These Possible Lives (Paperback or Softback)
Jaeggy, Fleur
ISBN 10: 0811226875 ISBN 13: 9780811226875
Published by New Directions Publishing Corporation 7/25/2017, 2017
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About this Item
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These Possible Lives. Seller Inventory # BBS-9780811226875
Synopsis:
Brief in the way a razor’s slice is brief, remarkable essays by a peerless stylist
New Directions is proud to present Fleur Jaeggy’s strange and mesmerizing essays about the writers Thomas De Quincey, John Keats, and Marcel Schwob. A renowned stylist of hyper-brevity in fiction, Fleur Jaeggy proves herself an even more concise master of the essay form, albeit in a most peculiar and lapidary poetic vein. Of De Quincey’s early nineteenth-century world we hear of the habits of writers: Charles Lamb “spoke of ‘Lilliputian rabbits’ when eating frog fricassse”; Henry Fuseli “ate a diet of raw meat in order to obtain splendid dreams”; “Hazlitt was perceptive about musculature and boxers”; and “Wordsworth used a buttery knife to cut the pages of a first-edition Burke.” In a book of “blue devils” and night visions, the Keats essay opens: “In 1803, the guillotine was a common child’s toy.” And poor Schwob’s end comes as he feels “like a ‘dog cut open alive’”: “His face colored slightly, turning into a mask of gold. His eyes stayed open imperiously. No one could shut his eyelids. The room smoked of grief.” Fleur Jaeggy’s essays―or are they prose poems?―smoke of necessity: the pages are on fire.
About the Authors:
Fleur Jaeggy― “a wonderful, brilliant, savage writer” (Susan Sontag) ―was born in 1940 in Zurich and lives in Milan. Her work has been acclaimed as “small-scale, intense, and impeccably focused ”(The New Yorker) and “addictive” (Kirkus).
The author of Do You Hear What I Hear? Religious Calling, the Priesthood, and My Father, and the editor of The Literary Review, Minna Proctor won the PEN/Renato Poggioli Award for her translation of Federigo Tozzi’s Love in Vain.
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Bibliographic Details
Title: These Possible Lives (Paperback or Softback)
Publisher: New Directions Publishing Corporation 7/25/2017
Publication Date: 2017
Binding: Paperback or Softback
Condition: New
Book Type: Book