trans. Lara Vergnaud
A rare book that depicts the isolation and poetry of rural life.
Everyone is asking about his identity. Gay? Muslim? French? Moroccan? Instead of choosing a side, he writes a book. A book about the forest and the city, Paris and Tangiers, shame and forgiveness, dating apps and spiritual discovery. A book about growing up as a diaspora kid in rural France, with desires that want to emerge at any cost. Told in mesmerising prose, How to Leave the World is a beautiful non-answer.
Shortlisted for the 2025 Republic of Consciousness Prize for Small Presses.
Marouane Bakhti is a writer and arts journalist. Born in Nantes, France to a Moroccan father and a French mother, he studied history and journalism at the Sorbonne. He writes criticism for Mouvement magazine and lives in Paris. How to Leave the World is his first novel.
Lara Vergnaud is a literary translator of French and has translated over a dozen novels, including works by Zahia Rahmani, Fatima Daas, Mohamed Leftah and Mohamed Mbougar Sarr. Lara was born in Tunisia, grew up in the United States and currently lives in southern France.
Visceral scenes and fragments of shame, desire and displacement crystallise as sentences that are felt before they are understood. Bakhti writes diaspora as distension, a condition of freezing and unfreezing through successive intimacies and encounters: ‘Voice, silence, voice, silence.’ What it takes to imagine social and physical freedom is what it meant to keep reading this incredible book.
I was struck by its kaleidoscopic scope, despite its brevity – from the earthy and vital imagery of Bakhti’s childhood, through the transformational effects of grief and faith. A beautiful book!
This is an astonishingly good debut book. I was immediately drawn in and adored the beautifully crafted prose. With sensitivity and nuance, Marouane Bakhti explores the complexities of family and cultural identity as a member of the Moroccan diaspora – and one who happens to be coming to terms with his sexuality. There is so much heart in this story, you can’t help but feel like it was a privilege to have been taken on this journey. Marouane Bakhti is without doubt a promising new writer and I am excited to see what he does next.
trans. Ivan Kats, revised by Lionel and Sharmini Bailly
Dolto’s Dominique is the only case I’ve found that rivals Freud, and brings us up to date, replete with questions of incestuous trauma, repressed sexualities, autism and cognitive disability, and a profound sense for the contradictions of polite society and histories of colonial and racist violence. I love this child and encountering Dolto’s otherworldly voice as an analyst.
While the child psychoanalyst Françoise Dolto stands alongside Jacques Lacan as a leading light of the Other French School, she has been little translated and remains curiously unknown in the English-speaking world. First published in 1971, Dominique: The Case of an Adolescent is frank and close to the clinical experience. A masterpiece of the genre, it is at once a granular psychological portrait of a troubled adolescent and his familial inheritance, and a historical case study of French society in the 1960s.
Foreword by Michael Ryzner-Basiewicz.
Françoise Dolto (born 6 November 1908, Paris) was a psychoanalyst and paediatrician. Alongside private practice at her home, where she saw adults and children, Dolto practised in four institutions where she saw only children patients: the Polyclinique Ney, the Centre Claude Bernard, the Hôpital Trousseau and the Centre Etienne Marcel. From 1967 to 1969, Dolto answered adult and child listeners of the French radio station Europe No. 1, live and anonymously under the name ‘Docteur X’. The programme enjoyed excellent ratings, but Dolto found dialogue to be hindered by the demands of live broadcasting and advertising. In 1976, she agreed to return to radio with Lorsque l’enfant paraît on France Inter, on the condition that she replied to listeners’ letters, which enabled her to go into depth. The programme was a huge success, and would make her a household name. In 1978 Dolto retired as an adult psychoanalyst: her fame had become such that it distorted the therapeutic relationship with patients. She now devoted herself to prevention, training of young analysts, group and individual supervision, publications, conferences and radio and television broadcasts. She also continued her work with children in the care of the Aide Sociale à l’Enfance, some of whom she received at her home until the end of her life. In 1979, along with a small team, she founded the Maison Verte, a place for early-years socialisation welcoming children from ages zero to four along with their caregivers, for sessions of play and talk. This model spread throughout France and Europe, to Russia, Armenia and Latin America. Dolto is the author of more than a dozen books, and several essays, interviews and seminars. In English, her books have been translated as Psychoanalysis and Pediatrics (Routeledge, 2013) and The Unconscious Body Image (Routledge, 2022). Françoise Dolto died on 25 August 1988 in Paris.
Ivan Kats (1926–2008), naturalised American, worked as a translator, editor, teacher, publisher and journalist in France and the United States. He graduated with an MA from Yale University, New Haven, in 1969. In 1970 he founded the Obor Foundation, dedicated to the publication and dissemination of books to book-poor countries, which he directed until his retirement in 1996.
Lionel Bailly is a practising psychoanalyst of the Association Lacanienne Internationale, an academic associate of the British Psychoanalytical Society, and a child and adolescent psychiatrist. Trained in medicine and psychiatry at Salpêtrière Hospital in Paris, he is honorary professor at University College London Psychoanalysis Unit where he is particularly involved in the doctoral school. He led the Sainte-Anne Hospital Centre’s biopsychopathology unit before moving to London in 2000. Bailly is the author of two books, one on psychotrauma in children (in French) and Lacan: A Beginner’s Guide (Oneworld, 2009).
Sharmini Bailly is a psychoanalyst (member, British Psychoanalytical Society) and a senior member of the British Psychotherapy Foundation. She translated Françoise Dolto’s The Unconscious Body Image (Routledge 2022) and has edited two books on Lacanian theory. She works in the NHS and in private practice, and teaches and supervises psychodynamic/psychoanalytic practitioners.
