All the outings not to be missed for your return to school!
Po help you sort out your future purchases during this literary tidal wave that the new literary season represents, we have decided to give the floor to the publishers to tell you about their crush…and the rest of the year. too !
The literary return. It still makes a lot of ink flow, animates conversations, appears in the pages of newspapers and magazines, is also on the program of radio and television programs…
This exclusively French phenomenon, it has no real equivalent outside our borders, results in the massive landing of several hundred French and foreign novels each autumn on the tables of bookstores. In the end, few elected officials will be noticed and valued at their fair value…
For an author and for his book, the start of the new school year can be a launching pad or turn outright into disaster.
It is therefore necessary, even if very fortunately very good books are published the rest of the year, to program texts which will be able to withstand the shock, to arouse interest, to create surprise.
For lands of americathe literary season has two faces this year.
The first is that of a young twenty-year-old novelist.
Her name is Leila Mottley and is originally from Oakland, California.
Her first novel, Walk the night translated by Pauline Loquin, is a book like a publisher dreams of encountering more often. A text carried by a writing that is both raw and poetic. A novel that is never what one might expect, that never sinks into pathos, didacticism or militancy. A novel that is both tragic and luminous, where life and everything that composes it take precedence over everything else…
“Art allows us to imprint ourselves on the world so that no one can ever erase us. »
Seventeen-year-old Kiara lives in a dilapidated public housing project with her older brother Marcus, who dreams of a career in rap. Since the death of their father and the conviction of their mother, the two teenagers have been left to fend for themselves. But only Kiara bears the burden of everyday life, earning enough money from odd jobs to be able to pay late rent and watch the specter of eviction fade away, stocking the fridge, caring for nine-year-old Trevor, the neighbour’s son addicted to crack. Fortunately, Kiara can count on Alé, her friend and her lover. But one day the pressure is too much and Kiara imagines having found a quick and effective way to solve her financial problems. She does not know that this choice will have catastrophic consequences on her life and plunge her into darkness far too deep for a child.
→ Criticism ofWalk the Night of Leila Mottley
The second is no stranger.
Anthony Doerr came to prominence in the early 2000s with The name of the shells, a remarkable collection of short stories. Crowned by the award Pulitzer in 2015 for her previous novel, All the light we can’t see (which Netflix has just adapted for broadcast next year)he returns with an exceptional book that confirms his incredible talent.
The City of Clouds and Birds is a novel that leaves you speechless to the point that you almost wonder how it is possible for a writer to manage to give birth to such a thing…
This novel, translated by Marina Borasois a world unto itself, the world of stories, books and libraries, that of literature and the human imagination, and of our pronounced taste for each other.
“Sometimes the things we think are lost are just hidden away, waiting to be rediscovered. »
At the heart of the plot is an ancient Greek manuscript, which gives its title to the book and links together all the characters, the places and the different times in which they live. We pass in turn from a 22nd century spaceship carrying humans in search of a new planet to Constantinople besieged by the armies of Sultan Mehmet II, from a prison camp in Korea during the war of the same name to a quiet little town in Idaho, in the northwest of the United States. And Anthony Doerr does not just juggle eras, he also juggles literary genres and creates an incredible hybrid universe all oriented around the mystery of the creation of the stories we tell ourselves about life and the world, since the night of the time.
If the word masterpiece is too often overused, it nevertheless applies to this novel which explodes all the frames for the greatest pleasure of the reader…
→ Criticism of The City of Clouds and Birds ofAnthony Doerr
French readers discovered Marlon James on the occasion of the release of A brief history of seven murderswhere he drew a striking portrait of Jamaica, around the assassination attempt on Bob Marley in 1976.
crowned by the Booker Prize in 2015, this book is being adapted for netflix.
With Black Leopard, Red Wolf (translated by Heloise Esquie), Marlon James succeeds in a singular feat where a legendary Africa and the imagination of the studios rub shoulders Marvelthe heritage of the griots like that of Gabriel Garcia Marquez. This hallucinated and abundant novel has nothing to envy to the universe of Lord of the Rings or of Game Of Thrones, but in what we can without hesitation qualify as an epic, Marlon James gives birth to a truly singular literary universe.
→ Criticism of Black Leopard, Red Wolf of Marlon James
→ Find all the publishers’ releases for this literary season 2022!
We would like to say thanks to the author of this short article for this outstanding content
Literary back to school 2022: Albin Michel Terres d’Amérique