These Possible Lives - Couverture souple

Jaeggy, Fleur

Couverture souple

ISBN 10 : 0811226875 ISBN 13 : 9780811226875

Editeur : New Directions Publishing Corporation, 2017

A propos du livre

Présentation de l'éditeur :

"...vibrant and unforced, shimmering with the complexity of reality. As in Plutarch's Parallel Lives, the juxtaposition of [these] biographies accentuates their common characteristics, and from this triptych a survey of genius, mysticism and intoxication emerges." Financial Times

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.

Revue de presse :

"The hypnotic essay-portraits of Fleur Jaeggy's These Possible Lives... [are] small studies in astringency and malicious historical imagination."

--Adam Thirlwell, Times Literary Supplement

"Enjoy these short, meditative pieces slowly; Jaeggy is addictive."

--Kirkus Reviews

"Small-scale, intense, and impeccably focused." --The New Yorker

"Terse beauties falling on the reader like a chaste gray rain." --The New Republic

À propos de cette édition

• Éditeur: New Directions Publishing Corporation
• Date d'édition: 2017
• ISBN 10: 0811226875
• ISBN 13: 9780811226875
• Reliure: Broché
• Nombre de pages: 64