Ce récit littéraire, paru le 10 janvier chez Sonatine, a été récompensé par le prix du Livre Inter étranger. Alexandria Marzano-Lesnevich succède à Paul Auster, lauréat l’année dernière pour son roman 4 3 2 1.
Vendredi 11 janvier, Augustin Trapenard a interviewé l’auteur dans son émission Boomerang, que vous pouvez écouter en cliquant ci-dessous:
Sept nouvelles sur treize de ce recueil de Matthew Baker qui sera publié par Holt seront adaptées pour le cinéma ou la télévision! Voici la liste impressionnante des deals qui ont été finalisés :
THE TRANSITION – droits d’adaptation acquis par Amazon
LIFE SENTENCE – droits d’adaptation acquis par Netflix
THE APPEARANCE – droits d’adaptation acquis par Makeready
RITES – droits d’adaptation acquis par James Ponsoldt, directeur de “The Circle”
WHY VISIT AMERICA – droits d’adaptation acquis par FX
LOST SOULS – droits d’adaptation acquis par Fox Searchlight.
TO BE READ BACKWARD – droits d’adaptation acquis par Fox
For readers of George Sanders and Carmen Maria Machado and watchers of Black Mirror and The Twilight Zone, WHY VISIT AMERICA is for anyone who, like the citizens of Baker’s America, “don’t subscribe to any one brand of politics” but who want to simply be free
WHY VISIT AMERICA
Stories
by Matthew Baker
Holt, TBA
The citizens of Plainfield, TX, a tiny town that “couldn’t even be plotted onto your basic left-right binary,” have had it with the United States, “that broke-down country.” So they vote to secede, rename themselves America “in memory of our former country,” and happily set themselves up to receive tourists from their closest neighbor. America. Couldn’t happen? Well, it might, and so it goes in the thirteen stories in Matthew Baker’s brilliantly illuminating, incisive, and heartbreaking collection WHY VISIT AMERICA. A young man breaks the news to his family that he is going to transition – from an analog body to a digital existence. A young woman abducts a child – her own – from a government-run childcare facility. A man returns home after committing a great crime, his sentence being that his memory – his entire life – is wiped clean. Employing an exhilarating range of genres, Baker takes the issues confronting so many of us – from old age to runaway consumer culture, from immigration to infertility – and with truly innovative language and a very deep heart, makes us think about them in a new way.
Margaret Atwood recently commented that “[i]n science fiction, it’s always about now. What else could it be about? There is no future. There are many possibilities, but we do not know which one we are going to have.” WHY VISIT AMERICA is about these possibilities: an exegesis of our current political predicament, a warning for where we might be headed, and an eloquent plea for connection and the understanding of, as one character terms it, those who are “othery.”
Matthew Baker is author of the story collection “Hybrid Creatures” and the Edgar Award-nominated middle grade novel “If You Find This”. His stories have appeared in publications such as American Short Fiction, New England Review, One Story, Electric Literature, and Conjunctions, and in anthologies including Best of the Net and Best Small Fictions. A recipient of grants and fellowships from the Fulbright Commission, the MacDowell Colony, the Ucross Foundation, the Ragdale Foundation, Vermont Studio Center, Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, Blue Mountain Center, Prairie Center of the Arts, Djerassi Resident Artists Program, the Sewanee Writers’ Conference, and the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, he has an MFA from Vanderbilt University, where he was the founding editor of Nashville Review.
Dans un communiqué de presse, Studiocanal a officialisé le début du tournage de l’adaptation du roman de John Fante dans la région de Biarritz. Au casting du film on retrouve à coté de Charlotte Gainsbourg, le réalisateur lui-même, Pascale Arbillot, Eric Ruf, Sébastien Thiéry, Ben Attal, Adèle Wismes, Panayotis Pascot et Pablo Venzal. La sortie en salle est prévue pour l’automne 2019.
Plusieurs titres parmi nos représentations ont été sélectionnés par le New York Times :
ASYMMETRY de Lisa Halliday (droits acquis par Gallimard)
ETERNAL LIFE de Dara Horn (droits disponibles)
FRIDAY BLACK de Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah (droits acquis par Albin Michel/ Terres d’Amérique)
GEHEN GING GEGANGEN de Jenny Erpenbeck (droits disponibles)
IMPROVEMENT de Joan Silber (droits disponibles)
A PRINCESS IN THEORY de Alyssa Cole (droits disponibles)
ALI: A LIFE de Jonathan Eig (droits acquis par Marabout)
DEAD GIRLS d’Alice Bolin (droits disponibles)
IN PIECES de Sally Field (droits disponibles)
THE FIFTH RISK de Michael Lewis (droits disponibles)
INTO THE RAGING SEA de Rachel Slade (droits disponibles)
WHY COMICS? de Hillary Chute (droits acquis par Urban Comics)
La chaîne américaine envisage de produire une série limitée inspirée par ce titre de non fiction qui retrace l’histoire du légendaire Hôtel Barbizon de New York. La production serait confiée à l’auteur, Paulina Bren, et à l’actrice britannique Emilia Clarke (Games of Thrones).
The first-ever history of the legendary Barbizon Hotel, told through the generations of women who passed through its halls
THE BARBIZON
by Paulina Bren
Simon & Schuster, Fall 2020
Built in 1927, the Barbizon Hotel in New York was first intended as a home for the Modern Woman seeking a career in the arts, capitalizing on the post WWI influx of women flowing into Manhattan looking for jobs. With its grand lobby, swimming pool, sterling press (The New York Times commented on its “highly feminine boudoirs” and built-in radio in each room), and Bloomingdales down the street, the hotel offered a safe, glamorous place for parents to send daughters itching to pursue their dreams. Over the years, its 688 tiny pink rooms housed Joan Crawford, Grace Kelly (notorious for sneaking in men), Joan Didion, Candice Bergen, Ali McGraw, Cybil Shepherd, Elaine Stritch, Liza Minnelli, Eudora Welty, Phylicia Rashad, Ann Beattie, and Mona Simpson, among many others. Sylvia Plath fictionalized her time at The Barbizon in The Bell Jar, and Mademoiselle magazine boarded its summer interns there, as did the Ford Modeling Agency its young models. For decades it remained under the watchful guard of Oscar the doorman, a fixture of the hotel. The residency cultivated a sense of propriety and prestige, but not all the Barbizon Girls, as they came to be known, soared off into the sunset. In the 80s the hotel began to allow men, and in the early 21st century it was converted into luxury condos. But the building can’t fully shake its past. On the top floor still live “The Women,” a handful of residents who refuse to give up their pink rooms, their dreams now far behind them. THE BARBIZON is a colorful and stylish portrait of these lives, forming a history of the hotel and of women’s emancipation from the Jazz Age to the present. Through the Barbizon Girls, we are reminded that while the fight for equality continues today, tenacity and incremental change has transformational impact.
Paulina Bren received her PhD in Modern European history from New York University. Her first book, The Greengrocer and His TV: The Culture of Communism after the 1968 Prague Spring (Cornell UP, 2010), won the Council for European Studies 2012 Book Prize, the Austrian Studies Association 2012 Book Prize, and was shortlisted for the 2011 Vucinich Book Award. Her second book, co-edited with Mary Neuburger, was a collection of essays entitled Communism Unwrapped: Consumption in Cold War Eastern Europe (Oxford UP, 2012). Bren has been the recipient of many grants and fellowships, including from the National Endowment for Humanities, the National Council of East European and Eurasian Research, the Social Science Research Council, the American Council of Learned Societies, and the Fulbright-Hays.