Michelle Bailat-Jones
Michelle Bailat-Jones has translated two of the six Ramuz novels Skomlin publishes. Beauty on Earth, which Ramuz finished in 1927, had waited decades for an English translation. What if the sun... had never appeared in English at all, and her edition carries both the 1937 novel and the 1912 short story it grew from.
Michelle Bailat-Jones is a writer and translator. Born in Japan and raised in the Pacific Northwest, she lives in Switzerland, of which she is now a citizen, and holds an MFA from Emerson College. Her debut novel Fog Island Mountains won the 2013 Christopher Doheny Award from the Center for Fiction; her second, Unfurled, appeared in 2018. She is Translations Editor at Necessary Fiction, and beyond her two Ramuz novels for Skomlin she has translated Claude Cahun and, for Bloomsbury, Corinne Chaponniere's biography of Red Cross founder Henry Dunant.
Titles at Skomlin
The arrival of a beautiful orphan at her uncle's lakeside inn sends a slow, dreamlike chaos rippling through a Swiss village. In Ramuz's incantatory 1927 novel, beauty itself becomes an almost elemental, disruptive force.
What would the end of the world look like to people whose lives turn on the certainty of the seasons? When the sun fails to rise over their alpine valley, the villagers of Upper Saint-Martin must live out their final days knowing the worst.