Items related to A Life on Paper: Stories (Large Print 16pt)
The celebrated career of Georges-Olivier Chteaureynaud is well known to readers of French literature. This comprehensive collection the first to be translated into English introduces a distinct and dynamic voice to the Anglophone world. In many ways, Chteaureynaud is France's own Kurt Vonnegut, and his stories are as familiar as they are fantastic. A Life on Paper presents characters who struggle to communicate across the boundaries of the living and the dead, the past and the present, the real and the more-than-real. A young husband struggles with self-doubt and an ungainly set of angel wings in Icarus Saved from the Skies,'' even as his wife encourages him to embrace his transformation. In the title story, a father's obsession with his daughter leads him to keep her life captured in 93,284 unchanging photographs. While Chteaureynaud's stories examine the diffidence and cruelty we are sometimes capable of, they also highlight the humanity in the strangest of us and our deep appreciation for the mysterious.
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About the Author:
Georges-Olivier Chteaureynaud is the author of nine novels, two young adult novels, and over one hundred short stories. Despite a lifelong fear of flying, he has been to Peru - his only time on a plane - and lived to pen a travel memoir about the experience. He is the recipient of the prestigious Prix Renaudot, Prix Goncourt de la nouvelle (for short stories), Prix Giono, Prix Valry Larbaud, and the Grand Prix de l'Imaginaire. His work has been translated into fourteen languages. Born in Paris in 1947, Chteaureynaud was a solitary child who became a voracious and unprejudiced reader, ingesting Treasure Island as avidly as Lady Chatterley's Lover. He studied English at the Sorbonne, discovering Stevenson, Shelley, Stoker, and Wells, and later took a degree in library science from the cole Nationale Suprieure des Bibliothques. In 1968, he embarked on a series of odd jobs - including antiques dealer and auto assembly line laborer - that comprised, in his words, an apprenticeship in human nature,'' cementing his sympathy for the marginal, outcast figures who would become his luckless, well-meaning, Everyman heroes and narrators. Grasset published his first collection in 1973, Le fou dans la chaloupe. With novelist Hubert Haddad, and fellow Goncourt winners Frdric Tristan and sinologist Jean Lvi, Chteaureynaud is a founding member of the contemporary movement La Nouvelle Fiction; New'' because it rose up against the prevailingly minimalist and confessional tendencies (autofiction) of recent French writing, seeking to rouse it from what critic Jean-Luc Moreau called the slumber of psychological realism,'' and to restore myth, fable, and fairy tale to a place of primacy in fiction. In 1983 and 1990, Chteaureynaud was a representative of the Foreign Services Ministry to Quebec and then to Greece. He has been consistently involved with the Centre National du Livre and the SGDL (Socit des Gens de Lettres de France). He plays an active part in fostering new talent, serving
From Publishers Weekly:
These 22 curious tales verging on the perverse will strike new English readers of Châteaureynaud's work as a wonderful find. Beautiful prose featuring ingenuous protagonists and clever, unexpected forays into horror are the hallmarks of these mischievous stories. The husband of the title tale, reeling from the untimely loss of his much younger wife, tries to capture her essence in their daughter, whom he photographs obsessively. By the time of the daughter's untimely death, there are 93,284 photographs. The Pest chronicles the narrator's tireless attempts to rid himself of his odious doppelgänger, even setting up his own suicide. A doctor interviews a decapitated head in La Tête and vows to help put it out of its misery. Châteaureynaud is tremendously skillful at setting up disorienting stories with convincing details and characters, as evidenced in The Styx, narrated by a dead man who assists at his own burial ceremony a little too importunately, until he's pushed out of the moving hearse. Translator Gauvin does a fine job of harnessing the nervous, thrilling feel of these tales. (June)
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Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
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- PublisherReadhowyouwant
- ISBN 10 145872106X
- ISBN 13 9781458721068
- BindingPaperback
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