Book Details

As Duras tells us about the Moscow Olympics, shipyard strikes in Gda?sk, her hopes for a proletarian revolution, and her despair at the 'misfortune of mankind, ' she weaves in a tender narrative about a small boy and the adolescent girl who looks after him. This is entirely fictional--a characteristic ploy from a writer who believed that understanding suffering was an act of the imagination.--The New Yorker

Duras's writings span a host of styles and emotional tones, but Anglophone readers have, to date, not been exposed to nearly as much of her nonfiction. That's all about to change with this expansive collection of her nonfiction, offering readers a way to engage with a new, and equally impressive, side of Duras's bibliography.—Vol. 1 Brooklyn

Essays, aphorisms and other eclectic nonfiction from one of the 20th century's greatest thinkers and prose stylists.--New York Times Book 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
Biografía del autor
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.