[]
Exteriors
  • Published: 18 January 2022
  • ISBN: 9781644210970
  • Imprint: Seven Stories Press
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 96
  • RRP: $24.00

Exteriors

Formats & editions
EBook
4 Jan 2011
Paperback
18 Jan 2022
Buy from…
Book Hero BookHub Mighty Ape Paper Plus The Nile The Warehouse Whitcoulls Unity Books Find Local Retailers

One of Annie Ernaux's most exciting and idiosyncratic works now in paperback for the first time.

WINNER OF THE NOBEL PRIZE IN LITERATURE 2022

Translated by Tanya Leslie

Taking the form of random journal entries over the course of seven years, Exteriors concentrates on the ephemeral encounters that take place just on the periphery of a person’s lived environment. Ernaux captures the feeling of contemporary living on the outskirts of Paris: poignantly lyrical, chaotic, and strangely alive. Exteriors is in many ways the most ecstatic of Ernaux’s books—the first in which she appears largely free of the haunting personal relationships she has written about so powerfully elsewhere, and the first in which she is able to leave the past behind her.
  • Published: 18 January 2022
  • ISBN: 9781644210970
  • Imprint: Seven Stories Press
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 96
  • RRP: $24.00
Categories:

About the authors

Annie Ernaux

Among the most influential and impactful writers in the world today, ANNIE ERNAUX was awarded the 2022 Nobel Prize in Literature. She has also won the Prix Renaudot for A Man's Place and both the Marguerite Yourcenar Prize and the Prix Formentor for her body of work. She was awarded the International Strega Prize, the French-American Translation Prize, and the Warwick Prize for Women in Translation for The Years, which was also shortlisted for the Man Booker International Prize. Her works include Cleaned Out, Do What They Say or Else, A Frozen Woman, A Man’s Place, A Woman’s Story, Simple Passion, Exteriors, Shame, “I Remain in Darkness,” Happening, Things Seen, Getting Lost, The Possession, The Use of Photography (with Marc Marie), The Years, The Other Girl, L’Atelier Noir, Retour à Yvetot, Look at the Lights, My Love, Le Vrai Lieu: Entretiens, A Girl’s Story, L’Ecriture comme un couteau, Hôtel Casanova and Other Brief Texts, The Young Man, and I Will Write to Avenge My People: The Nobel Lecture.
portrait photo of Annie Ernaux

Tanya Leslie

TANYA LESLIE was the first translator of Annie Ernaux into English and translated a number of her works, including A Woman’s Story (1991), A Man’s Place (1992), Simple Passion (1993), Shame (1998), I Remain in Darkness (1999) and Happening (2001).
TL

Praise for Exteriors

Praise for Exteriors:
"Exteriors is honest, genuine and skillfully executed." --Columbus Dispatch
"Ernaux's writings walk a tightrope between art and confession, immersing us in a territory bounded on one side by commitment and on the other by desire." --Newsday
"Journal du dehors (Exteriors) is the opposite of an intimate diary. It shows a woman observing, without scorn or pity, the world out of which she came. . . . It is the text of a writer for whom the text is, simultaneously, interiority and provocation." --Télérama
Praise for Annie Ernaux:
"The author of one of the most important oeuvres in French literature, Annie Ernaux's work is as powerful as it is devastating, as subtle as it is seething." --Édouard Louis, author of The End of Eddy
"Ernaux is an unusual memoirist: she distrusts her memory... Ernaux does not so much reveal the past - she does not pretend to have any authoritative access to it - as unpack it." --Madeleine Schwartz, New Yorker
"Meticulous catalogs of longing, humiliation, class anxiety and emotional distress, Ernaux's books are unsparing in detail, pitiless in tone. In contrast to those of so many of her confession-minded peers, her shock tactics feel principled, driven less by narcissism or the need for self-justification than by some loftier impulse: a desire to capture the past as it was, undistorted by faulty memories, moral judgments or decorative literary flourishes." --Emily Eakin, New York Times Book Review

Praise for Exteriors:
"Exteriors is honest, genuine and skillfully executed." --Columbus Dispatch
"Ernaux's writings walk a tightrope between art and confession, immersing us in a territory bounded on one side by commitment and on the other by desire." --Newsday
"Journal du dehors (Exteriors) is the opposite of an intimate diary. It shows a woman observing, without scorn or pity, the world out of which she came. . . . It is the text of a writer for whom the text is, simultaneously, interiority and provocation." --Télérama
Praise for Annie Ernaux:
"The author of one of the most important oeuvres in French literature, Annie Ernaux's work is as powerful as it is devastating, as subtle as it is seething." --Édouard Louis, author of The End of Eddy
"Ernaux is an unusual memoirist: she distrusts her memory... Ernaux does not so much reveal the past - she does not pretend to have any authoritative access to it - as unpack it." --Madeleine Schwartz, New Yorker
"Meticulous catalogs of longing, humiliation, class anxiety and emotional distress, Ernaux's books are unsparing in detail, pitiless in tone. In contrast to those of so many of her confession-minded peers, her shock tactics feel principled, driven less by narcissism or the need for self-justification than by some loftier impulse: a desire to capture the past as it was, undistorted by faulty memories, moral judgments or decorative literary flourishes." --Emily Eakin, New York Times Book Review

Praise for Exteriors:
"Exteriors is honest, genuine and skillfully executed." --Columbus Dispatch
"Ernaux's writings walk a tightrope between art and confession, immersing us in a territory bounded on one side by commitment and on the other by desire." --Newsday
"Journal du dehors (Exteriors) is the opposite of an intimate diary. It shows a woman observing, without scorn or pity, the world out of which she came. . . . It is the text of a writer for whom the text is, simultaneously, interiority and provocation." --Télérama
Praise for Annie Ernaux:
"The author of one of the most important oeuvres in French literature, Annie Ernaux's work is as powerful as it is devastating, as subtle as it is seething." --Édouard Louis, author of The End of Eddy
"Ernaux is an unusual memoirist: she distrusts her memory... Ernaux does not so much reveal the past - she does not pretend to have any authoritative access to it - as unpack it." --Madeleine Schwartz, New Yorker
"Meticulous catalogs of longing, humiliation, class anxiety and emotional distress, Ernaux's books are unsparing in detail, pitiless in tone. In contrast to those of so many of her confession-minded peers, her shock tactics feel principled, driven less by narcissism or the need for self-justification than by some loftier impulse: a desire to capture the past as it was, undistorted by faulty memories, moral judgments or decorative literary flourishes." --Emily Eakin, New York Times Book Review