Sex, Time, and Memory: Annie Ernaux’s Young Man, by Manash Firaq Bhattacharjee Book Reviews [email protected] Mon, 08/21/2023 - 15:04 The Young Man—forthcoming from Seven Stories in September 2023—is Annie Ernaux’s first novel in English translation after receiving the most coveted honor in literature, the Nobel Prize in Literature, in October 2022 (see WLT’s review of Le Jeune Homme, May 2023, 73). A slim book of autofiction, translated by Alison Strayer, it is a few pages shorter than Simple Passion (1991), her shortest book so far. With deft terseness, Ernaux recounts her short relationship with a student thirty years younger than her. The epigraph reiterates the raison d’être of her writing: living is incomplete without evaluating life’s experiences. Life is spontaneous facticity, spent in accordance with one’s desires and impulses. Writing throws new light on life. It unearths, as Ernaux puts it in The Girl’s Story (2016), something that is irreducible to any singular explanation. In a startling sentence at the beginning of The Young Man, Ernaux equates writing with the need and possibility of overcoming “the fatigue, the dereliction” of sex and the violence of orgasm. She feels writing brings “greater pleasure” than sex, because it doesn’t abandon you to a postcoital void. It is reminiscent of Roland Barthes’s idea of body-writing in The Pleasure of the Text (1973), of writing as a fragmented overcoming of... Continue reading at 'World Literature Today'
[ World Literature Today | 2023-08-21 20:04:48 UTC ]
As she celebrates a series of career milestones—which coincide with the 20th anniversary of her publisher, Dafina Books—the author starts a new chapter by revisiting classic characters in the long-awaited sequel to her first novel, My Brother’s Keeper. (Sponsored) Continue reading at Publishers Weekly
[ Publishers Weekly | 2019-06-24 04:00:00 UTC ]
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Ta-Nehisi Coates, the bestselling author and MacArthur Fellowship recipient, is about to add novelist to the list. His debut novel, 'The Water Dancer' (One World, Sept.), follows a young man’s conflicted journey into the covert war on slavery. Continue reading at Publishers Weekly
[ Publishers Weekly | 2019-05-30 04:00:00 UTC ]
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Her Body and Other Parties, by Carmen Maria Machado I've absolutely loved this collection of short stories, which floats between the weird and the queer, passing horror, black comedy and feminism along the way. Doubles and others are especially important: a wife enters her wife’s dream when they... Continue reading at British Council global
[ British Council global | 2019-04-11 08:49:28 UTC ]
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In his unfortunately-titled 1895 self-help book Successward: A Young Man’s Book for Young Men, Edward Bok had the following to say about the importance of honesty in business: Continue reading at Slate
[ Slate | 2018-08-06 00:00:00 UTC ]
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In the wake of Hugh Hefner’s death, the magazine’s former fiction editor shares how she got everyone from Donna Tartt to Margaret Atwood to write for herI am not the only woman who worked at Playboy and kept her clothes on. When I was hired as literary editor in 2005, Hugh Hefner’s basic recipe... Continue reading at The Guardian
[ The Guardian | 2017-10-06 00:00:00 UTC ]
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Former prime minister tells BBC Radio 4 that learning about the Russian revolutionary was ‘like a light going on’Tony Blair has said that he “toyed with Marxism” as a young man after being inspired by a biography of Leon Trotsky that detailed “extraordinary causes and injustices”.The former... Continue reading at The Guardian
[ The Guardian | 2017-08-10 00:00:00 UTC ]
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Fiction reviews editor Gabe Habash recommends 'What Belongs to You,' the brilliantly structured story of an American teacher in Bulgaria caught in a love affair with a young man. Continue reading at Publishers Weekly
[ Publishers Weekly | 2015-12-04 00:00:00 UTC ]
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The feted US literary agent on addiction, attempted suicide, and having his first novel longlisted for the Booker prizeBill Clegg is a leading New York literary agent and the author of the bestselling memoirs Portrait of an Addict As a Young Man and Ninety Days, which describe respectively his... Continue reading at The Guardian
[ The Guardian | 2015-09-13 00:00:00 UTC ]
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Still captivated by the distinctive small Virginia town where he grew up, Billy Coffey returns to its proxy in his latest novel, which explores what happens when 20 years’ worth of guilt about a young man’s untimely death overtakes three high school classmates. Continue reading at Publishers Weekly
[ Publishers Weekly | 2014-03-12 00:00:00 UTC ]
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So you're an admirer of James Joyce's "Ulysses"? Well, thank Trieste for that book. So you're an admirer of James Joyce's "Ulysses"? Well, thank Trieste for that book. Why? Gordon Bowker's "James Joyce: A New Biography" (Farrar, Straus & Giroux: 608 pp., $35) shows readers how living in that... Continue reading at Los Angeles Times
[ Los Angeles Times | 2012-07-15 00:00:00 UTC ]
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