A Life on Paper
Stories
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- $9.99
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- $9.99
Publisher Description
The celebrated career of Georges-Olivier Châteaureynaud is well known to readers of French literature. This comprehensive collection—the first to be translated into English—introduces a distinct and dynamic voice to the Anglophone world. In many ways, Châteaureynaud is France’s own Kurt Vonnegut, and his stories are as familiar as they are fantastic.
A Life on Paper presents characters who struggle to communicate across the boundaries of the living and the dead, the past and the present, the real and the more-than-real. A young husband struggles with self-doubt and an ungainly set of angel wings in “Icarus Saved from the Skies,” even as his wife encourages him to embrace his transformation. In the title story, a father’s obsession with his daughter leads him to keep her life captured in 93,284 unchanging photographs. While Châteaureynaud’s stories examine the diffidence and cruelty we are sometimes capable of, they also highlight the humanity in the strangest of us and our deep appreciation for the mysterious.
Georges-Olivier Châteaureynaud is the author of eight novels and almost one hundred short stories, and he is a recipient of the prestigious Prix Renaudot and the Bourse Goncourt de la nouvelle. His work has been translated into twelve languages.
Edward Gauvin has published Châteaureynaud’s work in AGNI Online, Conjunctions, Words Without Borders, The Café Irreal, and The Brooklyn Rail. The recipient of a residency from the Banff International Literary Translation Centre, he translates graphic novels for Tokyopop, First Second Books, and Archaia Studios Press.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
These 22 curious tales verging on the perverse will strike new English readers of Ch teaureynaud's work as a wonderful find. Beautiful prose featuring ingenuous protagonists and clever, unexpected forays into horror are the hallmarks of these mischievous stories. The husband of the title tale, reeling from the untimely loss of his much younger wife, tries to capture her essence in their daughter, whom he photographs obsessively. By the time of the daughter's untimely death, there are 93,284 photographs. The Pest chronicles the narrator's tireless attempts to rid himself of his odious doppelg nger, even setting up his own suicide. A doctor interviews a decapitated head in La T te and vows to help put it out of its misery. Ch teaureynaud is tremendously skillful at setting up disorienting stories with convincing details and characters, as evidenced in The Styx, narrated by a dead man who assists at his own burial ceremony a little too importunately, until he's pushed out of the moving hearse. Translator Gauvin does a fine job of harnessing the nervous, thrilling feel of these tales.