Me & Other Writing

nLiterary Nonfiction. Fiction. Essay. Film. Literary Criticism. Translated by Olivia Baes and Emma Ramadan. Introduction by Dan Gunn. In her nonfiction as well as her fiction, Marguerite Duras's curiosity was endless, her intellect voracious. Within a single essay she might roam from Flaubert to the scattering of desire to the Holocaust; within the body of her essays overall, style is always evolving, subject matter shifting, as her mind pushes beyond the obvious toward ever-original ground. nME & OTHER WRITING is a guidebook to the extraordinary breadth of Duras's nonfiction. From the stunning one-page Me to the sprawling 70-page Summer 80, there is not a piece in this collection that can be easily categorized. These are essayistic works written for their times but too virtuosic to be relegated to history, works of commentary or recollection or reportage that are also, unmistakably, works of art. n nWhile reading Marguerite Duras, it can be hard to tell if you are pressing your hands to her chest or if she is pressing her hands to yours. Has she mined your deepest feelings or have you caught her heart's fever? Her nonfiction, written in the same blood and seawater as her fiction, produces the same sensation.--Julia Berick, Paris Review Staff Picks n nThis is writing that demands, and provides, its own spotlight--not only through its incandescent intelligence (as in Duras's reading of the violence enacted not by, but upon, Simone Deschamps in 'Horror at Choisy-le-Roi'), but also through its refusal of linear exposition, the way it careens from one idea to another or dashes the reader's expectation of authorly pronouncements by offering instead a lyrical image (Olivia Baes and Emma Ramadan reflect on the challenges of translating this opacity in an excellent note in the book's final pages).--Heather Cleary, Lit Hub Book Marksn