Canoes

· New York Review of Books
Ebook
197
Pages
Tools
Eligible

About this ebook

From the author of Eastbound, a New York Times Top 10 Book of the Year

A colorful cast of female characters contends with UFOs, sonic waves, and the legend of Buffalo Bill in a spellbinding novella and 7 short stories about the mysteries of place and language

“The translation of any of Maylis de Kerangal’s books is a gift.” — Lauren Oyler, The New Yorker

"De Kerangal’s masterful collection examines alienation and grief at pivotal moments in her characters’ lives . . . Each story is richly complex, and the collection’s recurring canoe imagery gives it the feel of a treasure map . . . This understated volume packs a powerful punch." — Publishers Weekly, starred review


Ricocheting off of the book’s exhilarating central novella and 7 short stories, the women we meet in Canoes are by turns indelibly witty, insightful, intimate, bracing, and profoundly interconnected.

“When did I start placing myself in the fable?” a young Parisian wonders as she tells her son the legend of Buffalo Bill, a spectral presence atop the mountain in their small Colorado town. She has just moved to the United States and everything disorients her – suburbs stretching along reptilian highways, a new house rigged like a studio set, but most of all, the sound of her husband’s voice. Sam speaks with a different tone in English, not the soft and swift timbre of his native French. From a voice made new, Maylis de Kerangal opens up a torrent of curiosities, hauntings, and questions about place and language.

The women of these stories are mad about: stones, molds of human jaws, voicemail recordings, sonic waves, UFOs, and always how the texture of human voice entwines with their obsessions. With cosmic harmonics, vivid imagery, and a revelatory composition, Canoes will leave readers forever altered.
From the author of Eastbound, a New York Times Top 10 Book of the Year A colorful cast of female characters contends with UFOs, sonic waves, and the legend of Buffalo Bill in a spellbinding novella and 7 short stories about the mysteries of place and language “The translation of any of Maylis d...

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About the author

Maylis de Kerangal is the award winning and critically acclaimed author of several books, including Naissance d’un pont (Birth of a Bridge), winner of the Prix Franz Hessel and Prix Médicis; Réparer les vivants, which won the Grand Prix RTL-Lire and whose English translation, The Heart, was one of the Wall Street Journal’s Ten Best Fiction Works of 2016 and the winner of the 2017 Wellcome Book Prize; and Un chemin de tables, whose English translation, The Cook, was a New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice. Mend the Living was Longlisted for the Booker International Prize 2016.

Jessica Moore is a poet, singer-songwriter, translator, and author. A former Lannan writer-in-residence and winner of a PEN America Translation Award for her translation of Turkana Boy, by Jean-François Beauchemin, her first collection of poems, Everything, now, was published in 2012. She lives in Toronto.
Maylis de Kerangal is the award winning and critically acclaimed author of several books, including Naissance d’un pont (Birth of a Bridge), winner of the Prix Franz Hessel and Prix Médicis; Réparer les vivants, which won the Grand Prix RTL-Lire and whose English translation, The Heart, was one o...

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