Sous la présidence de Gérard de Cortanze, le jury vient de décerner le Prix du Premier roman étranger 2019 à Sana Krasikov pour LES PATRIOTES, paru cet été chez Albin Michel (traduit de l’anglais par Sarah Gurcel).
« Alors que les États-Unis sont frappés par la Grande Dépression, Florence Fein, à seulement 24 ans, quitte Brooklyn pour une ville industrielle de l’Oural, dans la toute jeune URSS. Elle n’y trouvera pas ce qu’elle espérait : un idéal d’indépendance et de liberté. Comme de nombreux Refuzniks, son fils Julian, une fois adulte, émigre aux États-Unis. Des années plus tard, en apprenant l’ouverture des archives du KGB, il revient en Russie et découvre les zones d’ombre de la vie de sa mère. Entremêlant époques et lieux, ce premier roman magistral de Sana Krasikov nous plonge au cœur de l’affrontement Est-Ouest en explorant, à travers le destin de trois générations d’une famille juive, l’histoire méconnue de milliers d’Américains abandonnés par leur pays en pleine terreur stalinienne, et les conséquences de nos choix individuels sur la vie de nos enfants. »
Archives de l’auteur : WebmasterBenisti
THE LIFE OF THE MIND de Christine Smallwood
A debut novel following an adjunct professor whose days are disrupted by a miscarriage, forcing her to reckon with shame, relationships, the passage of time, the meaning of endings, and the illusion that our minds may free us from our bodies. A witty, intelligent story of an American woman on the edge, by a brilliant new voice in fiction.
THE LIFE OF THE MIND: A Novel
by Christine Smallwood
Hogarth Press, March 2021
As an adjunct professor of English with a 4-3 course load, Dorothy feels “like a janitor in the temple who continued to sweep because she had no idea what else to do but who had lost her belief in the essential sanctity of the enterprise.” No one but her partner knows that she’s just had a miscarriage, not even her therapists—Dorothy being the kind of person who begins seeing a second because she’s too conflict-averse to break things off with the first. It’s not so much that Dorothy is ashamed of the miscarriage itself as she is of the sense of purpose the prospect of motherhood had provided, of how much she’d wanted it. The freedom not to be a mother is one of the victories of feminism. So why does she feel like a failure? (That’s another thing she’s ashamed of.)
In the tradition of Sheila Heti, Ottessa Moshfegh, and Rachel Cusk, THE LIFE OF THE MIND is a novel about endings: of youth, of aspirations, of possibility, of the illusion that our minds can ever free us from the tyranny of our bodies. And yet our minds are all we have to make sense of a world largely out of our control—which is to say a world without us at the center as protagonists; a world where things happen, but there is no plot. And so Dorothy must make do with what she has, as the weeks pass and the bleeding subsides. If that sounds depressing, it isn’t; in fact, it’s often hilarious. Most of all, it’s real. In literature—as Dorothy well knows—stories end. But life, as they say, goes on.
Christine Smallwood’s fiction has appeared in The Paris Review, n+1, and Vice. Her reviews, essays, and cultural reporting have been published in many magazines, including The New Yorker, Bookforum, T, and The New York Times Magazine, where she is a contributing writer. From 2014-2017 she wrote the “New Books” column for Harper’s, and has been an editor at The Nation. She has a PhD in English from Columbia University, is a co-founder of the Brooklyn Institute for Social Research, and is a Fellow at The New York Institute for the Humanities.
FEASTING WILD de GinaRae LaCerva
A writer and anthropologist searches for wild foods―and reveals what we lose in a world where wildness itself is misunderstood, commodified, and hotly pursued.
FEASTING WILD:
In Search of the Last Untamed Food
by GinaRae LaCerva
Greystone Books, May 2020
Anthropologist and geographer GinaRae LaCerva’s fascination with hunting and gathering quickly exploded into a personal obsession that sent her on a quest to taste the wild foods we still eat and the ones we have forgotten: from wild boar in Borneo, to a lobster bake on an island in Maine, to gathering herbs near Kierkegaard’s grave in Copenhagen. She didn’t expect to find something much more profound—an untamable love affair and the elusive pleasure of simple sustenance. Along the way, she illuminates that the history of food is also the history of environmental conservation, examines the rapid transformation of wild food from nutritional necessity to luxury good, explores how this shift reflects our attempts to tame and commodify “natures” of all kinds, and ultimately finds that her own sense of adventure is just as unruly as the natural places she explores.
This impeccably researched narrative history uncovers something essential about what it means to love the planet in the age of extinction. Equal parts environmental history and adventure narrative, FEASTING WILD weaves together extensive field research and personal narrative to interrogate our concept of nature, investigate how our insatiable appetites have contributed to the current landscape of environmental crisis, and question what we might do about it now.
GinaRae LaCerva is a geographer, environmental anthropologist, and award-winning writer who has traveled extensively to research a variety of environmental and food-related topics. A National Science Foundation Graduate Fellow, La Cerva holds a Master of Environmental Science from Yale University’s School of Forestry and Environmental Studies and a Master of Philosophy from the University of Cambridge. Originally from New Mexico, she lives in New York.
NEW KID de Jerry Craft remporte le Kirkus Prize !
★“An engrossing, humorous, and vitally important graphic novel that should be required reading in every middle school in America.” — Kirkus Reviews
Le roman graphique jeunesse NEW KID de Jerry Craft a été récompensé par le Kirkus Prize ! Ce prix vient s’ajouter aux autres distinctions déjà reçues : il fait partie de la sélection des meilleurs livres de 2019 de Publishers Weekly et a également été en lice pour le Harvey Award for Best Children’s Book of the Year.
Un nouveau titre de Jerry Craft, CLASS ACT, paraîtra chez HarperCollins à l’automne 2020.
MORD IN SUNSET HALL de Leonie Swann
The first volume of the forthcoming SUNSET HALL crime series!
MORD IN SUNSET HALL
(Murder in Sunset Hall)
by Leonie Swann
Goldmann Verlag, Spring 2020
Photo credit: Mark Bassett
Agnes Sharp has enough to worry about, thank you very much! There’s the hip, the broken stairlift and of course her unruly housemates, a bunch of eccentric fellow pensioners. However, now there’s a dead old lady in the potting shed. And another dead old lady in the neighboring garden. Idyllic English village life suddenly has a crack and someone is out to get them. A perfidious murderer is on the loose!
Agnes and her feisty housemates roll up their sleeves, grab their trusty tortoise and set out in pursuit of the murderer. The hunt for the killer will lead them onto the slippery parquet of the local Community Coffee Club, to the sinister Limetree House and – most frighteningly – deep into their own past. Turns out that Agnes and her crew have their own old secrets to guard…
Leonie Swann was born near Munich in 1975. She studied philosophy, psychology and English literature at the universities of Munich and Berlin. Her first two novels, GLENNKILL (THREE BAGS FULL) and GAROU, were an immediate and sensational success: both books topped the bestseller lists for months and have been sold to twenty-five countries, often gracing those bestseller lists, too. Leonie Swann lives in Berlin and in England. Her third novel, DUNKELSPRUNG, was published in 2014 and translated as well. GRAY is Leonie’s newest book, published in 2017.