Archives de catégorie : Nonfiction

ANY ONE OF US d’Alexandria Marzano-Lesnevich remporté aux enchères par Flatiron Books

Mise à jour du 5 juin 2017: droits cédés à Sonatine

L’agence littéraire Sterling Lord Literistic vient d’annoncer l’accord passé avec Flatiron Books après enchères pour la publication aux États-Unis du premier livre de Alexandria Marzano-Lesnevich.

Encore étudiante en droit, Alexandria se rend en Louisiane pour faire du bénévolat dans une organisation offrant à des accusés sans moyens une représentation légale. Elle travaille alors sur la condamnation à mort de Ricky Langsley, reconnu coupable d’avoir assassiné un enfant de 6 ans. La condition mentale de ce meurtrier et son passé extrêmement difficile expliquent, sans le justifier, son délit. La mère de l’enfant demandera même à la cour de ne pas infliger la peine capitale à Ricky, qui aurait besoin de soins psychiatriques. Grâce aux actes du procès, aux témoignages et articles de journaux divers, l’auteure se propose de reconstruire cette histoire, du passé de Ricky jusqu’au débat suscité par sa condamnation.

Mais ANYONE OF US n’est un « true crime » conventionnel. Car parallèlement à l’histoire de Ricky, l’auteure raconte sa propre histoire, notamment son expérience d’enfant abusé. Et au fil des pages, la vie de Ricky et la sienne se rapprochent progressivement, jusqu’à même se croiser…

 

A groundbreaking book that shows how law is personal and composed of individual stories

ANY ONE OF US
by Alexandria Marzano-Lesnevich
Flatiron Books, TBA

 
When Alexandria started Harvard Law School, she had no idea how her life would be dramatically altered. After taking a summer internship at a small law firm in Louisiana and working on the murder and death penalty retrial of convicted child molester Ricky Langley, Alexandria begins to see his life and circumstances mirrored in her own. As she digs deeper into Ricky’s past, pouring over thousands of pages of court transcripts to tell his story, she finds herself thrust into the narrative as she begins identifying with the killer through their mutually abusive childhoods. In taking on Ricky, she is forced to face her own story, and rationalize the path that led her to a Harvard education, while defending the one that led Ricky Langley to a life of violent crime. But in investigating his case, she realizes that she is not alone in interpreting the crime through her own life. The judge, the jury foreman, even the victim’s mother and the defense attorney—all saw the crime through their own lens. All saw their lives in his. The murder trial that took place was not just about Ricky’s past, but about the pasts of everyone touched by the crime. In Alexandria’s hands, ANY ONE OF US becomes a book not only about how the story of one crime was constructed—but about how we understand our lives, our families, and each other, and how we all make stories.

In the tradition of IN COLD BLOOD, THE EXECUTIONER’S SONG and DEVIL IN THE WHITE CITY, Alexandria merges her own personal narrative with that of Ricky Langley’s, interpreting her life through his and showing how either story can really happen to ANY ONE OF US.

 

L’écriture selon Bukowski : des lettres inédites à paraître en 2015 !

La nouvelle ravira les milliers de fans de l’auteur : l’éditeur ECCO publiera en juillet 2015 le premier de trois volumes inédits de Charles Bukowski. ON WRITING précédera CATS (octobre 2015) et LOVE (Février 2016).

ON WRITING est un recueil autour d’un sujet qui a toujours obsédé le plus irrévérencieux des écrivains américains : l’écriture.

Piercing, unsentimental, and often hilarious, ON WRITING is made up of never-before-published letters about the subject that obsessed Bukowski the most: writing

ON WRITING
by Charles Bukowski
Ecco, July 2015

Charles Bukowski was one of our most iconoclastic, raw, and riveting writers, one whose stories, poems, and novels have left an enduring mark on our culture. ON WRITING collects Bukowski’s reflections and ruminations on the craft that he dedicated his life to. Piercing, unsentimental, and often hilarious, ON WRITING is filled not only with memorable lines but also with the author’s trademark toughness, leavened with moments of grace, pathos, and intimacy. In the correspondence collected here–letters to publishers, editors, friends, and fellow writers–Bukowski is brutally frank about the drudgery of work and canny and uncompromising when it comes to the absurdities of life-and of art. Still, he is always “effortlessly, magnetically readable” (Booklist), a true American legend and counterculture icon whose hard-edged, complex humanity is fully on display here. The “laureate of American lowlife,” a writer associated with the downtrodden and depraved, Bukowski was still always–and indelibly–in tune with the life of the mind.

WINTER IS COMING de Garry Kasparov sera publié par Public Affairs

Breaking news !

Un accord vient d’être conclu entre l’agence littéraire The Gernert Company et l’éditeur PublicAffairs pour la publication aux États Unis du prochain titre de Garry Kasparov, ancien champion d’échecs aujourd’hui fervent opposant à la politique de Poutine.

A clear-eyed view of the Russian leader and what can be done to stop him, from the Russian dissident and former #1 world chess champion

WINTER IS COMING:
Why Putin Must Be Stopped, and How the Forgotten Lessons of the Cold War Can Prevent a New One
by Garry Kasparov
Public Affairs, Autumn 2015 (Manuscript due April 2015)

 When Russia invaded Ukraine last year, the world finally began to take seriously what pro-democracy dissidents—of whom Garry Kasparov has been the most vocal and prominent—have been saying for years: Vladimir Putin will stop at nothing to consolidate and maintain power.  Not kleptocratic corruption, not political assassination, not crackdowns on political freedoms, not a puppet President, not ultra-nationalist rhetoric—and now, not even the military invasion and occupation of a sovereign nation. 

And yet the United States and Europe have continued to appease Putin, as if patience and continued engagement will one day bring him around to the liberal democratic values on which our own nations are built.  Years of seeing his Cassandra-like prophecies about Putin’s intentions fulfilled, however, have left Garry Kasparov with the realization of a far darker truth: Putin’s Russia, like ISIS or Al Qaeda, defines itself in opposition to the free countries of the world.  And so the only way to avoid the second Cold War that Putin very much wants is, ironically, for the liberal democracies of the world to present a united front against him, one built on the same moral values on which the West stood during the first Cold War. 

Garry Kasparov spent twenty years as the world’s #1 ranked chess player.  In 2005, he retired from professional chess to lead the pro-democracy opposition against Vladimir Putin, and ran for the presidency of Russia in 2008.  In 2012, he was named Chairman of the Human Rights Foundation, succeeding Václav Havel. He has been a contributing editor to The Wall Street Journal since 1991, and his 2007 book, How Life Imitates Chess, has been published in twenty-three languages.   He lives in self-imposed exile in New York with his wife, Dasha.

LE MANUSCRIT DE STALIN’S DAUGHTER ENFIN DISPONIBLE

Après le succès de VILLA AIR-BEL, Rosemary Sullivan revient avec la biographie passionnante de la fille de l’un des dictateurs les plus connus de l’Histoire.

Rosemary Sullivan a eu accès à un grand nombre de sources inédites et a pu interviewer plusieurs témoins qui, jusqu’à aujourd’hui, avaient refusé de parler. Elle a travaillé avec la fille de Svetlana et les agents de la CIA qui avaient aidé Svetlana à s’enfuir aux Etats-Unis, et elle s’est également rendue à Moscou pour dévoiler les vérités cachées dans les archives KGB.

UPDATE: Une version abrégée est désormais disponible!

The incredible story of a woman fated to live her life in the shadow of one of history’s most monstrous dictators

STALIN’S DAUGHTER
by Rosemary Sullivan
Harper, June 2015

Svetlana Stalina, who died on November 22, 2011 at the age of 85, was the only daughter and last surviving child of Josef Stalin. Beyond her controversial defection to the United States in a cloak and dagger escape via India in 1967, Svetlana Stalina’s journey from the beloved daughter of a fierce autocrat to her death in small-town Wisconsin is an astonishing saga. Publicly she was the young darling of her people; privately she was controlled by a tyrannical father who dictated her every move, even sentencing a man she loved to ten years hard labor in Siberia. She burned her passport soon after her arrival in New York City and renounced both her father and the Soviet Union. She married four times and had three children. In 1984, she returned to the Soviet Union, this time renouncing the US, and then reappeared in America two years later, claiming she had been manipulated by her homeland. She spoke four languages and was politically shrewd, even warning in the late 1990s of the consequences of the rise to power of former KGB officer Vladimir Putin. Svetlana Stalina spent her later years as a nomad, shuttling between England, France, and the US, a woman shaped and torn apart by her father’s legacy.

 Foreign rights:

*Czech rights sold at auction to Albatros

*Danish rights sold at auction to Informations Forlag

*Dutch rights sold at auction to De Geus

*Estonian rights sold to Tanapaev

*Finnish rights sold to at auction to Otava

*Polish rights sold at auction to Znak

*Portuguese rights in Brazil sold at auction to Globo

Portuguese rights in Portugal sold to Temas e Debates, an imprint of Bertrand

*Slovak rights sold to Ikar

*Swedish rights sold at auction to Norstedts

*Russian rights sold to Astrel

*UK rights sold to Fourth Estate

FORTY AUTUMNS, mémoires d’une famille divisée par un mur

Cinq femmes, une famille, de part et d’autre du rideau de fer, FORTY AUTUMNS de Nina Willner, dont l’éditeur William Morrow vient d’acquérir les droits mondiaux, retrace l’histoire aussi émouvante qu’incroyable d’une famille séparée par le mur de Berlin pendant quarante années.

Quarante années où vont se succéder, plus particulièrement à l’automne, donnant ainsi tout son sens au titre de l’ouvrage, des évènements clefs caractérisant cette période : la montée et la chute d’un état totalitaire, la fuite d’une jeune femme, Anna, la mère de l’auteure, quittant à 23 ans ses parents et ses sept frères et sœurs sans espoir de retour, la dénonciation du père, son expulsion du parti communiste, l’exil de la famille, les missions dangereuses d’une jeune américaine, Nina, la fille d’Anna, devenue agent des services secrets américains, l’ascension d’une jeune athlète, cousine de Nina, la mort de la grand-mère ayant faire vœu quoiqu’il arrive de maintenir le lien familial, ou encore l’envoi du grand-père dans un asile psychiatrique.

FORTY AUTUMNS est l’histoire d’une famille qui va affronter avec force et détermination un régime brutal et autocratique maintenant ses citoyens isolés du reste du monde. Le récit d’une séparation tragique, de l’expérience du désespoir, de la perte de toute dignité, mais aussi de l’espoir de la réunion et de la paix.

An incredible memoir about a family divided by the Berlin Wall during the Cold War

FORTY AUTUMNS:
Five Women, One Family; Two Sides of the Iron Curtain
by Nina Willner
William Morrow, 2016 (Manuscript due end of 2015)

FORTY AUTUMNS traces the dramatic lives of the women in a family on both sides of the Iron Curtain through the Cold War up until the miraculous day when the family is reunited. Nina has an amazing story to tell, and she captures the time and feeling perfectly of what it was like to have a mystical curtain dividing the East from the West. There is a whole generation of readers who don’t remember what that time was like. Nina and her family’s story is going to bring it to life for them.

Nina Willner has spent over two decades working in Central and Eastern Europe and in Asia. She was the only female U.S. Army intelligence officer to lead a series of sensitive and risky intelligence operations in East Germany during the Cold War. Following a career in intelligence, in Eastern Europe she worked to promote human rights, education, the rule of law, and to provide humanitarian assistance to underprivileged groups throughout the region, serving in a variety of roles, including as Political Officer for the State Department, and working with international pioneering NGOs and charities. In Russia, she studied at Moscow State University. A former Army Captain and an Army wife, Nina is married to Colonel Jeff Holachek, Director, Russia, Eurasia, Caucasus Policy for the Secretary of Defense. She speaks conversational German, French and Russian.