Translation Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts for Zone.