| These Possible Lives Contributor(s): Jaeggy, Fleur (Author), Proctor, Minna (Translator) |
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ISBN: 0811226875 ISBN-13: 9780811226875 Publisher: New Directions Publishing Corporation OUR PRICE: $11.66 Product Type: Paperback - Other Formats Published: July 2017 |
| Additional Information |
| BISAC Categories: - Biography & Autobiography | Literary Figures - Social Science | Essays |
| Dewey: B |
| LCCN: 2017000507 |
| Physical Information: 0.3" H x 5" W x 6.9" (0.10 lbs) 64 pages |
| Descriptions, Reviews, Etc. |
| Publisher Description: 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. |
Contributor Bio(s): Proctor, Minna: - 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.Jaeggy, Fleur: - 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). |