Archives de catégorie : Nos incontournables

BENJAMIN FRANKLIN: HUGE PAIN IN MY… de Adam Mansbach et Alan Zweibel

The hilarious middle-grade debut of the author of GO THE F**K TO SLEEP

BENJAMIN FRANKLIN: HUGE PAIN IN MY…
by Adam Mansbach and Alan Zweibel
Hyperion, September 2015

BENJAMIN FRANKLIN: HUGE PAIN IN MY… introduces us to 13-year-old Franklin Isaac « Ike » Saturday, who lives an uneventful life (save for having the worst stepfather on the planet). Then his history teacher assigns a fateful project: each student must write to the historical figure of their choice as a pen pal. Ike decides to write to Benjamin Franklin (whom he was named after) and duly completes the assignment — but after he presents it in class, he steals one of his stepfather’s prized 1770s-era stamps and mails his letter to Benjamin Franklin as a practical joke.

Ike forgets all about the incident until he receives a letter with a similarly old stamp…and with a return address from a « B. Franklin » in Philadelphia. What follows is an imaginative, riotously funny exchange of letters between an awkward teenager and a revered statesman who offers him his legendary advice on family, friends, enemies, girls, and everything in between.

Adam Mansbach is the New York Times Bestselling author of GO THE F**K TO SLEEP, which was translated in over 30 languages.

Alan Zweibel is a former “Saturday Night Live” writer and the author of LUNATICS, co-written with Dave Barry.

 

 

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.

GIRLS ON FIRE de Robin Wasserman

Mise à jour du 30 janvier 2015 : droits achetés par les Éditions Fayard

Robin Wasserman’s first novel for adults follows in the footsteps of Heathers meets Megan Abbott but carves a dark, brambly path all its own

GIRLS ON FIRE
by Robin Wasserman
Harper, 2016

Hannah Dexter and Lacey Champlain recall in their alternating retrospective points of view, an obsessive teenage female friendship so passionately violent it bloodies the very sunset its protagonists insist on riding into, together, at any cost. The story begins with Hannah and Lacey as two breathless halves of the same codependent whole, incomplete and impossible without the other, and unconcerned by the mounting discomfort that their lust for chaos and rebellion causes the inhabitants of their parochial small town. But Lacey has a secret, about life before her better half, and it’s a secret that will change everything…

Set against a backdrop of 90s grunge and small-town scandals, Wasserman’s work explores the impossible dictates of femininity and the cold, hard beauty and danger inherent in adolescence. Simultaneously contemporary novel and campfire cautionary tale, GIRLS ON FIRE is part love story, part tragedy, part horror story and part irrefutable indictment both of the actual ripped-from-the-headlines blood flowing of late from modern teens’ hands and the emotional lacerations inflicted upon the psyche caused simply by being a girl. Wasserman’s work serves then as both story and object lesson, a page-turning thriller by form but more thrillingly, an all-too-recognizable and brutal portrait of certain ugly female friendship truths and the at times catastrophic masks we project upon others, and worse, ourselves, for our own weak comfort. What’s most frightening of all about this addictive excavation of adolescent violence and vulnerability is that we cannot simply cast it off merely as entertainment, thanks to Wasserman’s searing intelligence and unflinching honesty — it reads too uncomfortably necessary to the conversation, and too true to minimize, or ignore.

Robin Wasserman is a Harvard graduate, former book editor at Brooklynite, and has published or has pieces forthcoming in the LA Review of Books, Tin House, and The New York Times. She is also a beloved author in the young adult realm, with over half a million copies of more than ten teen novels in print. GIRLS ON FIRE is her first novel for adults.

More info: http://www.robinwasserman.com