Dix ans après la parution de son roman BRIGHTLY WOVEN, l’auteure Alexandra Bracken s’est associée à l’illustratrice Kit Seaton pour créer une adaptation de son livre en bande-dessinée, à paraître chez Disney Hyperion en juin 2020.
BRIGHTLY WOVEN GRAPHIC NOVEL figure dans la liste des Spring 2020 Sneak Previews de Publishers Weekly, et la couverture ainsi qu’un extrait ont été dévoilés en exclusivité par Bookish.
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. »
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.
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.
A historical thriller set in Munich in 1950 about a journalist trying to find the paintings that the Nazis had stolen during the war. While investigating, he suddenly finds himself trapped in a dangerous net of lies and deception.
DIE IM DUNKELN SIEHT MAN NICHT
(Those In the Dark Remain Unseen)
by Andreas Götz
Fischer Scherz Verlag, August 2019
Munich 1950. Karl Wieners, previously a writer, returns to his hometown Munich – a city where smugglers are successful in doing their business, where old Nazis sees new chances coming up, and where the lost finally lose all their hopes. Karl‘s last hope is a career as a journalist. If only he found out where the Nazis had hidden the works of art they had accumulated in the “Führerbau” (Hitler’s palace) during the war – this would be the very sensation he needs! He begins his research, together with his niece, Magda, who is also his secret love. They find out that the paintings, worth millions of dollars, are supposed to be sold secretly to an unknown buyer. During their investigations, however, Karl and Magda are not only disturbing the activities of inspector Ludwig Gruber, who is at his wits’ end in finding a murderer. They also get into the focus of some dubious people doing their business on the black market, and find themselves being trapped in a dangerous net of deception that seems not to let them go.
Andreas Götz, born in 1965, studied German, theatre studies, and American literature, and is now a freelance writer living close to Munich. He has worked as a translator and a journalist and has written radio plays for various radio stations. He has been writing several thrillers for young adults: STIRB LEISE, MEIN ENGEL (‘Die Gently, My Angel’), HÖRST DU DEN TOD? (‘Do You Hear Death’s Call?’), DENN MORGEN SIND WIR TOT (‘Tommorow We’ll be dead’), and BAD BOYS AND LITTLE BITCHES, all published by Oetinger. DIE IM DUNKELN SIEHT MAN NICHT is his first novel for an adult readership.