Archives de catégorie : Fiction

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.

THE GIRL IN THE GARDEN de Parnaz Foroutan

If your child is your legacy, who are you without one? What story will you leave behind?
A wrenching and heartfelt debut novel

THE GIRL IN THE GARDEN
by Parnaz Foroutan
Ecco, Fall 2015

Set in the Iranian town of Kermanshah at the turn of the twentieth century, THE GIRL IN THE GARDEN is the intimate, poetic, and brutal story of a young woman beholden to the schemes and strictures of a male world. In a cloistered household of wealthy Jewish merchants, at a time when a woman’s worth is measured only by the number of male heirs she can produce, Rakhel, a barren young bride, must do the impossible: produce a son and satisfy her husband Asher’s wild desire for preeminence. Their struggle slowly rends their family asunder, dividing Asher from his family and breaking the delicate bonds between the women of the house, which have grown like flowers in a garden as they battle impossible odds to save Rakhel and her place in the household.

THE GIRL IN THE GARDEN’s lyrical prose and heartbreaking evocation of female struggle in a forgotten time and place is reminiscent of Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things and Isabel Allende’s The House of the Spirits, but it is not just a novel about women. It is a story of Iran, of a lost cultural moment and identity that flourished before the wars and the reign of the shahs. And it is a story about family—about the things that draw us closer and perhaps inevitably push us apart.

Parnaz Foroutan was born in Iran and spent her early childhood there. This novel, for which she received PEN USA’s Emerging Voices fellowship, was inspired by her family history. She has been named to the Hedgebrook Fellowship and residency, and has received funding from the Elizabeth George Foundation, among other institutions. Writers like Holly Morris, Gloria Steinem, and Carolyn Forche have reviewed her work with praise and hold the project in high esteem.

MURDER 101 de Faye Kellerman

Decker and Lazarus embark on a new life in upstate New York—and find themselves entangled in deception, intrigue, and murder in picturesque elite college town

MURDER 101
by Faye Kellerman
William Morrow, September 2014

As a detective lieutenant with the LAPD, Peter Decker witnessed enough ugliness and chaos for a lifetime. Now, he and his devoted wife Rena Lazarus are ready to enjoy the quiet beauty of upstate New York, where they can be closer to their four adult children and their foster son.

But working for the Greenbury Police department isn’t as fulfilling as Decker hoped. While Rina has adapted beautifully to their new surroundings, Decker is underwhelmed and frustrated by his new partner, Tyler McAdams, a former Harvard student and young buck with a bad ‘tude. Just when he thinks he’s made a mistake, Decker is called to his first real crime here—a possible break-in at the local cemetery.

At first, it seems like a false alarm until it’s discovered that a mausoleum’s stunning Tiffany panels have been replaced by forgeries. Then, a coed at one of the exclusive local colleges is brutally murdered. Poking into the hallowed halls of academia to find a killer, Decker and McAdams are drawn deep into a web of dark secrets, cold case crimes, international intrigue, and ruthless people who kill for sport. Suddenly, the job is anything but boring. This case just might be too much to handle and Decker will have to draw on every ounce of experience that he has garnered in the past thirty years as a Homicide cop. And then again, even that might not be enough!

Le prochain volet de la Saga de Recluce prévu pour novembre

HERITAGE OF CYADOR, le dix-huitième titre de la Saga de Recluce, la série de fantasy culte écrite par L. E. Modesitt, Jr., sortira en novembre chez Tor Books.

HERITAGE OF CYADOR est la suite directe de CYADOR’S HEIR, publié en mai 2014 aux US. Voici un extrait de la critique que RT Book Reviews lui a consacrée : “Modesitt is known for the incredibly detailed worlds he builds, and the ability to take those worlds through generations to show the growth and development of his characters. Cyador’s Heirs does not disappoint, building on the stories of the grandchildren of the great matriarch in the Recluse saga from childhood to early adulthood. Lerial is a fully realized character who is highly sympathetic to the reader, and has a depth of thought and maturity that will be immediately recognizable to Modesitt fans.”

Vous pouvez télécharger ici une présentation en PDF des ouvrages de L. E. Modesitt, Jr..

The new novel in the bestselling epic fantasy series, Saga of Recluce, and the direct sequel to CYADOR’S HEIR

HERITAGE OF CYADOR
by L. E. Modesitt Jr.
Tor Books, November 2014

Scarcely a year after the events of Cyador’s Heirs, Lerial uses his mastery of Order and Chaos, the competing natural forces that shape his world and define the magic that exists within it, to utterly destroy an Afritan military force crossing into Cigoerne.
Five years later, Lerial, now an overcaptain and a field commander of Cigoerne’s Mirror Lancers, must lead three companies of troops into Afrit on a mission of mutual interest: neighboring Heldya is threatening to invade Afrit, and if that nation falls, Cigoerne is certain to be next.
The mission is both delicate and dangerous; Lerial’s value in the effort to repelling Heldya is undeniable, but his troubled history against Afrit may reopen old wounds that will never truly heal.

THE DRESSMAKER OF DACHAU de Mary Chamberlain aux enchères dans quatre pays !

Trois jours seulement après sa première soumission, THE DRESSMAKER OF DACHAU de Mary Chamberlain fait déjà l’objet d’enchères en Italie, aux Pays Bas et en Angleterre. Et aux Etats-Unis, quatre éditeurs de premier plan sont entrés dans la course !

THE DRESSMAKER OF DACHAU

by Mary Chamberlain

THE DRESSMAKER OF DACHAU is a literary historical fiction spanning 1939 to 1948 and following a young London seamstress who is hanged for murder in 1948. It’s beautifully evocative, intensely clever novel, which draws the reader in before pulling the rug from beneath their feet:

They had already weighed Ada and measured her. She was eight stone three pounds, and five feet six in stockinged feet.

She still had the slender figure of a mannequin.

She put on the thick, calico knickers with drawstrings, pulled them tight round her thighs and waist so nothing would leak. She knew that when they came off, there would be marks on her skin.

‘There’s a notebook,’ she said. ‘I kept a notebook. Everything’s in it.’

‘Are you ready?’

‘No,’ she said. ‘No.’

Ada Vaughan is hanged in Holloway Prison in 1948, a prostitute and murderess, pilloried in the press as the ‘Dressmaker of Dachau’. But who was the woman behind the epithet? And what led her to her fate? Spanning 1939 to 1948 and taking us from the glamour of the Savoy to the desperation of Dachau, we watch a woman betrayed and abandoned, forced to survive on her wits alone, and in every way underserving of her punishment. Or was she?

In 1939 Ada is nothing more than an average young seamstress, from a normal home in London. But her life changes when she is swept off her feet by Stanislaus, an Austrian-Hungarian aristocrat. She elopes with him to France but when she falls pregnant he abandons her, leaving her to her fate as WWII breaks out. Forced to give up her child she is sent as a POW to Dachau where she begins to make clothes for the commandant’s wife, forever haunted by the fate of her son. On her return to London after the war she falls on desperate times and becomes a prostitute, where a chance meeting with a man she recognises from her past leads her on the steps towards the gallows.

Ada is an intensely compelling character. Is she an innocent young woman driven to a terrible crime? Or is she a liar and a fantasist, cold-blooded and calculating?

Mary Chamberlain is the author of popular and academic histories, and is Emeritus Professor of Caribbean History at Oxford Brookes University.