All My Friends - Softcover

NDiaye, Marie

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1931883238 ISBN 13: 9781931883238

Publisher: Two Lines Press, 2013

Synopsis

A moody and beautiful reflection on relationships, and how our idea of the world too often fails to match reality, All My Friends delivers five stories that probe the boundaries between individuals to mediate on how well we really know anybody, including ourselves. Written in hypnotic prose with characters both fully fleshed and unfathomable, All My Friends opens with the fraught love story of a man who has fallen for his housekeeper, his student of many years ago. Losing his grip as he feels his own family turning against him, he plots romance between the housekeeper and an old friend, whom he thinks is perfect for her. 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. And when a woman takes her mentally challenged son on a bus ride to the city, they both know that she’ll return, but he won’t. Chilling, provocative, and touching, this is an unflinching look at 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 Author:

Marie NDiaye is the recipient of the Prix Femina and the Prix Goncourt, the highest honor a French writer can receive. She is the author of over a dozen plays and works of prose, including Trois femmes puissantes, published as Three Strong Women by FSG in 2012. She lives in Paris.

Jordan Stump is a two-time nominee for the IMPAC Dublin Literary Award. He has translated books by Nobel laureate Claude Simon, Jean-Philippe Toussaint, Eric Chevillard, and many others. He lives in Lincoln, NE.

Review:

Praise for All My Friends:

"NDiaye, who received France's most prestigious literary prize for Three Powerful Women and may be that nation's most startling new literary voice, brings to life an electrifying rogue's gallery of social outcasts, disgruntled wives, and loony strivers. . . . Stump's perfectly calibrated translation captures the rich timbre and fearsome bite of NDiaye's chiseled prose."
Publishers Weekly

"A superb short story collection. . . . Her oneiric tales suggest a necessary truth about contemporary life that explains why she is increasingly and justly recognized as a major world writer." Rain Taxi Review of Books

"Woah. These stories are not linked, but the emotional force that pervades them is so consistent you feel that Marie NDiaye's fantastic characters belong together. This book is a world." SF Weekly

"[NDiaye's] is a unique voice among other contemporary French writers, and her fictional vision both intricate and distinctive. She is an example of exactly the kind of non-Anglophone writer who should have already been translated in full. Hopefully, this new translation will renew interest in her work, prompt further translations and give English readers the chance to experience her entire contribution to world letters."
The Rumpus

"All five of the stories that make up this slim book are masterful. . . . NDiaye creates a portable unease that slips from one story to the next, never losing its force, or its accusatory tone You don't see anything? You ought to see something."
The Collagist

Praise for Three Strong Women:
NDiaye is a hypnotic storyteller with an unflinching understanding of the rock-bottom reality of most people’s lives.”
The New York Times Book Review

Passionate and unsettling. . . . Rich, sensuous. . . . Three Strong Women is a major work of world literature. . . . A rare novel, capturing the grand scope of migration, from Africa to Europe and back, and the inner lives of very different people caught between pride and despair. And NDiaye is a rare novelist, whose arrival in America is long overdue.”
NPR

Gorgeous, fearless prose . . . NDiaye’s storytelling approaches something of the power and simplicity of folklore. There is good and evil here, and as in the world they are blended confusingly and only slowly revealed. In the interplay between Europe and Africa, between men and women, NDiaye finds both beauty and beast.”
The Boston Globe

About this edition

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