Archives de catégorie : Fiction

LUCIA IN LA-LA-LAND de Tien-Yi Lee, un roman prometteur

Pour son agent américain il s’agit de l’un des meilleurs livres qu’elle n’ait jamais représenté. Pamela Dorman vient d’en acheter les droits nord-américains pour Penguin, et scouts et éditeurs étrangers s’y intéressent déjà :

A brilliant, heart-warming, language- and plot-driven examination of madness, identity, unexpected family ties, and the perpetual friction between love and duty

LUCIA IN LA-LA-LAND
by Tien-Yi Lee
Penguin US, TBA

The novel, told through three different POV’s starts as we see the irrepressible Lucia Bok recently married to her older husband, Yonah, a tough, charismatic Israeli with a glass eye. Together, they live on the Lower East Side. They run an organic grocery store. They think they will live happily ever after but Lucia’s older sister Miranda is wary. When Lucia starts to act a little “off” and ends up in a mental hospital Lucia and Yonah think she just needs some rest. Miranda knows better. Lucia is in fact bipolar and has had an episode before. Lucia needs to be stabilized and put on the right meds, and her husband is enabling her by letting her just come home. But there is nothing Miranda can do. You can’t force a patient to stay in a hospital and even if they stay, you can’t force them to take medication. And so, Lucia returns home, but not for long. When her affliction ramps up again, Lucia decides she wants a baby and since Yonah does not, Lucia disappears.
Enter Manny, an undocumented Ecuadorian immigrant, who starts to date Lucia. Once she gets pregnant, he is swept into her whirlwind and is blindsided when her illness takes a psychotic turn after the birth of the child. Co-dependent Miranda, having moved far away to Switzerland in an attempt to live her own life, flies back to get Lucia straightened out—if only it were that easy. Attempting a fresh start, Lucia decides she, Manny, and the baby should move to rural Ecuador. But as they plow ahead there, Lucia’s actions spawn unintended consequences for those she loves, and she, like the others in her family, struggle to find balance between self-fulfillment and moral obligation. At its heart, Lucia In La-La Land is the story of a young woman’s quest to have a family, a life, and not be defined by her illness.

Tien-Yi Lee’s work has been published in TriQuarterly, The Missouri Review, The Southern Review, The Gettysburg Review, and American Short Fiction, and has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize. In 2012, she was awarded an Artist’s Fellowship by the Massachusetts Cultural Council.

THE OLD DRIFT, premier roman de Namwali Serpell, sera publié par Crown sous son imprint Hogarth

Namwali Serpell est née en 1980 en Zambie. Elle vient de recevoir pour « The Sack » le Prix littéraire Caine, décerné à la meilleure nouvelle en langue anglaise écrite par un écrivain d’origine africaine. « The Sack » est un extrait de THE OLD DRIFT, dont le manuscrit complet devrait être disponible sous 18 mois. Le talent de Namwali Serpell n’a manqué d’être immédiatement remarqué par le Guardian et la BBC.

The Great Zambian novel you didn’t know you were waiting for, written by one of the most exciting new African writers

THE OLD DRIFT
by Namwali Serpell
Hogarth, Late 2017/Early 2018

THE OLD DRIFT is a vast and ambitious, episodic narrative about a curse that affects three generations, that takes us from Livingstone’s ‘discovery’ of Victoria Falls in 1855, through the foundation of Northern Rhodesia, its transformation into Zambia, the Zambian Space Program of the 1960s (with astronauts called Afronauts), to the southern Africa of 2050.   It is broken into three parts, narrating The Grandmothers, The Mothers and the Children of one family, playing with and subverting classic fiction tropes, including magical realism, and even science fiction.

Namwali arrives with a tremendous amount of acclaim:  her first published story was selected for the Best American Short Stories; she was just awarded the Caine Prize; she received a Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers’ Award; and was chosen to be one of the Africa39, representing the 39 best African born writers under 40 working in the world.  She was awarded a Bread Loaf Tuition Scholarship this year. Her writing has appeared in Tin House, The Believer, n+1, McSweeney’s, Bidoun, Callaloo, The L.A. Review of Books, The SF Chronicle, and The Guardian.

Kadokawa publiera le dernier thriller de Gregg Hurwitz au Japon

La maison d’édition japonaise a donc remporté les enchères et acquis les droits pour ORPHAN X, le dernier ouvrage de l’auteur de THE CRIME WRITER (« Je Te Vois », éd. Presses de la Cité).

Les droits pour ORPHAN X, premier volet d’une nouvelle série, ont été déjà cédés au Royaume-Uni (Penguin), République Tchèque (Talpress), Italie (De Agostini), Brésil (Planeta) et Israël (Dani).

Last but not least, Warner Bros a acquis les droits cinématographiques et a contacté Bradley Cooper, la star de AMERICAN SNIPER, pour le produire et y jouer le rôle principal !

The first book in a big new thriller series by Gregg Hurwitz

ORPHAN X
by Gregg Hurwitz
Minotaur Books, early 2016

“ORPHAN X is the most exciting new series character since Jack Reacher.  And Reacher would love this guy.  A page-turning masterpiece of suspense enriched by compassion and insight.”  – Jonathan Kellerman

Evan Smoak is Orphan X: a hero unlike any seen before. Trained in secrecy from childhood to be a superior assassin, he now uses those skills to aid desperate people in dire situations, removing the abusers from their lives and asking nothing in return, other than the forwarding of his phone number to someone else in need.  Though officially he doesn’t exist, he has powerful enemies from his past who want to eliminate him, and he hides from them in plain sight through a seemingly ordinary life in Los Angeles. In this inaugural book in the Orphan X series, one of Evan’s rescue missions goes horribly wrong, and Evan realizes the person he is trying to save just may be the person who destroys him.

Warner Bros has pre-empted the movie rights in a seven-figure deal!  Hot off his success in American Sniper, Bradley Cooper is attached to star and produce with his producing partner, Todd Phillips (the Hangover movies).

 

GIRLS ON FIRE de Robin Wasserman

Mise à jour du 30 janvier 2015 : droits achetés par les Éditions Fayard

Robin Wasserman’s first novel for adults follows in the footsteps of Heathers meets Megan Abbott but carves a dark, brambly path all its own

GIRLS ON FIRE
by Robin Wasserman
Harper, 2016

Hannah Dexter and Lacey Champlain recall in their alternating retrospective points of view, an obsessive teenage female friendship so passionately violent it bloodies the very sunset its protagonists insist on riding into, together, at any cost. The story begins with Hannah and Lacey as two breathless halves of the same codependent whole, incomplete and impossible without the other, and unconcerned by the mounting discomfort that their lust for chaos and rebellion causes the inhabitants of their parochial small town. But Lacey has a secret, about life before her better half, and it’s a secret that will change everything…

Set against a backdrop of 90s grunge and small-town scandals, Wasserman’s work explores the impossible dictates of femininity and the cold, hard beauty and danger inherent in adolescence. Simultaneously contemporary novel and campfire cautionary tale, GIRLS ON FIRE is part love story, part tragedy, part horror story and part irrefutable indictment both of the actual ripped-from-the-headlines blood flowing of late from modern teens’ hands and the emotional lacerations inflicted upon the psyche caused simply by being a girl. Wasserman’s work serves then as both story and object lesson, a page-turning thriller by form but more thrillingly, an all-too-recognizable and brutal portrait of certain ugly female friendship truths and the at times catastrophic masks we project upon others, and worse, ourselves, for our own weak comfort. What’s most frightening of all about this addictive excavation of adolescent violence and vulnerability is that we cannot simply cast it off merely as entertainment, thanks to Wasserman’s searing intelligence and unflinching honesty — it reads too uncomfortably necessary to the conversation, and too true to minimize, or ignore.

Robin Wasserman is a Harvard graduate, former book editor at Brooklynite, and has published or has pieces forthcoming in the LA Review of Books, Tin House, and The New York Times. She is also a beloved author in the young adult realm, with over half a million copies of more than ten teen novels in print. GIRLS ON FIRE is her first novel for adults.

More info: http://www.robinwasserman.com

Retour des nouvelles : dernière tendance de la littérature anglophone?

Le 10 octobre 2013, le prix Nobel de la littérature était décerné à Alice Munro, considérée comme la « Reine des Nouvelles ».
Un an après, l’engouement pour ce genre littéraire s’est confirmé à l’occasion de la Foire du Livre de Francfort dans le choix des ouvrages présents, dont notamment les trois recueils suivants :

A collection of connected short stories by an amazing debut author

AN UNRESTORED WOMAN
by Shobha Rao
Flatiron Books, Winter 2016

In AN UNRESTORED WOMAN, the partition of India and Pakistan in 1947 cuts a jagged path through the lives of ordinary women and men, leaving ripples of sorrow through time and space. Each couplet of stories spans the Indian subcontinent, from refugee camps and torched trains to the spacious verandas of the British Raj, and billows into the wider world. An old woman recounts the murdering of what was most precious to her, and the many small cuts that led her to that act. A girl forced into prostitution wields patience as deftly as a weapon, and manages to escape her fate. An Indian servant falls in love with his employer, and spins a twisted web of deceit.

The characters in these fearless stories stumble – occasionally towards love, more often towards survival – and find that history, above all, is their truest and greatest opponent. And what emerges, in the midst of newly erected barriers, boundaries, and nations, is a journey into the center of the only place that matters – the human heart.

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From a striking new talent, it comes an insightful collection of nine stories in which the author moves deftly between nouveau riche Los Angeles and the working-class East Coast as he explores the vicissitudes of modern life

WHITE MAN’S PROBLEMS
by Kevin Morris
Black Cat, January 2015

“A wonderful group of stories . . . you will love it” – Gus Van Sant

 Whether looking for creative ways to let off steam after a day in court or enduring chaperone duties on a school field trip to the nation’s capital; the heroes of White Man’s Problems struggle to navigate the challenges that accompany marriage, family, success, failure, growing up and getting older. The themes of these perceptive, wry and sometimes humorous tales pose philosophical questions about conformity and class, duplicity and decency, and the actions and meaning of an average man’s life. Morris’s confident debut strikes the perfect balance between comedy and catastrophe—and introduces a virtuosic new voice in American fiction.

Kevin Morris has written for The Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times and Filmmaker Magazine. He is the Co-producer of the Tony Award-winning Broadway musical, The Book of Mormon, and producer of the classic documentary film, Hands on a Hardbody. This is his first collection of fiction.

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From a student of George Saunders a collection of interconnected stories all set in one town

WE’VE ALREADY GONE THIS FAR
by Patrick Dacey
Holt, Fall 2016

“Patrick Dacey is one of my favorite young American writers.  His work is fast, poetic, edgy, and full of tremendous heart. » – George Saunders

A seemingly crazy woman who attacks a memorial to a neighbor’s son (he’s an Iraq veteran), a father who has an imaginary conversation with his daughter through a series of strange postcards, an alcoholic father and his slightly unhinged teenage son who make a journey to the local ice rink where they each find themselves falling in love, of a kind…

The stories of WE’VE ALREADY GONE THIS FAR all take place in the fictional Northeast town of Wequaquet, a town that lives in the shadow of militarised America,where apathy vies with a vague perennial disquiet, and yet where life’s strange intensity and occasional magic is still felt. The stories are the lives of neighbours and friends: those who’ve spent their whole lives in Wequaquet and can’t wait to leave; those who’ve been gone a long time and find themselves pulled back; those who live on the margins and those who live in the eye of the storm. This is the small-town America where has-been football coaches get drunk on the porch and shoot bunnies and bored housewives get bad cosmetic surgery, and where the demons of modernity manifest as terrorists and/or grizzly bears.