Archives de catégorie : Literary

MY MONTICELLO, novella de Jocelyn Nicole Johnson, paraîtra chez Harvill Secker au Royaume-Uni

Les éditions Harvill Secker au Royaume-Uni ont fait l’acquisition du premier recueil de nouvelles de Jocelyn Nicole Johnson intitulé MY MONTICELLO. Ils publieront d’abord la novella éponyme dans une édition reliée en novembre 2021, puis le recueil entier dans un deuxième temps. Aux États-Unis, c’est Henry Holt qui publiera le recueil en octobre 2021. Une négociation est en cours pour les droits d’adaptation audiovisuelle. (Lire l’article du Bookseller)

Dans la novella d’anticipation, un groupe de voisins d’horizons divers vivant à Charlottesville en Virginie cherchent à se réfugier à Monticello, la plantation historique de Thomas Jefferson, après de violentes émeutes provoquées par des suprémacistes blancs. (Lire la présentation complète)

L’éditeur chez Harvill Secker a déclaré : « Families, lovers and near-strangers care for and sustain one another over 19 heart-stopping days on the mountain, finding ways to hope, to resist, and to live, as the town burns below them. Their story is told by Da’Naisha Love, an imagined young Black descendant of Jefferson and Sally Hemings. Love must reckon with her own relationship to the house and its enslaved former inhabitants, as the present threat draws ever closer ».

Le livre a déjà reçu d’excellentes avant-critiques :

“A badass debut by any measure―nimble, knowing, and electrifying.” ―Colson Whitehead, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Nickel Boys, Underground Railroad and Harlem Shuffle

“It is a rare breed of writer who can tell any kind of story and do so with exquisite deftness. Jocelyn Nicole Johnson is one such writer. Her debut collection, MY MONTICELLO, is comprised of six stories of astonishing range and each one explores what it means to live in a world that is at once home and not. She dissects the unbearable burdens of such displacement. The crowning glory of this collection is the title story, a novella about a world that has fallen apart and a small band of people who take refuge in Monticello, among the old ghosts of the former plantation, how they become family, and how they try to make a stand for their lives, for the world the way it once was. This collection is absolutely unforgettable and Johnson’s prose soars to remarkable heights.” ―Roxane Gay, New York Times bestselling author of Hunger and Ayiti

“There is a special pleasure in discovering a voice that is vital and unlike anything else you’ve known before. Jocelyn Nicole Johnson is such a voice. One that is necessary and brimming with both heart and imagination, Johnson’s My Monticello is a beautiful debut work of art.” ―Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah, New York Times bestselling author of Friday Black

“Johnson crafts a fine-grained character study that also harrowingly reveals how racist violence repeats. . . . Johnson has a knack for irony and inventive conceits. . . . A sharp debut by a writer with wit and confidence.” ―Kirkus starred review

Voir la vidéo de présentation par l’auteure :
https://www.dropbox.com/s/ezjpcp52yuayffy/My%20Monticello%20-%20Jocelyn%20Johnson.mp4?dl=0

Les droits de langue française sont toujours disponibles.

THE GLASSHOUSE de Chinenye Emezie

An engrossing, deeply unsettling and finally uplifting Nigerian family saga.

THE GLASSHOUSE
by Chinenye Emezie
Penguin South Africa, September 2021

Let me tell you a story. It’s about a war. This war is not the type fought with guns and machetes. It is a family type. A silent war. The type fought in the heart. It began long before I was formed.
Udonwa’s family is at war – a war of relationships, played out under the tyranny of a monster dad. Twelve-year-old Udonwa has a peculiar love of her father, Reverend Leonard Ilechukwu, who favours her but beats his wife and his other children. She sees his good side: after all, he pays the school fees in advance, and tells her that she, named ‘the peaceful child’, is the one most likely to become a doctor in the family. But luck doesn’t last forever. When Udonwa’s eldest sister Adaora, just married, suddenly takes her from their family compound in Iruama to live with her in Awka, Udonwa experiences violence first-hand. Years later, while home on holiday from the University of Lagos, she overhears a secret that shakes her life to the core and shatters the dynamics of her family. No longer the person she thought she was, Udonwa launches into a period of extreme change, and parts of her life spiral into chaos. Later, more pieces of the sinister picture emerge, and the young woman finds herself torn between her love for her father and an underlying need to free herself.

Chinenye Emezie studied creative writing at the University of the Witwatersrand, South Africa, and has a bachelor’s degree in public administration. Her short stories have appeared in anthologies and literary journals such as Africa Book Club, Kalahari Review and Book Lovers Hangout. Chinenye is an alumna of the Hedgebrook/Vortex Writers Workshop. In 2018, her award-winning short story Glass House was selected as a reading text for the first- and second-year classes of the department of Dramatic Arts at the University of the Witwatersrand.

THE MADHOUSE de TJ Benson

In his exhilarating debut, TJ Benson conjures up a kaleidoscope of Nigeria. This is the extraordinary tale of five people bound by blood, each searching for a way through.

THE MADHOUSE
by TJ Benson
PRH South Africa/Masobe Books Nigeria, March 2021

The house at the end of Freetown Street in Nigeria’s Sabon Gari was once a sanatorium for colonists deranged from the heat and insanity of the place. Now it is home to a family whose unorthodox lives unfold into legend: Sweet Mother, an artist, her husband Shariff, a writer and soldier, and their children André and Max.
From the moment his baby brother André is born, Max attaches himself to him, even dreaming the boy’s homicidal dreams. When the wayward André later pulls free from the family to join a death cult, Max must decide how far he will be drawn into his brother’s web.
Serene and beautiful, Ladidi joins the family as a foster child, promising to marry the boy at school who can bring her a strawberry, a fruit she has never tasted.
Sensuality blooms, along with loss of innocence amid the death of music legend Fela Kuti, massacres, disappearances, abductions and broken promises.
While Sweet Mother and Shariff battle their personal demons, Max realises you cannot save your family. But can you ever escape them?

TJ Benson is a Nigerian author and portrait photographer. He was a finalist in the 2016 Short Story Day Africa Prize and a two-time writer-in-residence at the Ebedi Writers Residency, Nigeria. His collection of short stories, We Won’t Fade Into Darkness was shortlisted for the Saraba Manuscript Prize in 2016 before being published by Parresia House in 2018 and has appeared on many best debut lists. THE MADHOUSE is his first novel.

THE BOYS de Katie Hafner

When introverted, eccentric Ethan Fawcett falls in love with the vivacious Barb, he has every reason to believe he will be delivered from a lifetime of solitude. But their relationship takes a turn for the worse when Ethan grows obsessed with providing the perfect life for their adopted 8-year-old twins, Tommy and Sam. A tour-de-force novel about love, the yearning for connection, and the ways in which childhood trauma plays out in adult life.

THE BOYS
by Katie Hafner
Spiegel & Grau, July 2022
(via Levine Greenberg Rostan)

When introverted Ethan Fawcett marries Barb, he has every reason to believe he will be delivered from a lifetime of solitude. One day Barb brings home two young brothers, Tommy and Sam, for them to foster, and when the pandemic hits, Ethan becomes obsessed with providing a perfect life for the boys. Instead of bringing Barb and Ethan closer together, though, the boys become a wedge in their relationship, as Ethan is unable to share with Barb a secret that has been haunting him since childhood. Then Ethan takes Tommy and Sam on a biking trip in Italy, and it becomes clear just how unusual Ethan and his children are—and what it will take for Ethan to repair his marriage. This hauntingly beautiful debut novel—a bold and original high-wire feat—is filled with humor and surprise.

Katie Hafner writes for The New York Times, covering health care, and is the author of six non-fiction books: the memoir, Mother Daughter Me; A Romance on Three Legs: Glenn Gould’s Obsessive Quest for the Perfect Piano (which Kirkus called “the musical version of Seabiscuit”); The House at the Bridge: A Story of Modern Germany; Where Wizards Stay Up Late: The Origins of the Internet (with Matthew Lyon); The Well: Love, Death, and Real Life in the Seminal Online Community; and Cyberpunk: Outlaws and Hackers on the Computer Frontier (with John Markoff). THE BOYS is her first novel.

THE NET BENEATH US de Carol Dunbar

In the vein of Delia Owens, Brit Bennett, and Leif Enger, THE NET BENEATH US is a novel about being haunted by the choices we make—and don’t make—in our lives.

THE NET BENEATH US
by Carol Dunbar
Forge, Fall 2022

Silas is dead. Or he’s almost dead, felled by the trees he was felling and now brought home, comatose, to die in his unfinished, off-the-grid house at the edge of the forest he loved. His wife, Elsa, doesn’t know much about living in the country, about running the generator or chopping enough wood to survive the winter. Raising their children here, in this dwelling carved into the side of a hill, had been Silas’s dream, not hers. She doesn’t know how she’ll ease his final days with no heat and no running water. But she knows that he would want to stay here, in his bed, on his land, as his breath shudders to a whisper.
Silas’s aunt and uncle think she’s crazy. Elsa’s father thinks she ought to leave, go find an apartment in the city. Her young children think she’ll be able to bring their daddy back. But Elsa thinks staying is the right choice. She just has to remain focused, learn how to keep the house running, and ignore the way the trees outside seem to call to one another, how the walls seem to come alive at night, how nearly dead Silas seems to be haunting her, already, from his windowless room. Staying is the right choice. Isn’t it?
Told over the course of a year, THE NET BENEATH US is a lyrical exploration of loss, marriage, motherhood, and self-reliance, a tale of how the natural world—without and within us—offers a kind of healing available to us all, if we can learn where to look.

Carol Dunbar is a ghostwriter of over 50 nonfiction titles, and for the last 15 years she has lived in the house that is the setting for THE NET BENEATH US. Her essays about living off the grid air on Wisconsin Public Radio and her work has been published or is forthcoming in The South Carolina Review, Midwestern Gothic, The Midwest Review, Literary Mama, Great Lakes Review, and others. In 2018 she won the Hal Prize for fiction and an earlier draft of this novel was a 2013 finalist for the Dana Award.