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Nearly 30 years after its first printing, Chris Kraus’s most popular work continues to be a feminist touchstone

The author reviewed endless books about affairs. Then she wrote her own

Contributors and friends of the magazine reflect on what they read in 2023.

Helene (Laetitia Dosch) is a single mother and university lecturer in a heated sexual relationship with the mysterious, married Russian diplomat, Alexandre (Sergei Polunin). Their arrangement is purely physical, yet her desire for him becomes an all-consuming obsession, as she loses her grip on the rest of her life, including her son. Based on Annie Ernaux's controversial autobiographical novel.

“The Young Man” is more than the story of an affair. It’s an intense re-examination of the past.

What more can be said about Annie Ernaux, novelist, memoirist, leftist, reluctant member of the French literary elite? Since she won the Nobel Prize in literature in October 2022, she’s been fêted and interviewed, profiled and praised. Best known for her short, spare memoirs, she has been credited with reinventing the genre. While many other memoirists may work like stenographers, describing life in exhaustive detail, Ernaux, the critic Alexandra Schwartz has observed, “is mor...

The Nobel winning French writer documents her affair with a much younger man

On Annie Ernaux’s spectacular impersonality

From fables set in French villages to Egyptian epics, a good book is a wonderful way to immerse yourself in a destination

Solitude, creativity, Bergman, Grothendieck, and the pursuit of great ideas.