Me & Other Writing - Softcover

Duras, Marguerite

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1948980029 ISBN 13: 9781948980029

Publisher: Dorothy, a publishing project, 2019

Synopsis

Literary Nonfiction. Fiction. Essay. Film. Literary Criticism. Translated by Olivia Baes and Emma Ramadan. Introduction by Dan Gunn. In her nonfiction as well as her fiction, Marguerite Duras's curiosity was endless, her intellect voracious. Within a single essay she might roam from Flaubert to the "scattering of desire" to the Holocaust; within the body of her essays overall, style is always evolving, subject matter shifting, as her mind pushes beyond the obvious toward ever-original ground.

ME & OTHER WRITING is a guidebook to the extraordinary breadth of Duras's nonfiction. From the stunning one-page "Me" to the sprawling 70-page "Summer 80," there is not a piece in this collection that can be easily categorized. These are essayistic works written for their times but too virtuosic to be relegated to history, works of commentary or recollection or reportage that are also, unmistakably, works of art.

Table of Contents:

CONTENTS

Introduction vii
Publisher's Note xvii

Flaubert Is . . . 1
The Sound and the Silence 13
My Mother Had . . . 19
Atlantic Black 30
Letter to Centre Rachi 35
Translation 37
I Thought Often . . . 39
Horror at Choisy-le-Roi 48
Nadine from Orange 57
Reading on the Train 67
True Appearances 78
The Men of Tomorrow 82
The Right, Our Death 88
The Horror of Such a Love 90
Me 93
Summer 80 95

Notes & Context 173
Translators' Afterword 181
Biographical Notes 187

About this title

About the Author

Marguerite Duras was one of France's most important and prolific writers. Born Marguerite Donnadieu in 1914 in what was then French Indochina, she went to Paris in 1931 to study at the Sorbonne. During WWII she was active in the Resistance, and in 1945 she joined the Communist Party. Duras wrote many novels, plays, films, and essays during her lifetime. She is perhaps best known for her internationally bestselling novel The Lover, which won the Prix Goncourt in 1984. She died in Paris in 1996.

Review

"This is writing that demands, and provides, its own spotlight—not only through its incandescent intelligence (as in Duras's reading of the violence enacted not by, but upon, Simone Deschamps in 'Horror at Choisy-le-Roi'), but also through its refusal of linear exposition, the way it careens from one idea to another or dashes the reader's expectation of authorly pronouncements by offering instead a lyrical image (Olivia Baes and Emma Ramadan reflect on the challenges of translating this opacity in an excellent note in the book's final pages)."—Heather Cleary, Lit Hub "Book Marks"

"While reading Marguerite Duras, it can be hard to tell if you are pressing your hands to her chest or if she is pressing her hands to yours. Has she mined your deepest feelings or have you caught her heart's fever? Her nonfiction, written in the same blood and seawater as her fiction, produces the same sensation."—Julia Berick, Paris Review "Staff Picks"

About this edition

• Publisher: Dorothy, a publishing project
• Publication date: 2019
• ISBN 10: 1948980029
• ISBN 13: 9781948980029
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 204