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"An original and significant writer, whose fiction can be as engaging as it is surprising." The Times Literary Supplement
'This is a book that isn't going to please anybody, not intellectuals, who aren't interested in football, or football-lovers, who will find it too intellectual. But I had to write it, I didn't want to break the fine thread that still connects me to the world.'
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"In this improbable love story, we meet a man who is obsessed with himself: how he does things and all the ways he might have done them, how he thinks, why he thinks the way that he thinks, how he might do or think otherwise. What happens? He takes driving lessons, goes grocery shopping, slowly yet methodically battles an olive on a plate. It is all simple and amusing until life intercedes: there is love, suddenly, and change, a flurry of emotion, and an unexpected incident with a camera on a ship. Only Jean-Philippe Toussaint - master of poignant deadpan - could write a novel at once so aloof and so touching, where we come to know our narrator intimately while knowing almost nothing about him."--BOOK JACKET.
Bernadette O?Brien: child prodigy'professor of physics at Harvard'sentenced to die in the electric chair for the shocking murder of two male students. In her journal'her "death book" as she calls it?Bernadette takes a dark look back at the unfolding events that led to the extraordinary crime for which she stood trial.Defiance pulls us into the world of a lonely, defiant, brilliant woman'a misfit child, a girl-genius who left the working class, Irish Catholic world of Fall River, Massachusetts'a stone's throw away from Cambridge'who entered the halls of academic privilege at the age of 12, and stayed to rise within its ranks.In the incandescent, erotically charged prose for which she is known, Maso probes the depths of a female psyche'inextricably embedded in a uniquely American matrix of sexuality, violence, and the clash of class difference'as no writer before her has done.' Carole Maso has galvanized audiences across the country and won critical esteem and literary awards.' Compare Defiance to current hits like A.M. Homes? The End of Alice, Cronenberg's movie Crash, and Susanna Moore's In the Cut.
"To write of her that which has never been written of any other woman." And with these words from Dante, Jean-Philippe Toussaint sets out once more to deepen and broaden his depiction of one of contemporary fiction's most fully realized female characters: haute couturière Marie Madeleine Marguerite de Montalte. Having traced the ups, downs, ins, and outs of Marie's relationship with the unnamed narrator through three previous novels, Toussaint brings his customary nuanced rumination and nimble wit to this concluding volume, which takes us back to the Tokyo of Making Love and the Elba of The Truth About Marie, through jealousy and comedy, irony and tenderness, and the meticulous accretion of details that engross and distract us even as life's larger changes shift the assumptions by which we live.
"Wonderful . . . Toussaint is a genuinely funny writer." Kirkus Reviews
"An unnamed man travels to Shanghai, ostensibly on vacation, but finds himself increasingly unmoored from his life and identity. Caught in a jet-lag reality, he stumbles from adventure to adventure, allowing himself to be led not by sense or instinct but by the onrush of experience, until a call from home jars him back into his life, with all of its own confusions." "In Running Away, the Chaplinesque slapstick of Jean-Philippe Toussaint's acclaimed early works The Bathroom and Camera is replaced by an ever-unfolding fabric of coincidences and misapprehensions, both particularly modern and utterly real. The mature Toussaint shows himself to be no less ingenious an inventor of existential dilemmas, but with a new, surprising tenderness, and a deepened concern for the inexpressible immediacy and sensuality of human experience." --Book Jacket.
Both a sense of urgency and a goodly amount of patience are required for any writer to produce a novel. Moving between these two poles, Jean-Philippe Toussaint here collects a series of short essays on the art of writing, both his own and that of writers he's admired, for example Kafka, Beckett, Dostoyevsky, and Proust. As Toussaint himself has said, "It's only natural for writers... to say a word about how they write and what they owe to great authors."
The disintegration of an affair, set in Tokyo and Kyoto, details a couple's final days, exploring not only the feelings of the characters and lost intimacy, but the ultramodern setting and place in which it occurs.