Perfecting the Shot - Softcover

Enard, Mathias

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1804272639 ISBN 13: 9781804272633

Publisher: Fitzcarraldo Editions, 2026

Synopsis

In a nameless city torn apart by civil war, a teenage sniper has only one goal: to fire the perfect shot. He sublimates himself into his weapon, learns to maintain impassivity, controls his breath, listens to his body and the beat of his heart. Lying in wait on rooftops, he takes aim at people below while his traumatized mother cowers in their flat. The violence eats away at any sense of morality as he kills civilians and combatants indiscriminately, for the sake of killing itself. His routine is disrupted by the arrival of Myrna, a fifteen-year-old girl hired to care for his mother, and his increasingly disturbing obsession with her soon threatens to push them all into the abyss. Now appearing in English more than twenty years after its original publication, Mathias Enard’s debut novel is a timeless study of how extreme violence corrodes the soul, tracking the convulsions of a brutalized mind in spare, unflinching prose.

About this title

About the Authors

Mathias Enard, born in 1972, studied Persian and Arabic and spent long periods in the Middle East. He won several awards for Zone, including the Prix du Livre Inter and the Prix Décembre, and won the Liste Goncourt/Le Choix de l’Orient, the Prix littéraire de la Porte Dorée and the Prix du Roman-News for Street of Thieves. He won the 2015 Prix Goncourt, the 2017 Leipziger Book Award for European Understanding, the Premio Gregor von Rezzori and was shortlisted for the 2017 International Booker Prize for Compass. Perfecting the Shot is his seventh novel to appear with Fitzcarraldo Editions.

Charlotte Mandell has translated over fifty books of fiction, poetry and philosophy from French, including works by Marcel Proust, Maurice Blanchot, Abdelwahab Meddeb and Jean-Luc Nancy. Her translation of Compass by Mathias Enard was shortlisted for the International Booker Prize and was the recipient of the 2018 ALTA National Translation Award in Prose. She was recently named a Chevalier de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres by the French government and has received the Thornton Wilder Translation Prize from the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

Edition details

• Publisher: Fitzcarraldo Editions
• Publication date: 2026
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1804272639
• ISBN 13: 9781804272633
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 172