Archives par étiquette : Nouvelles

Leopoldine Core remporte le Whiting Award 2015 en fiction

Pour la 30ème édition de son prix, la Whiting Foundation a honoré dix jeunes écrivains « pour leur talent exceptionnel ». Dans la catégorie fiction, le prix a été décerné à Leopoldine Core qui publiera en 2016 son premier recueil de nouvelles, WHEN WATCHED :

WHEN WATCHED
by Leopoldine Core
Penguin, Fall 2016

“There is an incredible sense of place and character in her stories, a completely original world that one feels one is inhabiting, a feeling similar to the sensation of reading Paula Fox or Jane Bowles. I cannot think of another young writer I have come across in whom I have as much faith to make work that will be read, and read for a long time, as Leopoldine Core.” – Sheila Heti

 

Leopoldine Core’s stories take their energy from the dark. Animated by a variety of contrasting extremes – repression and hysteria, newly heated attractions and dulled repulsion, cautious approaches and staggered retreats – all of her characters are fending off versions of the abyss in their halting quests for something like understanding, peace. Two young college dropouts find complex solace in each other’s company while working as prostitutes in Tribeca; a long-married pair of poets takes a work-motivated road trip and angrily reaffirm longstanding suspicions; two young women go home together after meeting in AA and explain themselves to one another in unequal terms. Leopoldine is unafraid to turn the bright light of her immaculately refined lens on the darkest corners, and this collection announces a daring new voice.

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.