After ten years away, my return to Paris brought with it a new and critical perspective on the city I once called home. This book was born from that distance—geographical, emotional, and cultural—and from a personal quest to understand how my origins shape my relationship to love and sexuality.
At first, I approached this project as a kind of intimate sociological inquiry. I multiplied the encounters—mostly through dating apps—filming them, observing, taking notes. But gradually, I let go of the camera and returned to writing, my more familiar language. The stories began with my own, then opened up to include the voices and lives of others. One by one, these short stories unfolded like a series of encounters—each a fragment of truth, each a question posed to the world.
Through this collection, I aim to give voice to those who often go unseen, or whom society prefers not to see. The stories explore the accidental clash of social classes, the inversion of gender roles, the place of madness in love, emotional and sexual precarity, and the endlessly shifting definitions of intimacy and partnership.
The characters that inhabit these pages are as ordinary as they are marginal, as detestable as they are familiar—each in search of the other, in their own flawed, desperate, or tender ways.
2025: the majority of couples now meet online.
From one-night stands to relationships that remain unnamed, or those that don’t survive the break-up... Maya, with a unique sensitivity and a critical eye, selects her stories and characters deliberately and tells them with the power of her voice, the rhythmic precision of her prose, and a subtle balance of humor and gravity.
Faced with this array of "romantic" encounters, you may find yourself wondering whether one should disclose a disability before a first date, whether it might be better to tackle thousand-piece puzzles than romantic meetings, or whether mutual self-deception might be the most accomplished form of conjugal happiness.
You will encounter despair, infidelity, waiting, domination — all terribly ordinary. You’ll meet characters who are twisted and tormented, vulnerable, and above all, desperate for love and connection.
Dark, raw, and realistic, the collection does not shy away from inverting roles, restoring the dignity of victims, and giving voice to the ashamed and the castaways of love and its conventions.
ABOUT THE COVER:
The cover of NEXT is probably the one that went through the most successive versions in all of Eukalypto’s catalogue.
To begin with, the editorial team suggested a design focused on the “showcase” aspect of dating apps:
However, the author wasn’t fond of this direction. She found it too cliché, too familiar, not bold enough—and she suggested one of her own drawings instead:
But the rest of the team felt that her proposal didn’t really reflect the spirit of the book. So we experimented with several alternative directions:
We even considered some fairly radical options:
And finally, salvation arrived in the form of a design that combined all the ideas we had explored: