Most Popular Books by Annie Ernaux

WINNER OF THE 2022 NOBEL PRIZE IN LITERATURE One of the New York Times’s 100 Best Books of the 21st Century Shortlisted for the 2019 Man Booker International Prize Considered by many to be the iconic French memoirist''s defining work and a breakout bestseller when published in France in 2008 The Years is a personal narrative of the period 1941 to 2006 told through the lens of memory, impressions past and present—even projections into the future—photos, books, songs, radio, television and decades of advertising, headlines, contrasted with intimate conflicts and writing notes from 6 decades of diaries. Local dialect, words of the times, slogans, brands and names for the ever-proliferating objects, are given voice here. The voice we recognize as the author''s continually dissolves and re-emerges. Ernaux makes the passage of time palpable. Time itself, inexorable, narrates its own course, consigning all other narrators to anonymity. A new kind of autobiography emerges, at once subjective and impersonal, private and collective. On its 2008 publication in France, The Years came as a surprise. Though Ernaux had for years been hailed as a beloved, bestselling and award-winning author, The Years was in many ways a departure: both an intimate memoir "written" by entire generations, and a story of generations telling a very personal story. Like the generation before hers, the narrator eschews the "I" for the "we" (or "they", or "one") as if collective life were inextricably intertwined with a private life that in her parents'' generation ceased to exist. She writes of her parents'' generation (and could be writing of her own book): "From a common fund of hunger and fear, everything was told in the "we" and impersonal pronouns." Co-winner of the 2018 French-American Foundation Translation Prize in Nonfiction Winner of the 2017 Marguerite Yourcenar Prize for her entire body of work Winner of the 2016 Strega European Prize

WINNER OF THE 2022 NOBEL PRIZE IN LITERATURE A New York Times Notable Book In her spare, stark style, Annie Ernaux documents the desires and indignities of a human heart ensnared in an all-consuming passion. Blurring the line between fact and fiction, an unnamed narrator attempts to plot the emotional and physical course of her 2 year relationship with a married foreigner where every word, event, and person either provides a connection with her beloved or is subject to her cold indifference. With courage and exactitude, she seeks the truth behind an existence lived entirely for someone else, and, in the pieces of its aftermath, she is able to find it.

WINNER OF THE 2022 NOBEL PRIZE IN LITERATURE A New York Times Notable Book "A deeply affecting account of mothers and daughters, youth and age, and dreams and reality" (Kirkus Reviews) Upon her mother’s death from Alzheimer’s, Ernaux embarks on a daunting journey back through time, as she seeks to "capture the real woman, the one who existed independently from me, born on the outskirts of a small Normandy town, and who died in the geriatric ward of a hospital in the suburbs of Paris." She explores the bond between mother and daughter, tenuous and unshakable at once, the alienating worlds that separate them, and the inescapable truth that we must lose the ones we love. In this quietly powerful tribute, Ernaux attempts to do her mother the greatest justice she can: to portray her as the individual she was. She writes, "I believe I am writing about my mother because it is my turn to bring her into the world."

Originally published in 1977, Do What They Say or Else is the second novel by French author Annie Ernaux. Set in a small town in Normandy, France, the novel tells the story of a fifteen-year-old girl named Anne, who lives with her working-class parents. The story, which takes place during the summer and fall of Anne’s transition from middle school to high school, is narrated in a stream-of-consciousness style from her point of view. Ernaux captures Anne’s adolescent voice, through which she expresses her keen observations in a highly colloquial style. As the novel progresses, and Anne’s feelings about her parents, her education, and her sexual encounters evolve, she grows into a more mature but also more conflicted and unhappy character, leaving behind the innocence of her middle school years. Not only must she navigate the often-confusing signals she receives from boys, but she also finds herself moving further and further away from her parents as she surpasses their educational level and worldview.

WINNER OF THE 2022 NOBEL PRIZE IN LITERATURE Taking the form of random journal entries over seven years, Exteriors captures the feeling of contemporary living on the outskirts of Paris. Poignantly lyrical, chaotic, and strangely alive.

WINNER OF THE 2022 NOBEL PRIZE IN LITERATURE A New York Times Notable Book Annie Ernaux''s father died exactly two months after she passed her practical examination for a teaching certificate. Barely educated and valued since childhood strictly for his labor, Ernaux''s father had grown into a hard, practical man who showed his family little affection. Narrating his slow ascent towards material comfort, Ernaux''s cold observation reveals the shame that haunted her father throughout his life. She scrutinizes the importance he attributed to manners and language that came so unnaturally to him as he struggled to provide for his family with a grocery store and cafe in rural France. Over the course of the book, Ernaux grows up to become the uncompromising observer now familiar to the world, while her father matures into old age with a staid appreciation for life as it is and for a daughter he cautiously, even reluctantly admires. A Man''s Place is the companion book to her critically acclaimed memoir about her mother, A Woman''s Story.

“Annie Ernaux’s work,” wrote Richard Bernstein in the New York Times, “represents a severely pared-down Proustianism, a testament to the persistent, haunting and melancholy quality of memory.” In the New York Times Book Review, Kathryn Harrison concurred: “Keen language and unwavering focus allow her to penetrate deep, to reveal pulses of love, desire, remorse.” In this “journal” Ernaux turns her penetrating focus on those points in life where the everyday and the extraordinary intersect, where “things seen” reflect a private life meeting the larger world. From the war crimes tribunal in Bosnia to social issues such as poverty and AIDS; from the state of Iraq to the world’s contrasting reactions to Princess Diana’s death and the starkly brutal political murders that occurred at the same time; from a tear-gas attack on the subway to minute interactions with a clerk in a store: Ernaux’s thought-provoking observations map the world’s fleeting and lasting impressions on the shape of inner life.

WINNER OF THE 2022 NOBEL PRIZE IN LITERATURE "Happening recounts what it was like to be a young woman whose life changed — and world ominously narrowed — in 1963 with an unwanted pregnancy. . . . It feels urgently of the moment." --The New York Times In 1963, Annie Ernaux, 23 and unattached, realizes she is pregnant. Shame arises in her like a plague: Understanding that her pregnancy will mark her and her family as social failures, she knows she cannot keep that child. This is the story, written forty years later, of a trauma Ernaux never overcame. In a France where abortion was illegal, she attempted, in vain, to self-administer the abortion with a knitting needle. Fearful and desperate, she finally located an abortionist, and ends up in a hospital emergency ward where she nearly dies. In Happening, Ernaux sifts through her memories and her journal entries dating from those days. Clearly, cleanly, she gleans the meanings of her experience. Now an award-winning film by Audrey Diwan Winner of the Golden Lion at the Venice International Film Festival Official Selection of the Sundance Film Festival

WINNER OF THE 2022 NOBEL PRIZE IN LITERATURE Annie Ernaux''s most recent book, dazzling and breathtaking, published in France in 2022, is about her affair with a man 30 years her junior. “A sublime book.” —Olivia de Lamberterie, Elle “Once again the work of the writer Annie Ernaux appears as both a rigorous study of life and an experiment. These fragments of living, however evanescent, are precious, irreplaceable, like a skin that never fades.” —Caroline Montpetit in Le Devoir The Young Man is Annie Ernaux’s account of her passionate love affair with A., a man some 30 years younger, when she was in her fifties. The relationship pulls her back to memories of her own youth and at the same time leaves her feeling ageless, outside of time— together with a sense that she is living her life backwards. Amidst talk of having a child together, she feels time running its course, and menopause approaching. The Young Man recalls Ernaux as the “scandalous girl” she once was, but is composed with the mastery and the self-assurance she has achieved across decades of writing. It was first published in France in 2022.

WINNER OF THE 2022 NOBEL PRIZE IN LITERATURE "My father tried to kill my mother one Sunday in June, in the early afternoon," begins Shame, the probing story of the twelve-year-old girl who will become the author herself, and the single traumatic memory that will echo and resonate throughout her life. With the emotionally rich voice of great fiction and the diamond-sharp analytical eye of a scientist, Annie Ernaux provides a powerful reflection on experience and the power of violent memory to endure through time, to determine the course of a life.

WINNER OF THE 2022 NOBEL PRIZE IN LITERATURE An extraordinary evocation of a grown daughter’s attachment to her mother, and of both women’s strength and resiliency. I Remain in Darkness recounts Annie’s attempts first to help her mother recover from Alzheimer’s disease, and then, when that proves futile, to bear witness to the older woman’s gradual decline and her own experience as a daughter losing a beloved parent. I Remain in Darkness is a new high water mark for Ernaux, surging with raw emotional power and her sublime ability to use language to apprehend her own life’s particular music. A Washington Post Top Memoir of 1999

WINNER OF THE 2022 NOBEL PRIZE IN LITERATURE A Frozen Woman charts Ernaux''s teenage awakening, and then the parallel progression of her desire to be desirable and her ambition to fulfill herself in her chosen profession - with the inevitable conflict between the two. And then she is 30 years old, a teacher married to an executive, mother of two infant sons. She looks after their nice apartment, raises her children. And yet, like millions of other women, she has felt her enthusiasm and curiosity, her strength and her happiness, slowly ebb under the weight of her daily routine. The very condition that everyone around her seems to consider normal and admirable for a woman is killing her. While each of Ernaux''s books contain an autobiographical element, A Frozen Woman, one of Ernaux''s early works, concentrates the spotlight piercingly on Annie herself. Mixing affection, rage and bitterness, A Frozen Woman shows us Ernaux''s developing art when she still relied on traditional narrative, before the shortened form emerged that has since become her trademark.

Rčit remarqu ̌par la critique. L''ombre du pr̈e et la gens̈e d''un remord, celui d''une intellectuelle d''origine modeste devenue "bourgeoise". Prix Renaudot 1984. [SDM].

WINNER OF THE 2022 NOBEL PRIZE IN LITERATURE The diary of one of France’s most important, award-winning writers during the year she had a passionate and secret love affair with a Russian diplomat Getting Lost is the diary Annie Ernaux kept during the year and a half she had a secret love affair with a younger, married man, a Russian diplomat. Her novel, Simple Passion, was based on this affair, but here her writing is immediate, unfiltered. In these diaries it is 1989 and Annie is divorced with two grown sons, living outside of Paris and nearing fifty. Her lover escapes the city to see her there and Ernaux seems to survive only in expectation of these encounters, saying “his desire for me is the only thing I can be sure of.” She cannot write, she trudges distractedly through her various other commitments in the world, she awaits his next call; she lives only to feel desire and for the next rendezvous. When he is gone and the desire has faded, she feels that she is a step closer to death. Lauded for her spare prose, Ernaux here removes all artifice, her writing pared down to its most naked and vulnerable. Getting Lost is as strong a book as any that she has written, a haunting, desperate view of strong and successful woman who seduces a man only to lose herself in love and desire.

A revelatory meditation on class and consumer culture, from 2022 Nobel laureate Annie Ernaux "A dryly charming look at the way the French live now, through the sharp eyes of its most acclaimed chronicler."--Kirkus Reviews For half a century, the French writer Annie Ernaux has transgressed the boundaries of what stories are considered worth telling, what subjects worth exploring. In this probing meditation, Ernaux turns her attention to the phenomenon of the big-box superstore, a ubiquitous feature of modern life that has received scant attention in literature. Recording her visits to a store near Paris for over a year, she captures the world that exists within its massive walls. Through Ernaux''s eyes, the superstore emerges as "a great human meeting place, a spectacle"--a flashy, technologically advanced incarnation of the ancient marketplace where capitalism, cultural production, and class converge, dictating our rhythms of desire. With her relentless powers of observation, Ernaux takes the measure of a place we thought we knew, calling us to question the experiences we overlook and to gaze more deeply into ordinary life.

Published for the first time in a beautiful collectible edition, the essential lecture delivered by the 2022 recipient of the Nobel Prize in Literature, Annie Ernaux. «J’écrirai por venger ma race» It was as a young woman that Annie Ernaux first wrote these words in her diary, giving a name to her purpose in life as a writer. She returns to them in her stirring defense of literature and of political writing in her Nobel Lecture, delivered in Stockholm on December 7, 2022. To write of her own life, she asserts, is to “shatter the loneliness of experiences endured and repressed;” to mine individual experience is to find collective emancipation. Ernaux’s speech is a bold assertion of the capacity of writing to give people a sense of their own worth, and of one writer’s commitment to bearing witness to life, its joys and its injustices. Includes Annie Ernaux''s Nobel lecture, her Nobel banquet speech, a congratulatory speech by Professor Anders Olsson, Chair of the Nobel Committee for Literature, and the Nobel opening address by Professor Carl-Henrik Heldin, Chairman of the board of the Nobel Foundation.

Cleaned Out tells the story of Denise Lesur, a 20-year-old woman suffering the after-effects of a back-alley abortion. Alone in her college dorm room, Denise attempts to understand how her suffocating middle-class upbringing has brought her to such an awful present. Ernaux, one of France''s most important contemporary writers, daringly breaks with formal French literary tradition in this moving novel about abortion, growing up, and coming to terms with one''s childhood.

WINNER OF THE 2022 NOBEL PRIZE IN LITERATURE Another masterpiece of remembering from Annie Ernaux, the Man Booker International Prize–shortlisted author of The Years. In A Girl’s Story, Annie Ernaux revisits the season 50 years earlier when she found herself overpowered by another’s will and desire. In the summer of 1958, 18-year-old Ernaux submits her will to a man’s, and then he moves on, leaving her without a “master,” bereft. Now, 50 years later, she realizes she can obliterate the intervening years and return to consider this young woman that she wanted to forget completely. And to discover that here, submerged in shame, humiliation, and betrayal, but also in self-discovery and self-reliance, lies the origin of her writing life.

WINNER OF THE 2022 NOBEL PRIZE IN LITERATURE Self-regard, in the works of Annie Ernaux, is always an excruciatingly painful and exact process. Here, she revisits the peculiar kind of self-fulfillment possible when we examine ourselves in the aftermath of a love affair, and sometimes, even, through the eyes of the lost beloved.

Un Don Juan à éclipses, venu de l''Est, fait souffrir une nouvelle Bovary. Sur le thème de l''attente amoureuse, un roman sentimental de type "Harlequin", investi, avec une autorité sobre, par une intellectuelle. La critique est partagée. J.-F. Josselin, du ##Nouvel Observateur##, dit que ce petit livre est "aussi charmant qu''inutile."

La Place looks at a daughter’s relationship with her father. In a fragmented and retrospective way the narrator describes her feelings of separation and betrayal that arise when education and marriage place her in a social class with different values, language, tastes and behaviour. She explores the ways in which individual experience is related to class and group attitudes and at the same time tells us a great deal about French society in general since the turn of the century. It is a concentrated text, cut through with irony and may be read in different ways. La Place will be an accessible and exciting addition to French studies courses.

Relisant ces pages, je m''aperçois que j''ai déjà oublié beaucoup de scènes et de faits. Il me semble même que ce n''est pas moi qui les ai transcrits. Ce sont comme des traces de temps et d''histoire, des fragments du texte que nous écrivons tous rien qu''en vivant. Pourtant, je sais aussi que dans les notations de cette vie extérieure, plus que dans un journal intime, se dessinent ma propre histoire et les figures de ma ressemblance.

Parce qu''elle a vu ce qu''il ne fallait pas voir, une petite fille de douze ans a "honte". Un récit, quasi entomologique en son analyse, incisif et précis, qui dérange de vérité et provoque l''empathie. SDM.

J''avais quitté W. Quelques mois après, il m''a annoncé qu''il allait vivre avec une femme, dont il a refusé de me dire le nom. A partir de ce moment, je suis tombée dans la jalousie. L''image et l''existence de l''autre femme n''ont cessé de m''obséder, comme si elle était entrée en moi. C''est cette occupation que je décris. A. E.

Analyse : Roman psychologique (intime). Roman personnel.

WINNER OF THE 2022 NOBEL PRIZE IN LITERATURE **Serialized in The New Yorker** An account of Annie Ernaux’s love affair with journalist Marc Marie while she was undergoing treatment for cancer, and their combined project to document images and memories. Includes 14 color still-life photographs by the authors. A LitHub Most Anticipated Book of 2024 “A must-read for lovers of words, images, and Ernaux herself. So. . . everyone?”—Jessie Gaynor, LitHub “Annie Ernaux has long foregrounded physical and emotional sensations as the building blocks of her autobiographical writing. However, it is in The Use of Photography where the connection between the body and subjectivity most powerfully emerges.”—Lisa Connell in French Forum “These photos, in which the bodies are absent, and the eroticism is only represented by the abandoned clothes, were a reminder of my possible, permanent absence.”—Annie Ernaux Annie Ernaux and Marc Marie met in January 2003 and became lovers almost immediately. A short time later, he accompanied her to the Institut Curie, where she was having surgery for breast cancer. A deep bond formed between Annie and Marc precisely during this time of great uncertainty within Ernaux as to whether she would live or die from the cancer. Early in their affair, Ernaux found herself entranced each morning by the sight of clothes strewn about, chairs out of place, and the remains of their last meal of the evening before still on the table. The two lovers began to take still life photographs, and to write. Their efforts to save the fleeting beauty of these moments were, as Ernaux would describe later in an interview, “material proof of what had happened there, of love.” The Use of Photography is a defining work in Ernaux’s career, leading directly to the book that would come next, her masterpiece, The Years. “Annie Ernaux’s work presents a breathtakingly frank, fearless, many-sided account of the female experience during the past century.”—Liesl Schillinger, Oprah Daily

Thirteen books written by 2022 Nobel Laureate Annie Ernaux published by Seven Stories Press. "The harrowing beauty and brevity of these books and their apparent simplicity disguise somewhat the punishing cost of their honesty." --Rachel Cusk, New York Times Magazine Winner of the 2022 Nobel Prize in Literature, Annie Ernaux is considered one of Europe''s most important contemporary writers. She has expanded the very meaning of literature and has asserted her feminism and class consciousness in the stories she tells. Spanning Annie Ernaux''s English language oeuvre from 1991-2023, this collection of all thirteen titles published by Seven Stories attests to Ernaux''s range, depth, and enduring literary presence. Includes translations by Linda Coverdale, Tanya Leslie, Anna Moschovakis, and Alison L. Strayer. Annie Ernaux: The Boxed Set includes: - The Years - Getting Lost - Simple Passion - A Girl''s Story - Happening - Shame - A Man''s Place - A Woman''s Story - A Frozen Woman - I Remain in Darkness - Exteriors - The Possession - The Young Man

Published in book form for the first time, Annie Ernaux''s Nobel Lecture, delivered in Stockholm in December 2022, translated by Alison L. Strayer.

Aux premières lignes, la narratrice annonce, avec le moins d''effet possible, la mort de sa mère. Suit, quelques pages plus loin, le projet de l''écrivain : " chercher une vérité sur ma mère qui ne peut être atteinte que par des mots ". Le récit se déroule alors comme un flash-back où la mère d''Annie Ernaux est tour à tour la quatrième enfant de ses propres parents, une jeune mariée heureuse et fière, une commerçante, une vieille femme bientôt touchée par la maladie d''Alzheimer. Une expérience intime dans laquelle le lecteur se glisse sans peine. L''accompagnement critique met en place la poétique d''Annie Ernaux et en interroge la formule: " rester au-dessous de la littérature ". Une interview exclusive donne accès à la genèse d''Une femme, éclaire le statut du " je " dans le livre et met l''accent sur l''intertextualité. Une page du manuscrit montre la progression de l''écriture, la rature, l''effacement, le choix. Un groupement de textes (Rousseau, Stendhal, Sarraute) permet de travailler sur les différentes formes du biographique. Roman (XXe siècle) recommandé pour les classes de lycée. Texte intégral. Objet d''étude: le roman autobiographique.

WINNER OF THE 2022 NOBEL PRIZE IN LITERATURE For fans new to Annie Ernaux and longtime readers, this collection of interviews, writing by critics and journalists, with diary excerpts and unpublished texts by Ernaux herself, also includes visual material like drawings, photos, and newspaper clippings. Magisterial in scope and size, Writing, The Other Life was compiled and edited by Pierre-Louis Fort and was first published in France by Éditions de L''Herne in 2022, a few months before she received the Nobel Prize in Literature. The anthology includes twenty-four previously unpublished Ernaux pieces, as well as literary criticism, essays, interviews, diary entries, e song by Jeanne Cherhal, newspaper clippings, a comic strip by Aurélia Aurita, letters from Simone de Beauvoir. Never before published in English, this beautifully visual collection includes an 8-page color photo insert with images, handwritten manuscript pages, and drawings sprinkled throughout. It is the fruit of collaboration between six celebrated translators and a groundbreaking work of scholarship and rumination.