All My Friends: Stories - Softcover

Marie NDiaye

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1931883238 ISBN 13: 9781931883238

Publisher: Two Lines Press, 2013

Synopsis

Following her universally acclaimed novel Three Strong Women, French phenom Marie NDiaye returns with five intricately narrated stories showcasing characters both robustly real and emotionally unfathomable. All My Friends opens with the fraught story of a patriarch who is losing his grip on reality, even as he falls deeply in love with his former student, now his housekeeper. NDiaye further probes the enduring effects of past tragedies in “The Death of Claude François,” a striking dissection of the tug-of-war between a doctor and her impoverished patient over a dead husband. Later, NDiaye gives us the harsh tale of a young boy longing to escape his life of poverty by becoming a sex slave—just like the beautiful young man that lived next door. The curt, Kafkaesque “Revelation” involves a woman who takes her mentally challenged son on a bus ride to the city: they both know that she’ll return, but he won’t. And in the claustrophobic, psychologically dense “Brulard’s Day,” NDiaye sweeps in and out of the confused, aggressive mind of a woman tottering between sanity and madness. Chilling, provocative, and touching, All My Friends shows a master stylist using her unique gifts to render the personal horrors we fight every day to suppress—but in All My Friends they’re allowed to roam free.

About this title

About the Authors

Marie NDiaye was born in 1967 in Pithiviers, France. She is the author of around twenty novels, plays, collections of stories, and nonfiction books, which have been translated into numerous languages. She’s received the Prix Femina and the Prix Goncourt, France’s highest literary honor, and her plays are in the repertoire of the Comédie-Française.

Jordan Stump is a Professor of French at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln; he has translated some thirty works of (mostly) contemporary French fiction, by such writers as Marie Redonnet, Eric Chevillard, and Scholastique Mukasonga, as well as seven works by Marie NDiaye, including the forthcoming Vengeance Is Mine.  His translation of her The Cheffe was awarded the annual translation prize for fiction by the American Literary Translators’ Association.

Edition details

• Publisher: Two Lines Press
• Publication date: 2013
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1931883238
• ISBN 13: 9781931883238
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 190