SMOKING KILLS, deeply French story made accessible to Anglophone readers

SMOKING KILLS
ANTOINE LAURAIN (tr. Louise Rogers Lalaurie)
Pushkin Press (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$12.99 ebook, preorder for delivery on 5 May 2026

Rating: 4.5* of five

The Publisher Says: In this cozy crime novel with a witty, Parisian black-comedy twist, anti-hero Fabrice can only make smoking pleasurable by committing the ultimate crime

How far would you go to enjoy a cigarette?

When headhunter Fabrice Valantine faces a smoking ban at work, he decides to undertake a course of hypnotherapy to rid himself of the habit. At first the treatment works, but his stress levels begin to rise when he is passed over for an important promotion and he finds himself lighting up again—but with none of his previous enjoyment.

Then he discovers something terrible: he accidentally causes a man’s death, and, needing a cigarette to calm his nerves, he enjoys it more than any other previous smoke. What if he now needs to kill someone every time he wants to properly appreciate his next Benson and Hedges?

Unwilling to return to the numbness of a life without pleasurable smoking, Fabrice launches into a life of crime, finding ever more original murder methods—including the use of a poisonous Ecuadorean frog.

A blackly comic story of addiction and transgression, this is also an exploration of the human need for fulfillment, and the lengths we will go to in order to find it. In the end the book provokes us to question the limits we place on ourselves, and the true definition of joy.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA EDELWEISS+. THANK YOU.

My Review: Fabrice Valantine is in prison. He is so an unrepentant smoker, as the title implies, that he sees the joy of smoking as superseding others' right to life. Not quite the spin on the title you expected, eh what?

How a professional headhunter (noun Wiktionary serves three senses of the word:
A savage who cuts off the heads of his enemies, and preserves them as trophies.
One who recruits senior personnel for a company.
A pitcher who throws at the batter's head.)
Of these three I think the fairest to apply here is the third; the author intends the second; and implicit in all three is the first) with a genuine love affair with/oral fixation on the dick-shaped tubes of chemicals that, when ignited, provide particulate delivery directly into one's mucous membranes...and those of hundreds of others who happen to be passing by. When absolutely, as a condition of employment, required to stop smoking, Fabrice resorts to hypnotism. It works.

Sort of.

Fabrice loses the pleasure of smoking ("I faced these painful hours with no solace whatsoever, just the dusty taste of my cigarettes and the utter ineffectiveness of the nicotine"), not the need to smoke. Until after an awful, awful accident where someone loses their future to death due to his carelessness, the frisson of smoking returns. So it wasn't permanently removed by hypnosis, only recalibrated to require extreme stimulation to experience it. Being a smoker therefore selfish and self-obsessed, this shows a path forward into pleasure that Fabrice, narrating his story from prison, chooses to follow. But he's careful! He only kills those whose loss won't matter! Isn't he due a reward for, as I often say, cleanin' the gene pool?

A fantastical noir-tinged laugh-out-loud satire of capitalism is one way to see this story. So is a comedy of manners, replete with stock characters (Fabrice as Gordon Gekko leaps to mind). Most of all, though, I want you to read this pinnacle of the translator's art. Louise Rogers Lalaurie has rendered into high-level, delightfully readable English one of the most vibe-dependent reads from the very French pen of Author Laurain. It's not this team's first collaboration...I do not know if the author and the translator worked together to create their magic, but I'm inclined to view the evidence as supporting that interpretation...as the current rush of Pushkin Press's republications attests. I'm a fan because I think Author Laurain chooses his targets well. I'm a fan because the translator understands on a deep level the targets, their cultural position in France, and the sense of the language the author chooses to use and renders it into a different culture recognizably. Her skill is to make this extremely French book humorous in the extremely different cultural valences of English. That is a tremendous skill.

A book to savor like one's last cigarette.

BLACK BUCK, savagely funny & supremely fun send-up/roast/take-down of US business culture

BLACK BUCK
MATEO ASKARIPOUR
Mariner Books (non-affiliate Amazon link)
$26.00 hardcover, available now

AN ENTERTAINMENT WEEKLY BUZZIEST WORKPLACE BOOK OF 2021!

The Young Lions Fiction Award shortlist has the author on it! The New York Public Library will announce the winner on 16 June 2022.

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: There’s nothing like a Black salesman on a mission.

An unambitious twenty-two-year-old, Darren lives in a Bed-Stuy brownstone with his mother, who wants nothing more than to see him live up to his potential as the valedictorian of Bronx Science. But Darren is content working at Starbucks in the lobby of a Midtown office building, hanging out with his girlfriend, Soraya, and eating his mother’s home-cooked meals. All that changes when a chance encounter with Rhett Daniels, the silver-tongued CEO of Sumwun, NYC’s hottest tech startup, results in an exclusive invitation for Darren to join an elite sales team on the thirty-sixth floor.

After enduring a “hell week” of training, Darren, the only Black person in the company, reimagines himself as “Buck,” a ruthless salesman unrecognizable to his friends and family. But when things turn tragic at home and Buck feels he’s hit rock bottom, he begins to hatch a plan to help young people of color infiltrate America’s sales force, setting off a chain of events that forever changes the game.

Black Buck is a hilarious, razor-sharp skewering of America’s workforce; it is a propulsive, crackling debut that explores ambition and race, and makes way for a necessary new vision of the American dream.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA NETGALLEY. THANK YOU.

My Review: Please, please, someone in Black Hollywood make this into a movie! I can't think of a better time, or a better story, to use this terrific twist on The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit to skewer the shrinking opportunity pool! The Economist cites statistics that show that white bros are more eager than BIPoC employees to return to the office, stop remote working. Reading this book will give you a visceral, intense sense of why that most likely is true...and what the grim consequences for diversity in the workplace could turn out to be.

Not, however, if Author Askaripour has anything to say about it.

You see, there's some truth to the old adages "be careful what you wish for, lest the answer be 'yes'" and "you get back what you give out." Darren, twenty-two and a barista with a pretty good life (he thinks; his mom disagrees), sees one of his regulars ordering the same boring thing every morning. He does what a good sales person always does: suggests an alternative, a different and more interesting drink. Without being crappy about it, he persists until the customer agrees to try the new item. Which he loves.

Darren's brewed his last latte. He upsold the founder of SumWun and now he has a high-powered sales job waiting for him. That maybe he doesn't want...or isn't sure he wants...but let me tell you, when someone who's got what it takes to grab enough money to found a viable tech company wants you, it would do you best to get your stuff out of your locker and go with him right then. There will be no rest until your onboarding process is complete and your world revolves around Selling the Widget.

Author Askaripour chose to frame this narrative as one of those metastatic "positivity/self-help/I succeeded you can too" memoirs recrudescing all over bookstores like lesions on a cancer patient. It was, I thought for about two chapters, going to make me a crazy person. "I have to bail," I whimpered to my Young Gentleman Caller. "I might get seriously ill, this is reminding me of all those years selling!"

"Read me some," he said, "just enter {position number} and let's go."

“Ain’ no Black people need no therapists, ’cause we don’ be havin’ those mental issues. OCD, ADD, PTSD, and all those other acronyms they be comin’ up with every day. I’m tellin’ you, the only acronyms Black folk need help with is the NYPD, FBI, CIA, KKK, and KFC, ’cause I know they be puttin’ shit in those twelve-piece bucket meals to make us addicted to them.”

"That was funny! You haven't got that far yet, you have to find out why that's there," I was ordered.

You rock, Rob. I took the ride, I enjoyed the whole ride, and you're the one who made it happen.

It was sometimes cringe to me how close Author Askaripour sailed to the winds of snottiness. It was often the case, however, that he found my ticklish spot right after that. I am not going to say I think everyone should read the book because the humor-deficient will be blankly confused why it's supposed to be funny or outraged that their demographic is being scored off ("He reeked of privilege, Rohypnol, and tax breaks" is one of the most memorable snorts of derision). For me, possibly for you, there's an aesthetic hill to climb in the format being parodied; but there is something so very good to gain by persevering: Belly laughs at the sheer inventive snark leveled at targets who could use some dings and scratches on their cheap veneer.

Recommended for some good, cathartic belly laughs.