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In 2020, I retired from teaching at The Brearley School in New York City after 28 years. I am a literary translator, writer, and editor. My first modern translation of Paul Scarron’s seminal 1650 French novel, LE ROMAN COMIQUE, THE COMIC ROMANCE, was published by Alma Classics in 2012. The Times of London Literary Supplement (TLS) said ‘Jacques Houis’s lively new translation conveys the energy and vitality of Scarron’s original… a welcome revival of a comic classic.’ I am looking for a publisher for my translation of LA BALLADE, which I am calling THE RAMBLE, a 1966 fictional text by the forgotten French writer Patrick MacAvoy, who was shortlisted for the Prix Goncourt in 1970 and who abandoned writing at age 26, burned his manuscripts and devoted the rest of his life to Indian classical music. I published an article in The Review of Contemporary Fiction (Fall 2013) “Transgressive Autofictions: literary counterculture in 1960’s Saint Germain-des Prés” that discusses Patrick MacAvoy and three other neglected writers who I claim represent the sixties zeitgeist better than their more well-known contemporaries. I coedited with Paola Mieli and Mark Stafford, BEING HUMAN: THE TECHNOLOGICAL EXTENSIONS OF THE BODY. Marsilio, NY 1999. I translated Paola Mieli’s FIGURES OF SPACE: SUBJECT, BODY, PLACE. Agincourt/Seahorse, NY 2017. My translation of Jean-Pierre Cléro’s LACAN ET LA LANGUE ANGLAISE. Érès, 2017 (LACAN AND THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE) was published in 2020 by Agincourt/Seahorse, NY. In 2023, New York Review Books (NYRB) is slated to publish my translation of Georges Darien’s LE VOLEUR (THE THIEF) a classic 1897 novel.

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