In nearly fifty years of existence, the “Bouquins” collection has carved out a unique place for itself in the publishing world: combining intellectual rigor with freedom of tone and approach, it tirelessly explores all fields of knowledge and creation, often going against the grain of official trends or institutional biases. The chapter that opens today with the launch of “Les Singuliers” aims to further explore this path of curiosity and audacity. Born out of a desire to shed new light on the exceptional “Bouquins” collection and make it available to a new audience, “Les Singuliers” aims to explore the hundreds of thousands of pages published in “Bouquins,” where countless treasures lie, sometimes forgotten, to retain what has always made it successful: little-known classics, unpublished historical or literary essays, critical apparatus of unparalleled richness…
Among the first titles to be published in October, La Table ronde et le Roi Arthur offers a collection of novels based on Breton folklore and illustrating the quest for the Holy Grail. Most of them were published for the first time in modern French in the volume La Légende arthurienne, one of the bestsellers in the “Bouquins” collection (more than 150,000 copies sold since its publication), which retains exclusive rights to them. In these fantastical tales, which are above all great love stories, we encounter Merlin and Arthur, Perceval and Gauvain, followed by a whole cohort of characters as rich as they are surprising. Magical objects and artifacts, the quest for origins, initiatory trials, successes and failures, multiple adventures: here, in short, is the first form of the Western novel taking shape before our eyes. The end of the volume also includes a glossary of civilizational terms used, a table of proper names, and several maps describing the European spread of the Arthurian legend.
This volume contains: Merlin et Arthur : le Graal et le royaume ; L’Âtre périlleux ; Gliglois ; Le Chevalier à l’épée ; Le Chevalier au papego.
