TheEasy Life

An engrossing portrait of a woman's existential breakdown: In essence, this is a novel about a woman trying to live an "easy life," who, in the face of rural malaise and family deaths, finds it so impossible that she begins to unravel. This is a story with contemporary resonances that is also timeless.Duras is having a moment, and The Easy Life is the perfect book to take advantage: Parul Sehgal, Rachel Kushner, Kate Zambreno and many other literary stars have been writing about Duras in recent years, and bringing her renewed attention. The Easy Life is the first novel of Duras she didn't disown, and reveals the birth of the Durasian style like no other book could.Last Duras book by these translators got significant attention: Me & Other Writing, which was published by tiny Dorothy Press and was something of a strange hybrid book of fiction and nonfiction, still got extraordinary media coverage: It was written up in the Paris Review, the New Yorker, and the New York Times, The Nation, the LARB, and others, and won notable literary fans including Kate Zambreno and Rachel Kushner, who raved about it in Art Forum. Big name introduction and support very likely: In addition to those authors already mentioned being fans of Duras and these translators' work, other authors with whom the translators are connected include Valeria Luiselli, Dinaw Mengestu, and others. We will have a number of major authors to approach to support this publication.Reissues and rediscoveries of classic writers are selling: As the critical and commercial success of Lucia Berlin, Tove Ditlevsen, and Eve Babitz show, there is appetite for the previously unknown or underpublished works by important women writers.Marguerite Duras was one of France's most important and prolific writers. Born Marguerite Donnadieu in 1914 in what was then French Indochina, she went to Paris in 1931 to study at the Sorbonne. During WWII she was active in the Resistance, and in 1945 she joined the Communist Party. Duras wrote many novels, plays, films, and essays during her lifetime. She is perhaps best known for her internationally bestselling novel The Lover, which won the Prix Goncourt in 1984. She died in Paris in 1996. Emma Ramadan is a literary translator of poetry and prose from France, North Africa, and the Middle East. She is the recipient of a Fulbright, an NEA Translation Fellowship, the 2018 Albertine Prize and the 2020 PEN Translation Prize. She is based in Providence, Rhode Island where she is also the co-owner of Riffraff bookstore and bar. Olivia Baes is a Franco-American multidisciplinary artist who grew up between France, Catalonia, and the United States. She holds a Master of the Arts in Cultural Translation from the American University of Paris.For the first time in English, from the literary icon and author of the classic novel The Lover, Marguerite Duras's foundational masterpiece about a young woman's existential breakdown in the deceptively peaceful French countryside. The Easy Life is the story of Francine Veyrenattes, a twenty-five-year-old woman who already feels like life is passing her by. After witnessing a series of tragedies on her family farm, she alternates between intense grief and staggering boredom as she discovers a curious detachment in herself, an inability to navigate the world as others do. Hoping to be cleansed of whatever ails her, she travels to the coast to visit the sea. But there she finds herself unraveling, uncertain what is inside her. Lying in the sun with her toes in the sand by day while psychologically dissolving in her hotel room by night, soon her inner crisis reaches its peak and she must grapple with whether and how she can take hold of her own existence. An extraordinary examination of a young woman's estrangement from the world that only Marguerite Duras could have written, The Easy Life is a work of unsettling beauty and insight, and a bold, spellbinding journey into the depths of the human heart.For the first time in English, from the literary icon and author of the classic novel The Lover, Marguerite Duras's foundational masterpiece about a young woman's existential breakdown in the deceptively peaceful French countryside.One of the 20th century's greatest thinkers and prose stylists.A mind alive to the possibilities of human experience and of the word, and a writer with the courage to publish truly her experience as a woman.While reading Marguerite Duras, it can be hard to tell if you are pressing your hands to her chest or if she is pressing her hands to yours. Has she mined your deepest feelings or have you caught her heart's fever?Marguerite Duras writes brilliantly and strongly . . . her language and writing shine like crystal.