Archives par étiquette : Vauhini Vara

SEARCHES de Vauhini Vara

From the Pulitzer Prize Finalist author of Immortal King Rao, a collection of essays exploring how technology has become an inextricable part of modern life.

SEARCHES
by Vauhini Vara
Pantheon, March 2025
(via Writers House)

When it was released to the public in November 2022, ChatGPT sparked a global commotion. Now, anyone could be a novelist. Brands could generate copy and students could pen essays in mere seconds, all thanks to this frighteningly smart algorithm turned ghostwriter that could crank out pages of text at the drop of a prompt. Had writing just been democratized or destroyed?

It was a question that Vauhini Vara—tech journalist, former New Yorker business editor, and prize-winning author of the novel The Immortal King Rao—had long been grappling with. Her own relationship with ChatGPT began in 2021, when, using a beta version, she decided to use the program to attempt to write an essay about the death, two decades earlier, of her older sister. What resulted from the exercise was both a far more moving experience than she imagined, and an essay unlike any she had ever written—one that soon went viral. In the months that followed, it would be aired on the radio by This American Life; anthologized in The Best American Essays; and adapted for the stage.

In that essay, along with the others in this searing yet playful collection, Vara’s experiments with technology double as critiques of it. From Google search data to Amazon reviews to crowdsourced confessionals from both Vara’s peers and anonymous contributors, the raw material of Searches explores what it means to be alive in a world where human communication is inseparable from technology. Like the programs she explores, Vara’s voice is ever-evolving, at once experimental and deeply familiar to anyone who has experienced both wonderment and fear about our technological future, a future that has come to be seen as inevitable.

Vauhini Vara is the author of This is Salvaged, named a notable book of 2023 by Publisher’s Weekly, The New Yorker and others, and The Immortal King Rao, a Pulitzer Prize finalist. She is also a journalist, writing for Wired and others, and an editor, most recently at The New York Times Magazine. She teaches at the Lighthouse Writers Workshop’s Book Project and is the secretary of the mentorship collective Periplus.

Prix Pulitzer 2023

Cette année, trois ouvrages représentés par notre agence ont été récompensés lors de l’annonce des lauréats des prestigieux prix littéraires Pulitzer.

L’autobiographie de Hua Hsu, STAY TRUE, publiée par Doubleday en septembre 2022, a remporté le prix Pulitzer de l’autobiographie. Ce livre avait déjà récompensé par le National Book Critics Circle Award et récolté d’excellentes critiques. Il faisait également partie de la sélection des meilleurs titres parus en 2022 selon de nombreux médias comme le New York Times, le Washington Post, le New Yorker, TIME, The Atlantic, Vogue, Vanity Fair, Kirkus, Publishers Weekly, NPR, Rolling Stone

STAY TRUE est une autobiographie captivante sur l’amitié, le deuil, la recherche de soi et le réconfort que l’on peut trouver dans l’art ; « un récit élégant et poignant sur le passage à l’âge adulte, qui explore les amitiés intenses de la jeunesse, mais aussi la violence aléatoire qui peut altérer de façon soudaine et permanente la logique présumée de nos récits personnels » (selon les organisateurs du Prix Pulitzer).

“Quietly wrenching. . . To say that this book is about grief or coming-of-age doesn’t quite do it justice; nor is it mainly about being Asian American, even though there are glimmers of that too. . . This is a memoir that gathers power through accretion — all those moments and gestures that constitute experience, the bits and pieces that coalesce into a life. . . Hsu is a subtle writer, not a showy one; the joy of Stay True sneaks up on you, and the wry jokes are threaded seamlessly throughout.” —The New York Times

“[Hsu writes] with devastating emotional precision, questioning the possibility of meaning in tragedy and the value of the stories we tell while attempting to find it. [Stay True] is a thoughtful, affecting book. . . For all the soul-searching, therapeutic work and years of rumination imprinted on Stay True, it’s the ache of a friendship lost but honored that will linger for readers. Though Hsu claims, self-deprecatingly, that the term ‘good friend … only occasionally applies to me,’ the lasting effect of Stay True is that of an extraordinary, devotional act of friendship.”—The Washington Post

“This book is exquisite and excruciating and I will be thinking about it for years and years to come.” —Rachel Kushner, New York Times bestselling author of The Flamethrowers and The Mars Room

Biographie de l’auteur : Hua Hsu est journaliste au New Yorker et professeur de littérature à Bard College. Il siège au conseil d’administration de l’Asian American Writers’ Workshop. Il a été chercheur à la New America Foundation ainsi qu’au Dorothy and Lewis B. Cullman Center de la New York Public Library. Il vit à Brooklyn avec sa famille.

Les droits de langue française pour STAY TRUE sont toujours disponibles.

 

DEMON COPPERHEAD de Barbara Kingsolver, à paraître en juin 2023 aux édition Albin Michel, a remporté le prix Pulitzer de la fiction (ex æquo avec Trust de Hernan Diaz). Un roman éblouissant qui passionne et captive à travers le parcours inoubliable d’un jeune héros vers la maturité. Situé dans les montagnes du sud des Appalaches, DEMON COPPERHEAD raconte l’histoire d’un garçon né dans une caravane d’une mère seule adolescente, sans aucun autres atouts que sa beauté, ses cheveux cuivrés hérités de son père décédé, une bonne dose d’esprit et un talent féroce pour la survie. Demon brave les périls modernes du placement en famille d’accueil, du travail des enfants, des écoles délabrées, des succès sportifs, de la toxicomanie, des amours désastreuses et des pertes écrasantes. À travers les événements de sa vie, il s’interroge sur sa propre invisibilité dans une culture populaire où même les super-héros ont abandonné les populations rurales au profit des villes.

L’avis du jury : “A masterful recasting of David Copperfield, narrated by an Appalachian boy whose wise, unwavering voice relates his encounters with poverty, addiction, institutional failures and moral collapse–and his efforts to conquer them.”

 

THE IMMORTAL KING RAO de Vauhini Vara, publié en mai 2022 chez W.W. Norton, finaliste de la catégorie Fiction, est un premier roman épique et imaginatif sur la famille, la modernité, la technologie et la nature humaine, qui efface les frontières entre la fiction littéraire et spéculative, l’historique et le dystopique, en s’interrogeant sur la manière dont nous sommes arrivés à l’ère du capitalisme technologique et sur les conséquences futures de nos actions. Dans un village indien des années 1950, un enfant précoce naît dans une famille d’ « intouchables » cultivateurs de noix de coco. King Rao deviendra le PDG le plus accompli du monde dans le domaine de la technologie et, à terme, le chef d’un gouvernement mondial dirigé par des entreprises.

Vauhini Vara a été journaliste et rédactrice pour le Wall Street Journal, le New Yorker et le New York Times Magazine. Issue d’un milieu dalit, elle est diplômée de l’Iowa Writers’ Workshop et lauréate du prix O. Henry. Elle vit à Fort Collins, dans le Colorado.

Les droits de langue française pour THE IMMORTAL KING RAO sont toujours disponibles.

THE IMMORTAL KING RAO de Vauhini Vara

An epic, imaginative debut novel about family, modernity, technology, and what it means to be human, told through the soul of an Indian software engineer-entrepreneur and his daughter.

THE IMMORTAL KING RAO
by Vauhini Vara

W.W. Norton, May 2022
(via Writers House)

Will you, dear Shareholder, set Athena free? Athena Rao must reckon with the memory of her father, King Rao―literally. Through biotechnological innovation, he has given her his memories. His Dalit childhood on an Indian coconut plantation in the 1950s is as alive to her as her own existence in a prison cell, accused of her father’s murder.
Egocentric, brilliant, a little damaged, King Rao had a visionary idea: the personal computer known as the Coconut. His wife, Margie, was an artist with a marketing genius. Together they created a new world order, led by a corporate-run government. Athena’s future is now in the hands of its Shareholders―unless she can rejoin the Exes, a resistance group sustaining tech-free lifestyles on low-lying islands.
Lyrical, satirical, and profound,
The Immortal King Rao obliterates genre to confront the digital age. This gripping, brilliant debut poses an urgent question: can anyone―peasant laborers, convention-destroying entrepreneurs, radical anarchists, social-media followers―ever get free?

Vauhini Vara has worked as a Wall Street Journal technology reporter and as the business editor for The New Yorker. Her fiction has been honored by the O. Henry Prize and the Rona Jaffe Foundation. From a Dalit background, she lives in Fort Collins, Colorado.