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.

PRETTY LITTLE WIFE de Darby Kane bientôt sur Prime Video

Photo by Nino MunozLes studios Amazon ont acquis les droits audiovisuels du thriller de Darby Kane, PRETTY LITTLE WIFE, en vue d’une adaptation en série tv, en partenariat avec A+E Studios. Le scénario sera adapté pour le petit écran par les productrices des séries The Flight Attendant et Nashville. L’actrice Gabrielle Union incarnera l’une des deux protagonistes et travaillera également en tant que productrice de la série via sa société de production, I’ll Have Another, qui a pour but de mettre l’accent sur les communautés marginalisées d’une manière authentique.
(Lire l’article de Deadline pour plus de détails)

Le roman, publié par William Morrow en décembre 2020, oppose deux femmes brillantes mais très différentes : Lila, la jolie petite épouse soupçonnée d’avoir assassiné son mari, et Ginny, l’inspectrice chargée de l’affaire. Lorsque leurs deux chemins se croisent, chacune commence à faire tomber le masque de l’autre pour révéler qui se cache vraiment derrière.

THE OPPOSITE OF SUCCESS d’Eleanor Elliott Thomas

Lorrie Hope has a steady job, a partner she adores and two wonderful kids. All she wants is to get promoted, love her body and end global warming. By Friday. What could possibly go wrong?

THE OPPOSITE OF SUCCESS
by Eleanor Elliott Thomas
Text Publishing (Australia), October 2023

Lorrie Hope is about to have the worst day of her life.
Lorrie has been stuck for years in a mediocre job at the local council, and she’s applied for a promotion she’s not entirely sure she wants. Her best friend of twenty years, Alex, is stuck in a very different mess—one that involves Lorrie’s rakish ex, Ruben; or, more accurately, his wife. Oh, and Ruben’s boss happens to be the mining magnate Sebastian Glup, who is sponsoring Lorrie’s most important project at work…
As the day spirals from bad to worse to frankly unhinged, Lorrie and Alex are forced to reconsider what they can expect from life, love and middle management. THE OPPOSITE OF SUCCESS is a hilarious debut novel about our work, motherhood, friendship and ambition.

Eleanor Elliott Thomas worked for many years as a lawyer before devoting herself to writing full-time. She is a graduate of the Faber Writing Academy’s ‘Writing a Novel’ course, in which she was taught by Sophie Cunningham and Emily Bitto. She lives with her partner and two daughters in Naarm/Melbourne. THE OPPOSITE OF SUCCESS is her first novel.

NO ONE CAN KNOW de Kate Alice Marshall

The author of What Lies in the Woods returns with a novel about three sisters, two murders, and too many secrets to count.

NO ONE CAN KNOW
by Kate Alice Marshall
Flatiron/St. Martin’s Press, January 2024

Emma hasn’t told her husband much about her past. He knows her parents are dead and she hasn’t spoken to her sisters in years. Then they lose their apartment, her husband gets laid off, and Emma discovers she’s pregnant―right as the bank account slips into the red.
That’s when Emma confesses that she has one more asset: her parents’ house, which she owns jointly with her estranged sisters. They can’t sell it, but they can live in it. But returning home means that Emma is forced to reveal her secrets to her husband: that the house is not a run-down farmhouse but a stately mansion, and that her parents died there.
Were murdered.
And that some people say Emma did it.
Emma and her sisters have never spoken about what really happened that night. Now, her return to the house may lure her sisters back, but it will also crack open family and small-town secrets lots of people don’t want revealed. As Emma struggles to reconnect with her old family and hold together her new one, she begins to realize that the things they have left unspoken all these years have put them in danger again.

Kate Alice Marshall is the author of the young adult novels I Am Still Alive, Rules for Vanishing, and Our Last Echoes, as well as the Secrets of Eden Eld middle grade series. She lives outside of Seattle, where she spends her time playing board games, tending a chaotic vegetable garden, and wrangling dogs and children.

WEB OF ANGELS de John M. Ford

From the brilliant author of The Dragon Waiting and Growing Up Weightless, a novel that saw the cyberpunk future with stunning clarity, years before anyone else.

WEB OF ANGELS
by John M. Ford
Tor/St. Martin’s Press, April 2024

Originally published in 1980, the legendary John M. Ford’s first published novel was an uncannily brilliant anticipation of the later cyberpunk genre—and of the internet itself.
The Web links the many worlds of humanity. Most people can only use it to communicate. Some can retrieve and store data, as well as use simple precoded programs. Only a privileged few are able to create their own software, within proscribed limits.
And then there are the Webspinners.
Grailer is Fourth Literate, able to manipulate the Web at will—and use it for purposes unintended and impossible for anyone but the most talented Webspinner. Obviously, he cannot be allowed to live.
Condemned to death at the age of nine, Grailer must go underground, hiding his skills, testing his powers- until he is ready to do battle with the Web itself.
With a new introduction from Cory Doctorow, written especially for this edition.

John M. Ford was, in his lifetime, a favorite author of many writers better known than he was, including Neil Gaiman and Robert Jordan. He won World Fantasy Awards for both his novel The Dragon Waiting and his poem « Winter Solstice, Camelot Station, » and he won the Philip K. Dick Award for his novel, Growing Up Weightless. His Star Trek™ novel, The Final Reflection, essentially created the nuanced Klingon culture seen later in the feature films, and his other novel in that universe, How Much For The Planet?, was a Star Trek™ tale told as a Gilbert & Sullivan musical, complete with songs. He was a genius. He died in 2006.