97,196 Words
Essays
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- £7.99
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- £7.99
Publisher Description
Read the definitive essay collection from the Sunday Times bestselling author of The Adversary, dubbed 'France's greatest writer of non-fiction' (New York Times)
'The most exciting living writer' Karl Ove Knausgaard
Over the course of his career, Emmanuel Carrère has reinvented non-fiction writing. In a search for truth in all its guises, he dispenses with the rules of genre. For him, no form is out of reach: theology, historiography, reportage and memoir - among many others - are fused under the pressure of an inimitable combination of passion, curiosity and intellect that has made Carrère one of our most distinctive and important literary voices today.
97,196 Words introduces Carrère's shorter work to an English-language audience. Featuring more than thirty extraordinary texts written over an illustrious twenty-five-year period of Carrère's creative life, the book shows a remarkable mind at work. Spanning continents, histories, and personal relationships, 97,196 Words considers the divides between truth, reality and our shared humanity, exploring remarkable events and eccentric lives, including Carrère's own.
* A New York Times Notable Book *
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
This selection of short nonfiction by Carr re (The Kingdom) offers a fine overview of his career, with essays spanning 1990 2016. Carr re's style mixes research and reportage with personal anecdote he has a keen wit, unrelenting self-honesty, and a touch of naughtiness. Frustratingly for his longtime readers, many of the best pieces here works about the murderer Romand, the Russian dissident Limonov, Philip K. Dick, Luke the Evangelist, and Carr re's firsthand experience of the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami cover subjects also tackled in his previously published long-form books. Fortunately, there are several other standouts: "Nine Columns for an Italian Magazine" delves into Carr re's thoughts on dating, with an increasingly humorous meta aspect, and "In Search of the Dice Man" details Carr re's encounters with the elusive Luke Rhinehart, pseudonymic author of the 1971 book The Dice Man, the "object of a minor but persistent cult." Later works take on the migrant crisis in France and the Davos economic summit, to mixed effect. An insightful profile of French president Emmanuel Macron closes the collection. Carr re is at his best in longer form, where his idiosyncrasies can rise to the fore, but this is an excellent launching point to begin exploring his work.
