Most Popular Books by Marie-Claire Blais

In her third and most powerful novel, Marie-Claire Blais explores, with sober compassion and realistic detail, a season in the life of Emmanuel, the sixteenth child of a poverty-stricken farmer''s family in rural Quebec. First published in 1965, "A Season in the Life of Emmanuel" established Blais''s international reputation when it won the Prix France-Quebec and the Prix Medicis of France. The novel has been translated into 13 languages.

A group of imaginary beings perform every night at the Saloon, welcoming the outsiders of society and giving them a place to belong in this new novel from the award-winning and internationally renowned author of La Belle Bête (Mad Shadows). Original.

Originally published in French under the title Soifs, critics around the world called this book a tour de force, comparing Blais with Virginia Woolf, Dante, Sophocles, and Shakespeare. This swirling, baroque fresco captures the mood of our apocalyptic age, rendering it in powerfully evocative prose.

Eight lesbian women strive to achieve an all-female utopia within which homophobia and their own pasts and differences are abolished.

What anxiety grips Petites Cendres as he runs towards the sea in the sunshine on a warm tropical morning? Shouldn’t he be reassured by the thought that he now lives at the Acacia Gardens, a comfortable home where all find care, understanding, and healing? How can Fleur, the young musical prodigy, listen to the diabolical confessions of Wrath, the fugitive priest, without shuddering? And, can Daniel the writer finish his novel, the one he has been working on for twenty years, despite his sensitivity and empathy for all creatures, even if they are the most humble, like the lizard he inadvertently crushed under his sandal? With this latest novel, Marie-Claire Blais once again gives us a vibrant portrait that embraces the span of life — from birth to death and beyond. Her characters question their purpose and what will come after, as they are confronted by evil that lives and that has taken root.

With this astounding fourth novel in her ongoing series of contemporary masterpieces, Marie-Claire Blais invites us again to enter a complex circle of unforgettable characters. But this time, the tone is different: Blais’ writing has acquired a new, buoyant, electrifying rhythm — a rhythm described as "the heartbeat of the world." As we follow a central character named Rebecca, the voice in the novel becomes the voice of the world inventing itself, and the future playing itself out. Here Nigel Spencer, Marie-Claire Blais’ longtime translator, gives us Blais’ singular vision in supple English prose that is as transcendent and nuanced as the original French.

The latest work in internationally acclaimed author Marie-Claire Blais’s masterful novel cycle, A Twilight Celebration examines the prophetic side of the writer and the burden that falls to him in a world whose fate is yet to be determined. Daniel, a middle-aged novelist and loving father alienated from one of his sons and unsure how to care for his daughter, is on his way to an international conference of writers. The gathering is to be held in the forest above a mountain village of a strangely dreamlike nature. In the twilight of the festival’s setting, dreams, memories, nightmares, and dark forebodings meld in Daniel’s unsettled but deeply sympathetic consciousness: He is haunted by pressing existential questions: What is to be done? What are his responsibilities as a father, as a friend — and as a writer? As Daniel confronts his own vanities, as he recalls the activism but also the disappointments and betrayals of friends and colleagues — as he contends with, above all, the fears and aspirations of his children in times marred by apocalypse, he asks, ultimately, what can be done? In what may well be the most beautiful and disturbing of her novels, Marie-Claire Blais leads us on a heady, spellbinding journey through an interconnected world in which the artist strives to divert humankind’s headlong rush towards a terrible destiny. Here is a world in which friends and strangers, the living, the dead and those not yet born, are inextricably bonded by their often flawed but always splendid humanity. Yet again, Blais captivates with her urgent concerns, irrepressible empathy, and singular idiom: A Twilight Celebration is an astonishing literary accomplishment.

In the latest installment in her award-winning series, Marie-Claire Blais reintroduces us to Petites Cendres, familiar from other books in the cycle, and lets us into the lives of two other unforgettable characters. She shows us, once again, how creativity and hope and suffering and exclusion intersect. There is the writer who is stranded in an airport of the South Island, he is held captive because of a delayed flight. And a teenage musician, a former child prodigy living on the streets with his dog, wonders where he will get his next meal. Then there is Petites Cendres, who no longer dances or sings and refuses to get out of bed to attend the coronation of the new Queen of Night. By superimposing these three worlds, Blais continues her ambitious, compelling exploration of life in contemporary North America

The second volume in the beloved novelist Marie-Claire Blais’s prize-winning novel cycle — acclaimed as one of the greatest undertakings in modern Quebec fiction — reissued in a handsome A List edition. Originally published in 2001, Thunder and Light is the second volume in Marie-Claire Blais’s prize-winning Soifs series, hailed as one of the greatest undertakings in modern Quebec fiction. Powered by its characters’ gripping exploration of the world’s dark corners, the novel is a teeming microcosm in which boundaries collapse and the extremes and contradictions that animate our times are reconciled. Blais locks us directly into the consciousness of her characters, many of whom we met in her previous novel, These Festive Nights, and many that she derives from actual news stories: Jessica, a seven-year-old attempting to beat the world record as the youngest pilot to cross the continent; Nathanaël, a teenager on death row for killing his favourite teacher; Our Lady of the Bags, a modern-day Joan of Arc who lives among Manhattan’s skyscrapers and follows the voices in her head; and Caroline and Jean-Mathieu, aging artists who are fighting to come together again. One character’s thoughts or actions have consequences for another 3,000 miles away who is a complete stranger to the first. This is an intricate house of cards, delicately but expertly constructed, that shocks us in its perversity and familiarity, ultimately finding hope and redemption in the most human and basic forms of art.

In Augustino and the Choir of Destrucion literary legend and three-time winner of the Governor General''s Literary Award Marie-Claire Blais delivers the third volume in the prize-winning series (These Festive Nights, Thunder and Light, Augustino and the Choir of Destruction, and Rebecca, Born in the Maelstrom) acclaimed as one of the greatest undertakings in modern Quebec fiction. Augustino and the Choir of Destruction is set on an island in the Gulf of Mexico that is home to the full spectrum of humanity: the rich, the poor, the powerful, the humble, artists, criminals. With her unique, signature use of punctuation, Marie-Claire Blais manages to brilliantly show in one flashing stroke men and women; victims and tormentors; child kamikaze pilots and petty thieves from Bahama Street; Charles, a great poet cut down by AIDS; Cinderella, a transvestite prostituting himself to a customer at the Porte du Baiser saloon; Caroline, an artist and photographer who has seen all the hidden treasures of the world; and Augustino, a clairvoyant child-writer. These individual destinies combine in Blais'' vision to form a single harmonic texture.

A harrowing pathology of the soul, "Mad Shadows" centres on a family group: Patrice, the beautiful and narcissistic son; his ugly and malicious sister, Isabelle-Marie; and Louise, their vain and uncomprehending mother. These characters inhabit an amoral universe where beauty reflects no truth and love is an empty delusion. Each character is ultimately annihilated by their own obsessions. Acclaimed and reviled when it exploded on the Quebec literary scene in 1959, "Mad Shadows" initiated a new era in Quebec fiction.

This compelling story explores the motley crew of characters--including mother-turned-stripper Gloria, alcoholic Tim, frequent jailbird Charlie, and the suicidal wife of a rich doctor--who call the rundown Hôtel des Voyageurs home. Mesmerizing in its passion and humility, the narrative evokes the despair and innocence present in modern urban surroundings.

The ninth novel in internationally acclaimed author Marie-Claire Blais’s extraordinary Soifs cycle, Songs for Angel is an impassioned interrogation of violence and hate that takes us into the soul of a white supremacist on the verge of a racist attack. In the penultimate installment of the magnificent and ambitious Soifs cycle, widely regarded as one of the most original and ambitious endeavors ever to be undertaken in contemporary literature, renowned novelist Marie-Claire Blais once again marries the highest artistic standards with the most pressing human and political concerns. Revisiting figures from the previous novels in a swirling fresco of more than a hundred characters, Blais also takes us into the soul of “the Young Man,” a white supremacist preparing to attack a Black church and murder its entire congregation. This is an extraordinary portrait of the times that jostles and discomboluates the reader while inviting us to see the world in all its injustice and distress, but also its promise and beauty. Songs for Angel reminds us that Blais is a writer who never ceases to situate us in the world and the roles we play in it, and that reading her is always an unforgettable human experience.

Portraits of the writers, musicians, artists and social activists who influenced the life and work of Blais in the 1960s.

Two school boys plot and enact the murder of a classmate. Cast of 3 women and 17 men.

Exploring contemporary life and the penetrating energy of youth, this novel follows Anna, an introspective, alienated teenager without hope. Anna and her friend Michelle have experienced what life today has to offer--they have experimented with drugs and sex and have taken dance and music lessons in an attempt to find some meaning in their existence--and yet they have rejected its premise and instead remain alone and empty. Chilling and often terrifying, this chronicle portrays two young women who are not bored but are instead without hope of finding peace or even living long enough to begin the search.

Night after night through the winter, in a club called The Underground, Genevieve and her friends live out their loves and their tragedies, apart from the day-to-day life of the city. Genevieve is a sculptor. Her idealistic love for a doctor cannot be returned but then she meets a new lover to whom she is able to give a new optimism and will to live. Genevieve, her lover, and her friends emerge from the dark winter into the spring sunshine. This novel, a best seller in its French edition, is rich in character and emotion. The quiet melancholy of Genevieve''s story is set against the lively, racy humor of her friends. The book has a vitality and optimism that will delight admirers of Marie-Claire Blais and bring her a wide new audience.--Adapted from back cover.

Wintersleep (Sommeil d''hiver) is a collection of five short plays by internationally acclaimed Quebecois author, Marie-Claire Blais. Appearing for the first time in an English translation, these plays allow anglophones to appreciate Marie-Claire Blais'' range as a dramatist. The plays are known to francophones in their original publication by Les editions de la pleine lune; four of the plays have also been broadcast in French on the F.M. network of Radio Canada.The works themselves are written in the form of chamber plays with the addition of elements from the ballet and recitative. Three of the plays are for two voices, one has three voices, and the other is written for 13 characters with additional voices. The plays can be produced on radio, T.V. or on stage, in each case with varying effects. Nigel Spencer''s translation recreates the disturbing yet lyrical, ethereal yet gritty, effect of Marie-Claire Blais''s evocative French prose.Written with great prescience in the late ''70s and early ''80s, the plays have gained a sharp new resonance in the ''90s. They present a shattered psychic landscape, yet one that is not lacking in hope nor in the daring and balance they demand of author, actor and director alike.

A novel of Pauline Archange''s desire to translate the events of her life into words.

The two novellas contained in this collection represent some of Marie-Claire Blais''s finest and most lyrical prose. The Day is Dark invites us into a dreamlike world of shadowy landscapes peopled with complex, obsessive characters. It is a story about death as it comes to a family of young people and illuminates oppositions of darkness to daylight, life to death, love to betrayal and hope to despair. The Three Travellers is a beautiful and lyrical story about the profound relationship of life to art. It is a classic love triangle -- the reader enter the inner world of a playwright and his sculptress wife who are both enchanted with a brilliant pianist. This publication in Penguin Short Fiction marks the first English paperback appearance of these two novellas by the award-winning French Canadian writer.

Pauline tells her personal story of growing up through paradoxes and insights that blend social, religious, and moral textures. Her world is populated by people who turn to violence or sink into quiet despair--it is a world damned. Pauline, her family, schoolmates, teachers, and friends are driven by tempestuous individual imperatives and the social deprivation they encounter. Full of satire, fantasy, energy, and lyricism, this chronicle portrays a reality that neither poetry, nor dreams, nor Pauline''s fantasies can weaken.

In this collection of nine short stories and the powerful novella "The Sacred Travellers," Marie-Claire Blais offers an exploration of the major themes of her work: the pain of desire, the fragility and vulnerability of the human spirit, the quest for purity and generosity, and the pitiless search for truth. The characters in this new collection are all exiles, all fighting to inhabit new beings. Yet the exile explored by Marie-Claire Blais is far more than a matter of circumstance; it is the metaphysical exile of humans wandering the face of the earth, looking for a place, a self, to call their own. Many of Blais'' characters have passed through the 1960s, and are now refracting life in ways unexpected and unrecognizable, as increasing awareness compensates for diminishing powers. Neither nostalgic nor bitter, these travellers see their victories and defeats as something far more personal and intimate than they would have thought possible in the ''60s of their youth, a youth that stands as a parallel to the paradise, real or imagined, that has been lost. Marie-Claire Blais'' hauntingly beautiful French has been translated by Nigel Spencer into English that is at once straightforward, supple and lucid.

René suddenly feels like an old man. Recovering at home after an illness, his mind will not leave the past. He is both comforted and annoyed by the officious care provided by his Russian nurse, who keeps referring to him as a woman. It is a lifetime struggle. Right now, René just wants to get out of his pajamas and dress elegantly, as in the old days of playing piano in cabarets. A friend—or lover—will surely visit? And they do. René is soon surrounded. By the writer Johnie, the musician Doudouline, the theologian Polydor, the painter l’Abeille, and Gérard, who was lost but never forgotten. They support each other, offering shelter from the snowy world outside. They reminisce about past loves, tragedies, fights. The Stonewall riots. The AIDS epidemic where they lost so much. The Women’s March on Washington. They steel themselves to take on the monster of bigotry and intolerance whenever it rears its ugly head, as it always does, again and again. Most of all, they find comfort and hope in each other’s presence and in the continuing struggle to assert our own identities, to love how we wish, and to not be defined by what society expects. An icon of queer literature, Marie-Claire Blais’s characters bring to life pivotal moments in the fight for queer rights.

Anne Claire Poirier, filmmaker extraordinaire, lost her daughter to heroin. Yanne, aged twenty-six, was strangled. In this haunting text, Poirier unearths her daughter''s past in an effort to understand her, and to understand what pushes young people to risk their lives for the drugs they believe will set them free. This text was read during the film called Let Me Go! (National Film Board).