Marguerite Duras, trans. by Emma Ramadan and Olivia Baes
RaveWords Without BordersAll about aftermath ... The plot of The Easy Life rac[es] like a tongue of fire that has found a fuse—there’s nothing left to do but follow where it burns ... Duras...is the queen of blind spots so gaping that I’m tempted to call them doors to oblivion. Her heroines possess a kind of indifference, but it’s inevitability in disguise ... There’s a hinge in the center of this book when an even more shocking event divides beginning from aftermath ... In this excellent new translation, you can discover her as the long aftermath was just beginning, when her voice was a line of ash in the grass, and a hungry, traveling flame.
Anne Boyer
RaveOn the SeawallThis struggle is not for the faint of heart, and many of the contradictions Boyer unravels are designed to reassure, minimize, and compartmentalize, in effect, to isolate cancer away from the rest of life ... If you’ve ever helped to care for someone with cancer, you will recognize in this book the answers to lingering questions that never felt right, and the great luck of having friends who are willing to participate in art-making, bullshit-detecting, and black humor ... There are so many sharp and fiercely specific moments in this book, but I don’t want to overlook the significance of its form. Boyer’s work has a way of making individual experience less lonely, and the very structure of this book presents an alternative to the rarefied, isolating spaces of cancer care ... Reading The Undying feels like inhabiting the kind of temple Boyer once wanted to create — a temple for the individual and public acknowledgement of suffering, and also a temple for collectively examining the lies she sets out to untangle ... Every sentence of this book has something to say, under pain of death, about the truths artistic excellence can unleash.
