Archives par étiquette : Henry Holt

THE BEAUTIFUL BUREAUCRAT dans la shortlist du LA Times Book Award

Le roman d’Helen Philips est sélectionné pour le prochain prix littéraire du Los Angeles Times, catégorie fiction. Publié en août 2015, THE BEAUTIFUL BUREAUCRAT a attiré l’attention de la presse américaine et notamment du New York Times. Safarà Editore le publiera en Italie et les droits télé ont été acquis par The CW.

Josephine must race to find her way through the labyrinthine bureaucracy, in order to save herself and to salvage the life she’s built

THE BEAUTIFUL BUREAUCRAT
by Helen Phillips
Henry Holt, August 2015

Josephine has been out of work a long time, so when she is hired to work in a vast, windowless building, doing what at first appears to be a monotonous filing and cross-checking task, she’s mostly just relieved that her long period of unemployment has come to an end. Never mind that the person who hired her seems not to have a face and becomes known only as The Person With Bad Breath, or that Josephine works in a pale, airless room where the walls are completely bare, save some scratches Josephine fears may have come from those who held the job before her. She can endure any job in order to be able to build a future with her husband, Joseph. Under the watchful eyes of her sinister boss and an aggressively friendly coworker, she matches names to numbers and enters both into a seemingly infinite database, though she knows nothing about the true nature of her job nor the identity of the institution that employs her.

In the evenings, Josephine returns home to one of a series of strange sublets, and to Joseph, who often greets her with candles and dinner, until one day he doesn’t come home at all. Joseph also has a bureaucratic job, and the two have agreed never to discuss their work, but as Joseph grows mysteriously distant and begins to disappear more frequently without explanation, and as Josephine slowly comes to understand the meaning of the codes she’s entering into the system, the rituals of their daily lives shift from the mundane to something more sinister.

Is Josephine really being followed by The Man in the Grey Sweatshirt? How do her co-workers seem to know things about her before she knows them herself? Increasingly unmoored in her home life and uneasy in her work life, Josephine attempts to keep her paranoia in check and hold on to her sanity. But as her suspicions escalate and the terrifying truth about her work is revealed, she realizes that those she holds most dear are in fatal danger.

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.

————————-

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.

————————-

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.