The Noose of Sin. Edited with Annotations and an Afterword by Rob Couteau

About the Book

A newly revised edition of Francis Carco's novel "The Noose of Sin" (L'Homme traque), originally translated by Emile Hope in 1923, featuring an Afterword by publisher and author Rob Couteau.

About the Author :
Born in Noumea, New Caledonia in 1886, FRANCIS CARCO arrived in Paris during the winter of his 24th year, in January 1910. Making a beeline for the soon-to-be legendary cabaret, Le Lapin Agile, he was quickly accepted into the inner circle of a Parisian bohemia. There, on La Butte Montmartre, he rubbed shoulders with the likes of Picasso, Modigliani, Utrillo, Max Jacob, Pierre Mac Orlan, Apollinaire, and many of the other leading lights of a Parisian avant-garde. As the author of over 100 books, Carco's talents were plentiful. He composed poetry, fiction, plays, memoirs, and biography, and was also known as a witty and engaging chansonnier. But with each of these creative expressions his manner remains that of a poet - utilizing a personal vision to unravel and portray the spiritual enigmas that life presents. He was also possessed by a prescient perception and published the first critical essay on Modigliani, whose work he began to collect during a period when other French critics merely scoffed at the contributions of this modern master. In 1922, Carco was awarded Le Grand Prix du Roman for his novel L'Homme traque (The Noose of Sin), and in 1937 he was elected to the Academie Goncourt. ROB COUTEAU is a Brooklyn-born author and visual artist. His publications have been praised in Evergreen Review, Publishers Weekly, New Art Examiner, Midwest Book Review, and Witty Partition. In 1985 he won the North American Essay Award, sponsored by the American Humanist Association. His work has been cited in books such as Ghetto Images in Twentieth-Century American Literature by Tyrone Simpson, Gabriel Garcia Marquez's 'Love in the Time of Cholera' by Thomas Fahy, Conversations with Ray Bradbury edited by Steven Aggelis, and David Cohen's Forgotten Millions, a book about the homeless. His interviews include conversations with Pulitzer Prize-winning author Justin Kaplan, Last Exit to Brooklyn novelist Hubert Selby, Simon & Schuster editor Michael Korda, LSD discoverer Albert Hofmann, Picasso's model and muse Sylvette David, sci-fi author Ray Bradbury, film star and bibliophile Neil Pearson, and historian Philip Willan, author Puppetmasters: The Political Use of Terrorism in Italy. Couteau has appeared as a guest on Bob Barrett's The Best of Our Knowledge (WAMC), Len Osanic's Black Op Radio, and on Monocle 24 in Europe. Since 2020 he has devoted himself to republishing annotated texts of important but forgotten authors such as Stanley Marks, Charles Beadle, and Francis Carco. In 2023 he published Intimate Souvenirs, a memoir featuring an Introduction by Robert Roper, author of Nabokov in America: On the Road to Lolita and Now the Drum of War: Walt Whitman and His Brothers in the Civil War.