* Annie Ernaux - Nobel Prize in Literature, 2022 (16 books)

ANNIE ERNAUX (b. 1940) is one of France's most-garlanded authors and a prominent feminist voice.  Her intensely personal books have spoken to generations of women by highlighting incidents from her own life, including a back-street abortion in the 1960s and a passionate extramarital affair.  She was awarded the 2022 Nobel Prize in Literature "for the courage and clinical acuity with which she uncovers the roots, estrangements and collective restraints of personal memory."

Ernaux's books are small, simple, and rarely exceed a hundred pages.  The New Yorker wrote in 2020 that over the course of her career, "she has been devoted to a single task: the excavation of her own life."  In each, Ernaux is always asking how she can be sure that her memories are correct.  In A WOMAN'S STORY (1987), she talks about her mother's death.  Nearly a decade later, in I REMAIN IN DARKNESS (1997), she goes back to that moment and declares her recollection incomplete – she hadn't fully described her mother's long cognitive decline, the terrors of dementia.  Her books are whittled down to an intense core, not a confession but a kind of personal epistemology.  For Richard Bernstein, writing in the New York Times, her work "represents a severely pared-down Proustianism, a testament to the persistent, haunting and melancholy quality of memory."

Ernaux has charted her parents' social progression (A MAN'S PLACE, 1983; SHAME, 1997), her teenage years (DO WHAT THEY SAY OR ELSE, 1977), her marriage (A FROZEN WOMAN, 1981), her illegal abortion in 1963 (HAPPENING, 2000).  Her twin books SIMPLE PASSION (1991) – the story of her affair with a younger, married Soviet attaché in Paris in the months before and after the fall of the Berlin Wall, and her most recently published English translation, GETTING LOST (2001), the diary of that affair, are incendiary works which remind us how close we are in life to death – whether it be morally, physically, existentially.

Central to her work is an awareness that the most intimate moments of life – whether of grieving, classed shame, nascent sexuality, passion, illegal abortion, illness, or the perception of time – are always understood as shared by others, and governed by the circumstances in which they occur — that probing the personal will also involve investigating the historical.  When her monumental work of fiction-memoir, THE YEARS (2019), was shortlisted for the Man Booker International Prize, the judges called it a "genre-bending masterpiece" and said that "autobiography is given a new form, at once subjective and impersonal, private and collective."  The book covers six decades of social and personal history, and is considered by many to be her crowning achievement.


The following books are in ePUB format unless otherwise noted:

* A Frozen Woman (Four Walls / Seven Stories, 1995).  L. Coverdale, tr. –  ePUB + PDF
* A Girl's Story (Seven Stories, 2020).  A. L. Strayer, tr.
* A Man's Place (Seven Stories, 2012).  T. Leslie, tr.
* A Woman's Story (Seven Stories, 2003).  T. Leslie, tr.
* Cleaned Out (Dalkey Archive, 1990).  C. Sanders, tr. – PDF
* Do What They Say or Else (Nebraska, 2022). C. Beach & C. Noland, tr.
* Exteriors (Seven Stories, 1996).  T. Leslie, tr. – PDF
* Getting Lost (Seven Stories, 2022).  A. L. Strayer, tr.
* Happening (Seven Stories, 2001).  T. Leslie, tr.
* I Remain in Darkness (Seven Stories, 1999).  T. Leslie, tr.
* Positions (Quartet, 1991).  T. Leslie, tr. – PDF
* The Possession (Seven Stories, 2008).  A. Moschovakis, tr.
* Shame (Seven Stories, 1998).  T. Leslie, tr.
* Simple Passion (Seven Stories, 2003).  T. Leslie, tr.
* Things Seen (Nebraska, 2010).  J. Kaplansky, tr.
* The Years (Seven Stories, 2017).  A. L. Strayer, tr.


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