Best Selling Books by Frederick Exley

This fictional memoir, the first of an autobiographical trilogy, traces a self professed failure''s nightmarish decent into the underside of American life and his resurrection to the wisdom that emerges from despair.

The death of Edmund Wilson precipitates an odyssey through the distorted literary landscape of America in search of Wilson''s essence as the pre-eminent man of letters and the author''s own creative wellsprings

"Of his generation''s metafictioneers, Fred Exley has created the richest and most American body of work .... LAST NOTES tells tales about corruption, confession, and the often terrible beauty of the bonds of love." - VILLAGE VOICE Frederick Exley, the splenetic and prodigiously self-destructive narrator and protagonist of A FAN''S NOTES and PAGES FROM A COLD ISLAND, is alive, if not exactly well. In this exhilarating, scalding new novel, Ex recounts his death watch for his older brother, his imprisonment by a nightmarish Irishman, and his sexual enthrallment to a beautiful flight attendant whose lies are even more inventive than his own. Searching compulsively for love and inevitably betraying it, lashing out at the country in which he is perpetually an alien, Exley remains one of the most riveting characters- and mesmerizing writers - in contemporary American fiction. "[Exley] can weave a number of seemingly unrelated incidents into a single, allusive narrative leading to an unexpected, usually prickly epiphany. His books seem like the loquacious meanderings of one of the more literary and entertainingly cynical, if often terrifyingly frank, guys one might meet in a neighborhood bar.... They reveal themselves as structurally complex, thoroughly imagined, consummate works of art." -BOSTON GLOBE

Avec mordant et poigne, Exley décrit les profonds échecs de sa vie professionnelle, sociale et sexuelle. Ses tentatives pour trouver sa place dans un monde inflexible le mènent aux quatre coins du pays, mais surtout à l''hôpital psychiatrique d''Avalon Valley. Au gré des bars, des boulots et des rencontres improbables, l''obsession d''Exley pour la gloire, les New York Giants et leur joueur star, Frank Gifford, grandit. Dans ses mémoires fictifs, en plongeant la tête la première dans ce « long malaise » qu''est sa vie, Frederick Exley transforme la dérive alcoolisée d''un marginal en une épopée renversante. Chargé en grande partie de ce qu''il appelle « des fardeaux du chagrin » et de catastrophes ordinaires, ce premier roman est un époustouflant voyage littéraire. C''est hilarant. C''est touchant. C''est à la fois Nabokov et Bukowski et Richard Yates et Thomas Bernhard.

Désarçonné par l’échec commercial de l’œuvre de sa vie, Exley perd magistralement tout contrôle et consigne dans ce vrai-faux journal de bord, cru et sans fioriture, son inextinguible faim de gloire et de littérature. Ce livre n’est pas la suite du Dernier Stade de la soif. C’est un instantané des États-Unis des années 1970, écrit pendant sept ans, traversé de dérives, de deuils et de transgressions. C’est la tentative, ambitieuse et désespérée, d’un écrivain pour se soustraire à ce qu’il nommait le « chagrin universel ». Frederick Exley [1929-1992] est à la fois un écrivain unique et emblématique des lettres américaines. Unique, car il habitait un univers étrange et n’obéissait à aucune règle; emblématique car, en écrivain américain typique, sa légende s’est faite sur seulement trois livres.

"Amy Hamilton is a good girl. She always did exactly as society demanded, kept her eyes downcast, never spoke out of turn, and hid the myriad of questions swirling in her brain. In return for shutting off her intellect she landed an abusive fiancé and was cast aside by the ton. Disgraced, she seeks refuge at the Lyons'' country estate. There she is given a bracelet made from a unicorn''s tail and told it contains enough magic to grant one wish. She knows what she wants, someone to love the true her, and not the shallow image that smiles back from the mirror"--Back cover