Archives par étiquette : Frances Goldin Literary Agency

TELL ME A RIDDLE, REQUA I, AND OTHER WORKS de Tillie Olsen

“The four pieces in TELL ME A RIDDLE are lyrical bulletins of working-class family life, charged with emotional detail and delivered with an attention to the rhythms of consciousness more rigorous and powerful than most of what is called realism.” –A.O. Scott, New York Times

TELL ME A RIDDLE, REQUA I, AND OTHER WORKS
by Tillie Olsen
‎ University of Nebraska Press, 2013
(via the Frances Goldin Literary Agency)

A century after her birth, Tillie Olsen’s writing is as relevant as when it first appeared; indeed, the clarity and passion of her vision and style have, if anything, become even more striking over time. Collected here for the first time are several of Olsen’s nonfiction pieces about the 1930s, early journalism pieces, and short fiction, including the four beautifully crafted, highly celebrated stories originally published as TELL ME A RIDDLE: “I Stand Here Ironing,” “Hey Sailor, What Ship?,” “O Yes,” and “Tell Me a Riddle.” Also included, for the first time since it appeared in the 1971 Best American Short Stories, is “Requa I.”
In these stories, as in all of her work, Olsen set a new standard for the treatment of women and the poor and for the depiction of their lives and circumstances. In her hands, the hard truths about motherhood and marriage, domestic life, labor, and political conviction found expression in language of such poetic intensity and depth that their influence continues to be felt today.
An introduction by Olsen’s granddaughter, the poet Rebekah Edwards, and a foreword by her daughter Laurie Olsen provide a personal and generational context for the author’s work.

Tillie Olsen, 1912-2007, is internationally renowned for her powerful writing about the inner lives of working-class families, women, and minorities. Her books, Tell Me a Riddle, Yonnondio from the Thirties, Silences, and her essays and lectures, have been translated into twelve languages. In April 2021, A.O. Scott, the critic at large and co-chief film critic for The New York Times, wrote about Tillie Olsen for his essay series on influential American authors, saying she “helped change the study of American literature, opening its canon to neglected voices and traditions.”

THE OTHER VALLEY de Scott Alexander Howard

For fans of Emily St. John Mandel, David Mitchell, and Kazuo Ishiguro, an exquisite literary speculative novel set in an unnamed valley, where bereaved residents can petition to cross a forbidden border to see their lost loved ones again.

THE OTHER VALLEY
by Scott Alexander Howard
Atria/Simon & Schuster, February 2024
(via Frances Goldin Literary Agency)

Sixteen-year-old Odile Ozanne is an awkward, quiet girl, vying for a coveted seat on the Conseil. If she earns the position, she’ll decree who among the town’s residents may be escorted deep into the woods, who may cross the border’s barbed wire fence, who may make the arduous trek to descend into the next valley over. It’s the same valley, the same town. But to the east, the town is twenty years ahead in time. To the west, it’s twenty years behind. The only border crossings permitted by the Conseil are mourning tours: furtive viewings of the dead in towns where the dead are still alive.

When Odile recognizes two mourners she wasn’t supposed to see, she realizes that the parents of her classmate Edme have crossed the border from the future to see their son while he’s still alive in Odile’s present. Edme—who is brilliant and funny, and the only person to truly know Odile—is about to die. Sworn to secrecy by the Conseil so as not to disrupt the course of nature, Odile finds herself drawing closer to her doomed friend—imperilling her own future.

Masterful and original, The Other Valley is an affecting modern fable about the inevitable march of time and whether or not fate can be defied. Above all, it is about love and letting go, and the bonds, in both life and death, that never break.

Scott Alexander Howard lives in Vancouver, British Columbia. He has a PhD in philosophy from the University of Toronto and was a postdoctoral fellow at Harvard, where his work focused on the relationship between memory, emotion, and literature. The Other Valley is his first novel.

YONNONDIO de Tillie Olsen

The hopes, struggles, and dreams of a poor Wyoming family in the 1920s are revealed in their quest for a better life. Written by the author in the 1930s and rediscovered by her in the 1970s.

YONNONDIO:
From the Thirties
by Tillie Olsen
Delacorte Press, 1974
(via Frances Goldin Literary Agency)

YONNONDIO follows the heartbreaking path of the Holbrook family in the late 1920s and the Great Depression as they move from the coal mines of Wyoming to a tenant farm in western Nebraska, ending up finally on the kill floors of the slaughterhouses and in the wretched neighborhoods of the poor in Omaha, Nebraska.
Mazie, the oldest daughter in the growing family of Jim and Anna Holbrook, tells the story of the family’s desire for a better life – Anna’s dream that her children be educated and Jim’s wish for a life lived out in the open, away from the darkness and danger of the mines. At every turn in their journey, however, their dreams are frustrated, and the family is jeopardized by cruel and indifferent systems.

Tillie Olsen (1912-2007) was an American author of fiction and nonfiction whose slim body of work was very influential for her treatment of the lives of women and the poor. She was one of the first writers to draw attention to why women have been less likely to become published authors (and why they receive less attention than male authors when they are published). In April 2021, A.O. Scott, New York Times critic at large and co-chief film critic, included her in his essay series of the most influential authors, and credited her with changing the « study of American literature, opening its canon to neglected voices and traditions. »

DEMON COPPERHEAD de Barbara Kingsolver

A modern retelling of Dickens’s David Copperfield, which transposes that epic novel, chapter by chapter, to a modern place and time: the American south.

DEMON COPPERHEAD
by Barbara Kingsolver
‎ HarperCollins USA, Fall 2022
(via Frances Goldin Literary)

DEMON COPPERHEAD is the story of a boy born to a teenaged single mother in a single-wide trailer, with no assets beyond his dead father’s good looks and copper-colored hair, a caustic wit, and a fierce talent for survival. In a plot that never pauses for breath, relayed in his own unsparing voice, he braves the perils of foster care, child labor, derelict schools, athletic success, addiction, disastrous loves, and crushing losses. A modern retelling of Dickens’s David Copperfield, which transposes that epic novel, chapter by chapter, to a modern place and time: the American south.

Barbara Kingsolver is the author of nine bestselling novels, including The Poisonwood Bible and The Bean Trees. Her work of narrative nonfiction is the enormously influential bestseller Animal, Vegetable, Miracle. Kingsolver’s work has been translated into more than 20 languages and has earned literary awards and a devoted readership at home and abroad. She was awarded the National Humanities Medal, the highest honor for service through the arts in the United States, as well as the prestigious Dayton Literary Peace Prize for her body of work.

FILTERWORLD de Kyle Chayka

Author of The Longing For Less and a contributor to The New Yorker and NYT Magazine, Kyle Chayka’s FILTERWORLD focuses on the history and investigation of living in a world ruled by algorithms, which profoundly determine and shape culture in both digital and physical spaces, leading to flat and frictionless experiences that are remaking human identity.

FILTERWORLD:
How Algorithms Flattened Culture
by Kyle Chayka
Doubleday, Fall 2023
(via Frances Goldin Literary)

You’ve seen the smooth, uncanny artifacts: a blank, white café that looks like it could be located anywhere in the world; TikTok dance videos repeating in a dull echo; restaurant design and food plating which begs to be posted on Instagram; endlessly bingeable streaming television; influencers’ faces made up and surgically altered towards a certain photogenic ideal. While appearing in different mediums, these pieces of culture are characterized by a slick sameness. Rather than provoking us, they’re pleasing, ambient, frictionless.
In this new book, Kyle Chayka argues that these seemingly disparate cultural phenomena all have been shaped by a similar force: the algorithms governing and filtering the content that appears on digital platforms. We increasingly live in a world where the culture we encounter is not simply curated by these algorithms, but in which algorithms profoundly determine and shape culture itself in both digital and physical spaces. Chayka names this new reality, of a world both inescapably mediated and changed by algorithmic filtration, “Filterworld”.
In FILTERWORLD, Chayka traces a brief history of how we arrived in this place—from the rise of the algorithm through the corresponding erosion of human curation and taste—before launching a penetrating exploration of the flat hallmarks of Filterworld byproducts and the way that algorithmically determined taste is fundamentally reshaping human identity. Ultimately a pointed critique of the frictionless culture of Filterworld, the book turns towards what we might do to escape and dismantle this numbing cycle.
Building on the popular criticism Kyle Chayka has published for both The New Yorker online and elsewhere, FILTERWORLD is the product of a career spent as one of our keenest observers of the intersection of technology and modern culture. While much has been written about the way that algorithms impact everything from news to policy, there has been no major book published on the impact of algorithms on culture.
FILTERWORLD will appeal strongly to readers of Jia Tolentino’s Trick Mirror and Jenny Odell’s How To Do Nothing: a book that not only seeks to give language to the slippery ways that technology is reshaping our lived experience, but also gives readers tools to imagine a world in which things could be otherwise.

Kyle Chayka is a freelance writer and critic whose work has appeared in the New York Times Magazine, New York Magazine, the New Republic, Rolling Stone, n+1, Vox, the Paris Review, and other publications. He has contributed chapters to Reading Pop Culture: A Portable Anthology and A Companion to Digital Art. Chayka is cofounder of Study Hall, a newsletter and digital community for journalists. He began his career as a visual art critic for Hyperallergic in Brooklyn, and now lives in Washington, D.C.