Second Star

A #1 bestseller in France, Second Star is an inspiring series of lyrical meditations on life's smallest moments, from peeling a clementine, drinking a cold mojito, to washing your windows

A still life in motion, Second Star "consumes the present" with a patient curiosity, asking us to "put off tomorrow" and join Philippe Delerm in tasting, touching, listening, and noticing.

Whether biting into a bitter turnip or savoring a summer evening in June, Philip Delerm's literary snapshots transport us to simple, often overlooked sensations and pleasures, and, pausing, expand a moment or emotion outwards in concentric circles.

Vividly translated by Jody Gladding, these evocative vignettes invite us to linger, to "savor the few moments of silence"––as if each bite of a ripe watermelon, each exhaled breath on a bitterly cold day, each cloudy evening on the beach, were our last.

Philippe Delerm was born in 1950 in a suburb of Paris. A retired schoolteacher, Delerm writes fiction, essays, and children's books. His collection of essays La Première gorgée de bière et autres plaisirs minuscules sold more than one million copies in France and became a #1 bestseller. It was translated into English as The Small Pleasures of Life (also known as We Could Almost Eat Outside: An appreciation of life's small pleasures) translated by Sarah Hamp. He has published eleven books, including AUTUMN which won the Prix Alain-Fournier in 1990.
 
Jody Gladding has translated the works of Elizabeth Deshays, Hervé This, and Jean Giono, among others. She has written several books of poetry, including the spiders my arms (2018). Gladding has been honored with a Whiting Writers’ Award, an Academy of American Poets Prize, a Centre National du Livre de France Translation grant and a French-American Foundation Translation Award, along with a MacDowell Colony fellowship, a Stegner Fellowship at Stanford, and a residency at The Frost Place.