Archives de catégorie : Literary

PRETEND IT’S MY BODY de Luke Dani Blue

In a vivid debut story collection, Luke Dani Blue asks: is there such a thing as a real self? If so, how do you find it?

PRETEND IT’S MY BODY
by Luke Dani Blue
The Feminist Press, Fall 2022
(via Defiore & Company)

In the vein of Carmen Maria Machado, Kelly Link, and Daniel Lavery, and born of the author’s experience in and between genders, these stories blur the line between fantasy and reality, between the lives we wish for and the ones we actually lead, excavating new meanings from our varied dysphorias. Ranging from a tornado survivor grappling with a new identity, to a trans teen psychic that can only read undecided minds, from a woman telling her family of her plans to upload her consciousness and abandon her body, to con artists, runaways, and lost souls returning home, Blue’s characters all share an insistence on forging their own realities. Surreal, darkly funny, and always tender, PRETEND IT’S MY BODY is a collection bound together by the act of searching – for a story of one’s own, for a glimpse of certainty, and for a spark of recognition in others.

“The magic in [the short story] “Bad Things That Happen to Girls,” is so subtle and slow-building and so unprepossessing that, while reading it, I understood I was holding my breath only when the story started to swim before me…It’s a story that aches with truth and desperation, and I marvel at the way Blue ratchets up the motion, breath by breath, to the story’s logical but stunning end.” —Lauren Groff, author of Fates and Furies and Florida

Luke Dani Blue’s stories have appeared in the Colorado Review, Crab Orchard Review, and have been included on the list of the year’s most distinguished stories in Best American Short Stories 2016. They have an MFA from San Francisco State University and currently live in Alberta, Canada.

THE FORBIDDEN TERRITORY OF A TERRIFYING WOMAN de Molly Lynch

A mother vanishes from her bed one night while her husband is asleep beside her, their six-year-old son in the next room.

THE FORBIDDEN TERRITORY OF A TERRIFYING WOMAN
by Molly Lynch
Catapult, February 2023
(via Sterling Lord Literistic)

Ada is from Montreal and has been living reluctantly in the American Midwest. Across the country and around the world, mothers have begun to spontaneously wander away from their homes. When Ada comes through the kitchen door two weeks later, filthy and slightly feral, the mystery of her absence intensifies. She has no memory of being gone at all.
THE FORBIDDEN TERRITORY OF A TERRIFYING WOMAN is an intimate portrait of Ada’s life in the lead-up to her disappearance—her small stresses and pleasures, her catastrophic, often absurd visions of the future as she listens to news stories about oppression and ecological collapse. She also feels drawn magnetically into a small patch of forest behind her son’s school, and she has a growing obsession with reports about a missing mother from nearby.
With Ada gone, Danny’s life loses its center. He goes through text messages and memories, recalling painful and passionate times with Ada, and her adverse relationship with the United States. But nothing, including the speculations of federal agents, provides an answer as to where Ada and the other mothers might be going.
Desperate to make sense of what happened to her after she returns, Ada imagines that she transformed into the forest itself. As the boundary between her imagination and experience blurs, the distance between her and Danny grows.
THE FORBIDDEN TERRITORY OF A TERRIFYING WOMAN is at once a play on ancient myths of metamorphosis, an allegory of motherhood at a time when the future is hard to see and easy to fear, and a love story riven by an unaccountable absence.

Molly Lynch is a Canadian writer living in Michigan. Her stories have been published in The Walrus, Joyland, The New Quarterly, Grain, and more. She has been a fiction finalist for the National Magazine Awards of Canada and the Writers’ Trust Journey Prize. She received her MFA from Johns Hopkins and now teaches creative writing at the University of Michigan. This is her first novel.

MY MONTICELLO, novella de Jocelyn Nicole Johnson, paraîtra chez Harvill Secker au Royaume-Uni

Les éditions Harvill Secker au Royaume-Uni ont fait l’acquisition du premier recueil de nouvelles de Jocelyn Nicole Johnson intitulé MY MONTICELLO. Ils publieront d’abord la novella éponyme dans une édition reliée en novembre 2021, puis le recueil entier dans un deuxième temps. Aux États-Unis, c’est Henry Holt qui publiera le recueil en octobre 2021. Une négociation est en cours pour les droits d’adaptation audiovisuelle. (Lire l’article du Bookseller)

Dans la novella d’anticipation, un groupe de voisins d’horizons divers vivant à Charlottesville en Virginie cherchent à se réfugier à Monticello, la plantation historique de Thomas Jefferson, après de violentes émeutes provoquées par des suprémacistes blancs. (Lire la présentation complète)

L’éditeur chez Harvill Secker a déclaré : « Families, lovers and near-strangers care for and sustain one another over 19 heart-stopping days on the mountain, finding ways to hope, to resist, and to live, as the town burns below them. Their story is told by Da’Naisha Love, an imagined young Black descendant of Jefferson and Sally Hemings. Love must reckon with her own relationship to the house and its enslaved former inhabitants, as the present threat draws ever closer ».

Le livre a déjà reçu d’excellentes avant-critiques :

“A badass debut by any measure―nimble, knowing, and electrifying.” ―Colson Whitehead, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Nickel Boys, Underground Railroad and Harlem Shuffle

“It is a rare breed of writer who can tell any kind of story and do so with exquisite deftness. Jocelyn Nicole Johnson is one such writer. Her debut collection, MY MONTICELLO, is comprised of six stories of astonishing range and each one explores what it means to live in a world that is at once home and not. She dissects the unbearable burdens of such displacement. The crowning glory of this collection is the title story, a novella about a world that has fallen apart and a small band of people who take refuge in Monticello, among the old ghosts of the former plantation, how they become family, and how they try to make a stand for their lives, for the world the way it once was. This collection is absolutely unforgettable and Johnson’s prose soars to remarkable heights.” ―Roxane Gay, New York Times bestselling author of Hunger and Ayiti

“There is a special pleasure in discovering a voice that is vital and unlike anything else you’ve known before. Jocelyn Nicole Johnson is such a voice. One that is necessary and brimming with both heart and imagination, Johnson’s My Monticello is a beautiful debut work of art.” ―Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah, New York Times bestselling author of Friday Black

“Johnson crafts a fine-grained character study that also harrowingly reveals how racist violence repeats. . . . Johnson has a knack for irony and inventive conceits. . . . A sharp debut by a writer with wit and confidence.” ―Kirkus starred review

Voir la vidéo de présentation par l’auteure :
https://www.dropbox.com/s/ezjpcp52yuayffy/My%20Monticello%20-%20Jocelyn%20Johnson.mp4?dl=0

Les droits de langue française sont toujours disponibles.

THE GLASSHOUSE de Chinenye Emezie

An engrossing, deeply unsettling and finally uplifting Nigerian family saga.

THE GLASSHOUSE
by Chinenye Emezie
Penguin South Africa, September 2021

Let me tell you a story. It’s about a war. This war is not the type fought with guns and machetes. It is a family type. A silent war. The type fought in the heart. It began long before I was formed.
Udonwa’s family is at war – a war of relationships, played out under the tyranny of a monster dad. Twelve-year-old Udonwa has a peculiar love of her father, Reverend Leonard Ilechukwu, who favours her but beats his wife and his other children. She sees his good side: after all, he pays the school fees in advance, and tells her that she, named ‘the peaceful child’, is the one most likely to become a doctor in the family. But luck doesn’t last forever. When Udonwa’s eldest sister Adaora, just married, suddenly takes her from their family compound in Iruama to live with her in Awka, Udonwa experiences violence first-hand. Years later, while home on holiday from the University of Lagos, she overhears a secret that shakes her life to the core and shatters the dynamics of her family. No longer the person she thought she was, Udonwa launches into a period of extreme change, and parts of her life spiral into chaos. Later, more pieces of the sinister picture emerge, and the young woman finds herself torn between her love for her father and an underlying need to free herself.

Chinenye Emezie studied creative writing at the University of the Witwatersrand, South Africa, and has a bachelor’s degree in public administration. Her short stories have appeared in anthologies and literary journals such as Africa Book Club, Kalahari Review and Book Lovers Hangout. Chinenye is an alumna of the Hedgebrook/Vortex Writers Workshop. In 2018, her award-winning short story Glass House was selected as a reading text for the first- and second-year classes of the department of Dramatic Arts at the University of the Witwatersrand.

THE MADHOUSE de TJ Benson

In his exhilarating debut, TJ Benson conjures up a kaleidoscope of Nigeria. This is the extraordinary tale of five people bound by blood, each searching for a way through.

THE MADHOUSE
by TJ Benson
PRH South Africa/Masobe Books Nigeria, March 2021

The house at the end of Freetown Street in Nigeria’s Sabon Gari was once a sanatorium for colonists deranged from the heat and insanity of the place. Now it is home to a family whose unorthodox lives unfold into legend: Sweet Mother, an artist, her husband Shariff, a writer and soldier, and their children André and Max.
From the moment his baby brother André is born, Max attaches himself to him, even dreaming the boy’s homicidal dreams. When the wayward André later pulls free from the family to join a death cult, Max must decide how far he will be drawn into his brother’s web.
Serene and beautiful, Ladidi joins the family as a foster child, promising to marry the boy at school who can bring her a strawberry, a fruit she has never tasted.
Sensuality blooms, along with loss of innocence amid the death of music legend Fela Kuti, massacres, disappearances, abductions and broken promises.
While Sweet Mother and Shariff battle their personal demons, Max realises you cannot save your family. But can you ever escape them?

TJ Benson is a Nigerian author and portrait photographer. He was a finalist in the 2016 Short Story Day Africa Prize and a two-time writer-in-residence at the Ebedi Writers Residency, Nigeria. His collection of short stories, We Won’t Fade Into Darkness was shortlisted for the Saraba Manuscript Prize in 2016 before being published by Parresia House in 2018 and has appeared on many best debut lists. THE MADHOUSE is his first novel.