Seven small fictions each dedicated to an artist : Artemisia Gentileschi, Tiepolo, Poussin, Hölderlin, Rilke, Katherine Mansfield, Blaise Cendrars. Seven figures tinged with silence and loneliness, in whom we encounter Michèle Desbordes’ favourite themes and places : sensuality, travels, memory, illness, death, the painter’s studio, rivers, Italy. As always, Michèle Desbordes excels in showing the light — sometimes subdued, sometimes bright — around her characters,  and enables us to touch Time in its full melancholy.

Press reviews :

"A very moving book." Valérie Marin La Meslée, Le Point.

"These seven lives are other people’s lives, chronologicaly ordered, collected in a few pages by Michèle Desbordes, concentrated lives, squezzed to the core, lives of people slowly dying and whose melancholy turns their life in quiet destinies." Jean-Baptiste Harang, Libération.

"In Artemisia et autres proses, Michèle Desbordes expresses a same vision, serene and melancholy, of the world, of people, of places." Patrick Kéchichian, Le Monde