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Autofiction: Blurring Lines Between Autobiography and Fiction |
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Pond
by Claire-Louise Bennett
Living a mostly solitary, fragmented existence on the outskirts of a small coastal village, a young woman reflects on an evocative, almost synesthetic daily routine and her memorable encounters as they shape her in painful, whimsical and wistful ways.
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Open City
by Teju Cole
Feeling adrift after ending a relationship, Julius, a young Nigerian doctor living in New York, takes long walks through the city while listening to the stories of fellow immigrants until a shattering truth is revealed. A first novel.
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Undiscovered
by Gabriela Wiener
With tremendous intellect and her irreverent wit, Wiener rescues an intimate story from the family archive, a story that is also the infamous history of our continent. Her prose, sober and forward, is a breath of fresh air; her view allows us to be testimonies of Latin America's cycles of plundering and looting."--Valeria Luiselli, author of The Lost Children Archive and Tell Me How It Ends
An award-winning Peruvian journalist and writer delivers her stunning English breakthrough, blending fact and fiction in an autobiographical novel that faces the legacy of colonialism through one woman's family ties to both the colonized and colonizer.
Alone in a museum in Paris, Gabriela Wiener finds herself confronted by her complicated family heritage. Visiting an exhibition of pre-Columbian artifacts, she peers at countless sculptures of Indigenous faces each nearly identical to her own and recognizes herself in them - but the man responsible for pillaging them was her own great-great-grandfather, Austrian colonial explorer Charles Wiener. Wiener's "grand" contribution to history: the near rediscovery of Machu Picchu, nearly 4,000 plundered artifacts, a book about Peru, and a bastard child.
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On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous
by Ocean Vuong
"Brilliant, heartbreaking, tender, and highly original - poet Ocean Vuong's debut novel is a sweeping and shattering portrait of a family, and a testament to the redemptive power of storytelling. On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous is a letter from a son to a mother who cannot read. Written when the speaker, Little Dog, is in his late twenties, the letter unearths a family's history that began before he was born--a history whose epicenter is rooted in Vietnam--and serves as a doorway into parts of his life his mother has never known, all of it leading to an unforgettable revelation. At once a witness to the fraught yet undeniable love between a single mother and her son, it is also a brutally honest exploration of race, class, and masculinity"
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My struggle. Book one
by Karl Ove Knausgêard
An autobiographical novel focuses on a young man trying to make sense of his place in the disjointed world that surrounds him. It has already been anointed a Proustian masterpiece and is the rare work of dazzling literary originality that is intensely, irresistibly readable. Unafraid of the big issues—death, love, art, fear—and yet committed to the intimate details of life as it is lived, My Struggle is an essential work of contemporary literature.
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Ash Before Oak
by Jeremy Cooper
Ash before Oak is a novel in the form of a fictional journal written by a solitary man on a secluded Somerset estate. Ostensibly a nature diary, chronicling the narrator’s interest in the local flora and fauna and the passing of the seasons, Ash before Oak is also the story of a breakdown told slantwise, and of the narrator’s subsequent recovery through his reengagement with the world around him. Written in prose that is as precise as it is beautiful, winner of the 2018 Fitzcarraldo Editions Novel Prize, Jeremy Cooper’s first novel in over a decade is a stunning investigation of the fragility, beauty and strangeness of life.
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No One Is Talking About This
by Patricia Lockwood
"From "a formidably gifted writer" (The New York Times Book Review), a book that asks: Is there life after the internet? As this urgent, genre-defying book opens, a woman who has recently been elevated to prominence for her social media posts travels around the world to meet her adoring fans. She is overwhelmed by navigating the new language and etiquette of what she terms "the portal," where she grapples with an unshakable conviction that a vast chorus of voices is now dictating her thoughts. When existential threats--from climate change and economic precariousness to the rise of an unnamed dictator and an epidemic of loneliness--begin to loom, she posts her way deeper into the portal's void. An avalanche of images, details, and references accumulate toform a landscape that is post-sense, post-irony, post-everything. "Are we in hell?" the people of the portal ask themselves. "Are we all just going to keep doing this until we die?" Suddenly, two texts from her mother pierce the fray: "Something has gonewrong," and "How soon can you get here?" As real life and its stakes collide with the increasingly absurd antics of the portal, the woman confronts a world that seems to contain both an abundance of proof that there is goodness, empathy, and justice in the universe, and a deluge of evidence to the contrary"
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River
by Esther Kinsky
A woman moves to a London suburb near the River Lea, without knowing quite why or for how long. Over a series of long, solitary walks she reminisces about the rivers she has encountered during her life.
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Simple Passion
by Annie Ernaux
A woman plots the emotional and physical course of an all-consuming affair with a married man, during which she loses herself in her passion before the relationship comes to an end. By the author of A Woman's Story.
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Dept. of speculation
by Jenny Offill
An unflinching portrait of marriage features a heroine simply referred to as "the Wife," who transitions from an idealistic woman who once exchanged love letters with her husband and who confronts an array of universal difficulties.
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Man Gone Down
by Michael Thomas
Approaching his thirty-fifth birthday estranged from his white Boston Brahmin wife and three children, an impoverished African-American construction worker evaluates his inner-city Boston childhood, the abuses he suffered at the hands of his parents, and the disparity between the promise of his intellectual potential and his real-world achievements. https://acl.bibliocommons.com/v2/record/S209C2699404
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The museum of innocence
by Orhan Pamuk
Ending his engagement to pursue a married cousin, Kemal unsuccessfully woos the woman over the course of nine years, during which he amasses personal effects that reflect his obsession and render him a laughingstock among his peers. By the Nobel Prize-winning author of My Name Is Red.
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The Rings of Saturn
by W. G. Sebald
The Rings of Saturn, with its curious archive of photographs, records a walking tour of the eastern coast of England. A few of the things that cross the path and mind of its narrator (who both is and is not Sebald) are lonely eccentrics. Rembrandt's "Anatomy Lesson", the natural history of the herring, Borges, a matchstick model of the Temple of Jerusalem, Sir Thomas Browne's skull, recession-hit seaside towns, Joseph Conrad, the once-thriving silk industry of Norwich, Swinburne, the dowager Empress Tzu Hsi, and the massive bombings of WWII.
Mesmerized by the mutability of all things, the narrator catalogs the transmigration of whole worlds: "On every new thing, there lies already the shadow of annihilation.
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The Argonauts
by Maggie Nelson
aggie Nelson's The Argonauts is a genre-bending memoir, a work of "autotheory" offering fresh, fierce, and timely thinking about desire, identity, and the limitations and possibilities of love and language. At its center is a romance: the story of the author's relationship with the artist Harry Dodge. This story, which includes Nelson's account of falling in love with Dodge, who is fluidly gendered, as well as her journey to and through a pregnancy, offers a firsthand account of the complexities and joys of (queer) family-making.
Writing in the spirit of public intellectuals such as Susan Sontag and Roland Barthes, Nelson binds her personal experience to a rigorous exploration of what iconic theorists have said about sexuality, gender, and the vexed institutions of marriage and child-rearing. Nelson's insistence on radical individual freedom and the value of caretaking becomes the rallying cry of this thoughtful, unabashed, uncompromising book.
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Either/or
by Elif Batuman
During her sophomore year at Harvard, Selin's quest for self-knowledge leads to certain conclusions about the universal importance of parties, alcohol and sex and is determined to participate no matter the cost, in the follow-up to The Idiot.
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Ninth Building
by Zou Jingzhi
Ninth Building is a fascinating collection of vignettes drawn from Zou Jingzhi’s experience growing up during the Cultural Revolution, first as a boy in Beijing and then as a teenager exiled to the countryside. Zou poetically captures a side of the Cultural Revolution that is less talked about—the sheer tedium and waste of young life, as well as the gallows humor that accompanies such desperate situations. Jeremy Tiang’s enthralling translation of this important work of fiction was awarded a PEN/Heim Grant.
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Chilean Poet
by Alejandro Zambra
A young Chilean man who inherited his love of poetry from his stepfather, helps an American journalist both literally and figuratively lost in Santiago and encourages her to focus her article on the living, everyday poets that surround them. Illustrations.
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Biography of X
by Catherine Lacey
When a famous iconoclastic artist and shape-shifter dies suddenly, her widow, CM, begins writing her wifes biography and opens a vast Pandoras box of secrets and explores the history of the fascist theocracy where she lived.
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The Mystery Guest : A True Story
by Grégoire Bouillier
When the phone rang on a gloomy fall afternoon in 1990, Gregoire Bouillier had no way of knowing that it was the woman who'd left him, without warning, ten years before. And he couldn't have guessed why she was calling--not to apologize for, or explain, the way she'd vanished from his life, but to invite him to a party. A birthday party. For a woman he'd never met.
This is the story of how one man got over a broken heart, learned to love again, stopped wearing turtlenecks, regained his faith in literature, participated in a work of performance art by mistake, and spent his rent money on a bottle of 1964 bordeaux that nobody ever drank. "The Mystery Guest "is, in the words of "L'Humanite," a work of "fiendish wit and refinement." It pushes the conventions of autobiography (and those great themes of French literature: love and aging) to an absurd, poignant, and very funny conclusion. This translation marks the English-language debut of an iconoclast who has attracted one of the most passionate cult followings in French literature today.
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Yann Andrâea Steiner
by Marguerite Duras
Dedicated to Duras’ companion with whom she spent her last decade of life, Yann Andréa Steiner is a haunting dance between two parallel stories of love and solitude: the love between Duras and the young Yann Andréa and a seaside romance observed – or imagined – by the narrator between a camp counselor and an orphaned camper, a Holocaust survivor who witnessed his sister’s murder at the hands of a German soldier. Memory blurs into desire as the summer of 1980 flows into 1944. An enigmatic elegy of history, creation, and raw emotion.
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