Marie Darrieussecq's Books

A Brief Stay with the Living

By: Marie Darrieussecq

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An exploration of loss and guilt, A Brief Stay with the Living is the story of a mother and her three grown-up daughters. Jeanne, the eldest, has moved to Argentina with her husband; Anne lives alone in Paris, but is in the throes of an unhappy affair with a married man; and Nore, the youngest, is in her first year at university but still living at home. Although not close, all four women are drawn together by an incident from their past - a secret that the story only gradually reveals.

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Page Count

208

Publisher

Faber & Faber

Published Date

ISBN 10

0571214959

ISBN 13

9780571214952

Crossed Lines

By: Marie Darrieussecq

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Crossed Lines

By: Marie Darrieussecq

For fans of Rachel Cusk, Crossed Lines is a critique of a woman’s midlife, middle-class crisis of conscience, told through the astute and clever voice of one of France’s most prolific writers. Translated by Penny Hueston.

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Page Count

305

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Text Publishing

Published Date

ISBN 10

1911231340

ISBN 13

9781911231349

Tom is Dead

By: Marie Darrieussecq

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Tom is Dead

By: Marie Darrieussecq

Set in the Blue Mountains and in Sydney, Tom is Dead is a suspense novel about grief. The narrator's son has been dead for ten years; he was four and a half. For the first time since that day, she spends a few minutes without thinking of him. To stop herself from forgetting, she tries to write Tom's story, the story of his death. She writes about the first hours, the first days, and then about the hours and the days before. She strives to describe it all as precisely as possible. It's the details that will lead her and the reader to the truth.

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Page Count

177

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Text Publishing

Published Date

ISBN 10

1921520310

ISBN 13

9781921520310

Sleepless

A Memoir of Insomnia

By: Marie Darrieussecq

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Sleepless

A Memoir of Insomnia

By: Marie Darrieussecq

A restless inquiry into the cultural and psychic sources of insomnia by one of contemporary French literature’s most elegant voices. Plagued by insomnia for twenty years, Marie Darrieussecq turns her attention to the causes, implications, and consequences of sleeplessness: a nocturnal suffering that culminates at 4 a.m. and then defines the next day. “Insomniac mornings are dead mornings,” she observes. Prevented from falling asleep by her dread of exhaustion the next day, Darrieussecq turns to hypnosis, psychoanalysis, alcohol, pills, and meditation. Her entrapment within this spiraling anguish prompts her inspired, ingenious search across literature, geopolitical history, psychoanalysis, and her own experience to better understand where insomnia comes from and what it might mean. There are those, she writes, in Rwanda, whose vivid memories of genocide leave them awake and transfixed by complete horror; there is the insomnia of the unhoused, who have nowhere to put their heads down. The hyperconnection of urban professional life transforms her bedroom from a haven to a dormant electrified node. Ranging between autobiography, clinical observation, and criticism, Sleepless is a graceful, inventive meditation by one of the most daring, inventive novelists writing today.

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Page Count

289

Publisher

MIT Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

1635901782

ISBN 13

9781635901788

Men

By: Marie Darrieussecq

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Men

By: Marie Darrieussecq

The French title of Men plays on a quote by Marguerite Duras: We have to love men a lot. A lot, a lot. Love them a lot in order to love them. Otherwise it's impossible, we couldn't bear them.' With her characteristic intensity, edginess and humour, Marie Darrieussecq explores female desire, what it means to be a woman. Solange was a provincial teenager in All the Way; now in her thirties, she’s not a great mother, is a mediocre actress, but in Hollywood she falls for a charismatic actor, Kouhouesso, who wants to direct a movie of Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness—in Africa. He’s black; she’s white—what’s the difference when it comes to love, she wonders? Solange follows her man to Africa, determined to play a main role in both his film and his affections. But nothing goes to plan in this brilliantly droll examination of romance, movie-making and clichés about race relations. After all, there’s no guarantee you’ll be loved by the one you love. Personal and political, passionate and engaged, Men is a novel that will make you see things differently.

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Page Count

272

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Text Publishing

Published Date

ISBN 10

1925240916

ISBN 13

9781925240917

The Baby

By: Marie Darrieussecq

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The Baby

By: Marie Darrieussecq

A renowned French author asks fundamental questions about motherhood, gender roles and identity. A must read for fans of Rachel Cusk, Sheila Heti, Jenny Offill and Maggie Nelson

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193

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Text Publishing

Published Date

ISBN 10

191123126X

ISBN 13

9781911231264

Our Life in the Forest

By: Marie Darrieussecq

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Our Life in the Forest

By: Marie Darrieussecq

In the near future, a woman is writing in the depths of a forest. She’s cold. Her body is falling apart, as is the world around her. She’s lost the use of one eye; she’s down to one kidney, one lung. Before, in the city, she was a psychotherapist, treating patients who had suffered trauma, in particular a man, “the clicker”. Every two weeks, she travelled out to the Rest Centre, to visit her “half”, Marie, her spitting image, who lay in an induced coma, her body parts available whenever the woman needed them. As a form of resistance against the terror in the city, the woman flees, along with other fugitives and their halves. But life in the forest is disturbing too—the reanimated halves are behaving like uninhibited adolescents. And when she sees a shocking image of herself on video, are her worst fears confirmed? Our Life in the Forest, written in her inimitable concise, vivid prose recalls Darrieusecq’s brilliant debut, Pig Tales. A dystopian tale in the vein of Never Let Me Go, this is a clever novel of chilling suspense that challenges our ideas about the future, about organ-trafficking, about identity, clones, and the place of the individual in a surveillance state.

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Page Count

159

Publisher

Text Publishing

Published Date

ISBN 10

1925603784

ISBN 13

9781925603781

Being Here

The Life of Paula Modersohn-Becker

By: Marie Darrieussecq

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Being Here

The Life of Paula Modersohn-Becker

By: Marie Darrieussecq

‘A luminous tale about the courage of the lone female artist.’ Joan London Born in Germany in 1876, Paula Modersohn-Becker was the first female artist to paint herself not only naked but pregnant. Being Here is a moving account of the life of this ground-breaking Expressionist painter, by the acclaimed French writer Marie Darrieussecq. As her art evolves, Paula is torn between Paris and her home in northern Germany. In Paris she can focus on her work, and mix with artists like Rodin and Monet, or her close friend the poet Rainer Maria Rilke. But Germany is home, and that’s where her painter husband Otto lives. Darrieussecq thrillingly describes Paula’s discovery of her style and choice of subjects—women, babies, domestic life. She tells the story of her fraught marriage, her ambivalence about combining her passion for her career as an artist with motherhood. And she recounts her tragic death at thirty-one, days after giving birth. Marie Darrieussecq was born in Bayonne in 1969 and and is recognized as one of the leading voices of contemporary French literature. Her first novel, Pig Tales, was translated into thirty-five languages. In 2013 she was awarded the Prix Médicis and the Prix des Prix. Text publishes her three most recent novels, Tom Is Dead, All the Way and Men, as well as Being Here, The Life of Paula Modersohn-Becker. ‘Marie Darrieussecq reads the testament of Modersohn-Becker—the letters, the diaries, and above all the paintings—with a burning intelligence and a fierce hold on what it meant and means to be a woman and an artist.’ J.M. Coetzee ‘There are few writers who may have changed my perception of the world, but Darrieussecq is one of them.’ The Times ‘The internationally celebrated author who illuminates those parts of life other writers cannot or do not want to reach.’ Independent ‘Penny Hueston’s translation from the original French, reads strangely—and in a good way—like true crime...Heartbreaking.’ West Australian ‘A brief, powerful artistic life that went painfully unrewarded—until after the painter’s death.’ Julian Barnes, Best Summer Holiday Reads, Guardian [UK] ‘Darrieussecq has written this painful story because of her own sorrow at not knowing Paula Modersohn-Becker and of not knowing of her; sorrow, too, at her early death and truncated creativity. Darrieussecq looks squarely at a subject that is often too brutal to explore.’ Monthly ‘Lyrical and touching... Blending historical fact with imaginative flair, Darrieussecq brings her figures to life, imbuing them with emotion, character, and power...Being Here feels almost effortlessly beautiful, a short work of non-fiction told like a flowing piece of fictional prose.’ AU Review ‘Translated elegantly by Penny Hueston, the study retains some of the spacious, if not capacious quality of the French language and its ability to articulate the phenomena of presence and absence—the continued aliveness of the paintings and the sad and sudden death of the painter.’ Conversation ‘In Darrieussecq’s hands, Modersohn-Becker’s story is both individual and exemplary: a frightening, energising fable’ Guardian ‘Darrieussecq animates the short life of a passionate German artist with vivid, spare prose...This taut biography, written in the present tense, has the urgency and poignancy of the best novels.’ Suzy Freeman-Greene, Best Books of 2017, Australian Book Review ‘One of those books that catches you by surprise, Being Here is art history that feels like a beautifully crafted novel...It’s effortlessly beautiful, and highlights the ever more important need to tell the stories of women in art.’ AU Review, Top Ten Books of 2017

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Page Count

168

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Text Publishing

Published Date

ISBN 10

1925410846

ISBN 13

9781925410846

My Phantom Husband

By: Marie Darrieussecq

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My Phantom Husband

By: Marie Darrieussecq

What would you think if your husband, one day, with no word of explanation or warning, vanished? When would you begin to panic - the first hour, the first night? A deceptively simple story about a deserted woman, My Phantom Husbandis Marie Darrieussecq's eerie follow-up to Pig Tales, showing her to be a writer of great subtlety and depth. When her husband goes to buy fresh bread and never returns, the young narrator's life changes for ever. Night after night she has to learn to be alone, to sleep alone, to live in a space she has shared with a man for seven years. Yet who was he, her husband, and did they really have much in common? Why can't she remember her love for him - or even what he looked like? Dragged into a world of visions, she is besieged by childhood terrors - monsters behind the furniture, vampires floating around in the dark, strangers walking in other rooms. She begins to see her husband, or an apparition of him. Is he a supernatural visitation or the product of madness - or a figment of her guilty conscience? My Phantom Husband is a profoundly unsettling parable about the way love appears and disappears, about the absences and evasions that can lie hidden in any relationship.

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Page Count

160

Publisher

Faber & Faber Limited

Published Date

ISBN 10

0571203361

ISBN 13

9780571203369

Men

By: Marie Darrieussecq

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Men

By: Marie Darrieussecq

Winner Prix Médicis, Prix des Prix, 2013 The French title of Men plays on a quote by Marguerite Duras: We have to love men a lot. A lot, a lot. Love them a lot in order to love them. Otherwise it's impossible, we couldn’t bear them.’ With her characteristic intensity, edginess and humour, Marie Darrieussecq explores female desire, what it means to be a woman. Solange was a provincial teenager in All the Way; now in her thirties, she’s not a great mother, is a mediocre actress, but in Hollywood she falls for a charismatic actor, Kouhouesso, who wants to direct a movie of Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness—in Africa. He’s black; she’s white—what’s the difference when it comes to love, she wonders? Solange follows her man to Africa, determined to play a main role in both his film and his affections. But nothing goes to plan in this brilliantly droll examination of romance, movie-making and clichés about race relations. After all, there’s no guarantee you’ll be loved by the one you love. Personal and political, passionate and engaged, Men is a novel that will make you see things differently. Marie Darrieussecq was born in 1969 in Bayonne, France. Her debut novel, Pig Tales was published in thirty-four countries. Five other novels have also been translated into English including A Brief Stay with the Living, Tom is Dead and All the Way. Marie Darrieussecq lives in Paris. ‘There are few writers who may have changed my perception of the world, but Darrieussecq is one of them.’ The Times ‘The internationally celebrated author who illuminates those parts of life other writers cannot or do not want to reach.’ Independent ‘Compelling...Anyone who has experienced heartbreak will relate...A moody, powerful book.’ Age/Sydney Morning Herald ‘As a chronicle of the humiliations and occasional joys of loving someone whose own feelings are more ambiguous, though, it feels queasily accurate...A sometimes biting, often sharply observed take on a relationship one would surely rather read about than be part of.’ Kirkus ‘This is an atmospheric novel, written in prose that is at once evocative and compulsive...For those in the market for a nuanced and thought-provoking dissection of race and gender relations and who are willing to risk being infuriated, Men is an easy and engaging read.’ NZ Listener

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272

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Text Publishing

Published Date

ISBN 10

1922253537

ISBN 13

9781922253538

Pig Tales

A Novel of Lust and Transformation

By: Marie Darrieussecq

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Pig Tales

A Novel of Lust and Transformation

By: Marie Darrieussecq

Pig Tales is a brilliant satirical novel about a stunning young woman working in a beauty 'massage' parlour. She enjoys extraordinary success at bringing home the bacon (in part due to her increasingly rosy and irresistible backside) until she slowly metamorphoses - into a pig. Rejected by her boyfriend, left to wander the sewers and forage for food in public parks, she takes up with a werewolf with insatiable appetites. They share everything (pizza is a particular favourite; she gets the pizza, he gets the delivery boy) until someone alerts the authorities and tragedy strikes . . . Gender, politics and social hypocrisy all come under scrutiny in this entertaining and enlightening novel. Pig Tales is a Metamorphosis for the present day, a dark fable of political and sexual corruption, and a grim warning of what can happen in a society without a soul.

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Page Count

135

Published Date

ISBN 10

0571193722

ISBN 13

9780571193721

Sleepless

A Memoir of Insomnia

By: Marie Darrieussecq

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Sleepless

A Memoir of Insomnia

By: Marie Darrieussecq

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Page Count

289

Publisher

MIT Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

1635901782

ISBN 13

9781635901788

Being Here Is Everything

The Life of Paula Modersohn-Becker

By: Marie Darrieussecq

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Being Here Is Everything

The Life of Paula Modersohn-Becker

By: Marie Darrieussecq

The short, obscure, and prolific life of the German expressionist painter Paula Modersohn-Becker (1876–1907), a significant figure in modernism. First published in France in 2016, Being Here Is So Much traces the short, obscure, and prolific life of the German expressionist painter Paula Modersohn-Becker (1876–1907). In a brief career, cut short by her death from an embolism at the age of thirty-one, shortly after she gave birth to a child, Modersohn-Becker trained in Germany, traveled often to Paris, developed close friendships with the sculptor Clara Westhoff and the poet Rainer Maria Rilke, and became one of her generation's preeminent artists, helping introduce modernity to the twentieth century alongside such other painters as Picasso and Matisse. Marie Darrieussecq's triumphant and illuminating biography at once revives Modersohn-Becker's reputation as a significant figure in modernism and sheds light on the extreme difficulty women have faced in attaining recognition and establishing artistic careers.

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Page Count

161

Publisher

MIT Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

1635900115

ISBN 13

9781635900118

Being Here Is Everything

The Life of Paula Modersohn-Becker

By: Marie Darrieussecq

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Being Here Is Everything

The Life of Paula Modersohn-Becker

By: Marie Darrieussecq

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161

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MIT Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

1635900085

ISBN 13

9781635900088

Tom is Dead

By: Marie Darrieussecq

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Tom is Dead

By: Marie Darrieussecq

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Page Count

177

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Text Publishing

Published Date

ISBN 10

1921520310

ISBN 13

9781921520310

Undercurrents

A Novel

By: Marie Darrieussecq,Linda Coverdale

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Undercurrents

A Novel

By: Marie Darrieussecq,Linda Coverdale

A mother and daughter travel to a resort town on the coast of Spain, where they will experience a surrealistic adventure.

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Page Count

114

Published Date

ISBN 10

1565846273

ISBN 13

9781565846272

White

By: Marie Darrieussecq

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White

By: Marie Darrieussecq

Où? Au Pôle Sud. Quand? Dans un futur proche. Qui? Un homme et une femme. De l’aventure! Du froid! Du chaud! Des spectres! Des bons et des méchants! De l’amour! Jusqu’à quel point faut-il se débarrasser des fantômes pour faire l’amour?

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Page Count

147

Publisher

POL Editeur

Published Date

ISBN 10

281800845X

ISBN 13

9782818008454

Kate Barry : the Habit of Being

By: Jean Rolin,Kate Barry

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Kate Barry : the Habit of Being

By: Jean Rolin,Kate Barry

Elle aimait photographier les chemins sinueux, tordus, suspendus, terreux, boueux, caillouteux. Ou encore, les mauvaises herbes et les herbes folles secouées par le vent, attentive à la vie silencieuse, aux couleurs, aux lumières et à leurs incidences sur la transformation de la nature. L' échappée belle effectuée dans ce face à face silencieux avec le monde, sans limite, incitant à la mélancolie, la rêverie et l'imaginaire, laissait entrevoir une personnalité discrète, attentionnée, délicate. " (Aline Arlettaz) De cette pratique, ont été conservés des tirages réalisés sous son contrôle, des planches contacts découpées, des travaux en couleur minimalistes. Aussi, quelques textes, mots, correspondances, ainsi que des morceaux de films réalisés lors d'un voyage à Savannah en 2007 avec Jean Rolin sur les traces d'une auteur qu'elle admirait, Flannery O'Connor. Autant d'indices permettant aujourd'hui de remonter le fil d'une oeuvre inachevée.

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Page Count

200

Published Date

ISBN 10

2365111408

ISBN 13

9782365111409

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