Marie-Constance is thirty-four, unemployed, and in possession of a particularly beautiful reading voice. Deciding that this constitutes a marketable skill, she places an advertisement in the local newspaper offering to read literature aloud to strangers. 

Among her listeners are a paralysed teenager profoundly affected by Maupassant, an elderly countess with revolutionary sympathies, and a businessman seeking cultural refinement. As Marie-Constance moves between their homes, the boundaries between literature and lived experience become increasingly unstable. The books she reads begin to interfere with the lives of those listening, with consequences ranging from the erotic to the politically subversive.

Originally published in French in 1986, Raymond Jean's Reader for Hire is a playful, provocative novel about the physical and psychological power of language. Beneath its comic premise lies a serious curiosity about what happens when literature ceases to be a private intellectual activity and becomes an intimate encounter between two people.

Edition/Condition: Peirene Press, 2015. First English-language edition, paperback. Translated from the French by Adriana Hunter. Good to very good condition, with light cover wear and minor handling marks. Interior appears clean and unmarked.