Reading Writing

Every reader is a potential writer, and every writer is a reader in actuality. Reading Writing is a subjective history of fiction and poetry and a personal meditation on the links between literature and two visual arts: painting and cinema. Gracq’s poetics is founded upon the basic acts of reading and writing and on the relationship between the writer and his language.
 
This first English-language edition of En lisant en écrivant will mark a turning point in the public reception of Julien Gracq.

 

Julien Gracq (1910-2007), born Louis Poirier in Saint-Florent-le-Vieil, was one of the greatest French writers of the twentieth century. His work included essays, criticism, fiction and journalism. He won but refused the Prix Goncourt in 1951 for his novel Le Rivage des Syrtes (The Opposing Shore). This retiring and misunderstood figure said he wrote "to settle a score with expression itself, to give form, stability, precision to things that are vague in the mind."