Why does everyone call Buttfish "Buttfish"? Well, his cheeks look like butt cheeks. His head looks like a great big butt! But you know what? In the end, a great big butt looks a lot like… a great big heart! You just have to take heart and look on the bright side! Just like our hero in this picture book for ages 3-6.

 

Buttfish may laugh at his own buttlike head along with everyone else, but deep down, he wishes he were just a normal-looking fish. Tired of being the butt of every joke, he decides to head down into the abyssal depths to have a look around. That’s where he meets Cheesewedge-Fish, whose head looks even weirder—but what a unique and hilarious fellow he is! Soon followed by a catfish, a school of pilot fish, a sawfish, a lanternfish, a barrelfish, and even a monkeywrench fish! Down in the depths, Buttfish discovers that great big butt looks a lot like… a great big heart.

 

"An incredibly freeing work of incredible finesse" 

"I read Pauline Pinson’s words and laughed enormously. What I liked most was the perfectly calibrated blend of humor, tenderness, and unbridled whimsy, all in the service of an important theme: one’s own self-image. We love Poisson-Fesse. We rejoice in his unassuming resilience and cheer. Tackling a topic as important as this with such a light touch is a feat," says Valérie Cussaguet, editorial director of publisher Éditions des Fourmis Rouges.

 

A picture book that has captured the hearts of readers and booksellers all over France… 

Ever since splashing onto the page in June 2024, this chubby little pink fish has become a legitimate literary phenomenon: 65,000 copies of this book were sold in just one year. "Booksellers jumped on the wagon at once," says publisher Éditions des Fourmis Rouges. Despite a fairly large initial print run of 7,000 copies, the book went into a second printing just two weeks after its release. According to Angélina Codron, a bookseller at Bateau livre in Lille, Poisson-Fesse is "one of the best picture books you’ll ever read about the importance of self-confidence."  Meanwhile, Justine Caillaud of the bookstore Passages in Lyon calls it a "galaxy-wide crush." Readers, too—young and old alike—have fallen hard for everyone’s favorite fish.

 

"A spot on the TV program Quotidien was the first step in conquering the media. A major article in the national edition of the magazine Le Parisien led to an invitation on France Inter‘s Matinale, a radio show with countless listeners," Valérie Cussaguet adds. The daily paper Libération says: "Poisson-Fesse, a work by two Parisian friends—Magali Le Huche on pictures and Pauline Pinson on words—is very good. And everyone says so—even us!"

 

But what about publishers abroad?

Poisson-Fesse went on to be a hit with foreign publishers as well. Translation rights have been sold in ten languages: German, English (UK, US), Catalan, Chinese (simplified and traditional), Korean, Spanish, Finnish, Italian, and Dutch.

 

Hannele Willig, the agent and rights manager for Éditions des Fourmis Rouges, attributes sales to word-of-mouth momentum independent presses abroad. "The English publisher stopped by our booth at Frankfurt for five minutes to say hi. I showed him Poisson-Fesse; he loved it and made an offer. Then he told a Finnish editor about it, and she decided to publish it too!"

 

There was much hemming, hawing, and general conversation among publishers over how to best translate the title in different countries and languages. "The hard thing was striking the right tone for the word fesses in each language. It had to be funny, but not too vulgar. In some languages, ‘ass’ worked better than something tamer like ‘rump’ or ‘behind.’ ‘Ass’ is what the Spaniards went with, but that wasn’t going to fly in South America. We’re still waiting to hear what they came up with," Hannele Willig observes.

 

And so the title in North America became Buttfish and in England, Bumfish. In Italy, Pesce Chiappa (Poisson-fesse); in Catalonia, Peix Cul (Poisson-cul); in Spanish, Pez Culo (Poisson-cul)…

Anne Riottot
June 2025