Böcker av Elisa Gabbert

A young woman learns about life, and love found and lost, in this thought-provoking debut novel by one of the twentieth century’s most brilliant and prolific writers—with an introduction by Elisa Gabbert, author of The Unreality of Memory   “Absolutely unafraid . . . Here at last is a book which attains unity as surely as Wuthering Heights, though by a different path.”—E. M. ForsterLondon, 1905: Twenty-four-year-old Rachel Vinrace is a free spirited but painfully naïve young woman when she embarks on a sea voyage with her family to South America. Arriving in Santa Marina, a town on the South American coast, Rachel and her aunt Helen are introduced to a group of English expatriates, among them the sensitive Terence Hewet, an aspiring writer who is drawn to Rachel’s unusual and dreamy nature. The two fall in love, unaware of the tragedy that lies ahead. With hints of Jane Austen, The Voyage Out is a softer and more traditional novel than Virginia Woolf’s later work, even as its poetic style and innovative technique—with detailed portraits of characters’ inner lives and mesmeric shifts between the quotidian and the profound—reflect Woolf’s signature style.The Modern Library Torchbearers series features women who wrote on their own terms, with boldness, creativity, and a spirit of resistance.

Elisa Gabbert's L'Heure Bleue, or the Judy Poems, goes inside the mind of Judy, one of three characters in Wallace Shawn's The Designated Mourner, a play about the dissolution of a marriage in the midst of political revolution. In these poems, Gabbert imagines a back story and an emotional life for Judy beyond and outside the play. Written in a voice that is at once intellectual and unselfconscious, these poems create a character study of a many-layered woman reflected in solitude, while engaging with larger questions of memory, identity, desire, surveillance, and fear.

Literary Nonfiction. Elisa Gabbert's THE SELF UNSTABLE combines elements of memoir, philosophy, and aphorism to explore and trouble our ideas of the self, memory, happiness, aesthetics, love, and sex. With a sense of humor and an ability to find glimmers of the absurd in the profound, she uses the lyric essay like a koan to provoke the reader's reflection--unsettling the role of truth and interrogating the "I" in both literary and daily life: "The future isn't anywhere, so we can never get there. We can only disappear.""Gabbert strikes a perfect balance between heart and head, between cleverness and earnestness, between language that demonstrates its own fallibility and language that is surprisingly, perfectly precise."--Make Magazine"... smart and philosophically dexterous, capable of showing the self to be a fetish-object of its own and also a refractive subject of Lacanian devotion, as a mirror which doesn't so much distort as endlessly reveal,' like the panopticon eye of a camera."--The Rumpus"... the dispassion about the self allows the writer to enact a number of equally lovely sleights of hand . . . Even while the author is drawn to image and reason, she is also in love with the vanishing point, where all perspective is ecstatically compressed into a single node."--Gently Read Literature

A literary guide to digital anxiety, The Unreality of Memory collects thought-provoking and playful essays on the Internet age's media-saturated disaster coverage and our addiction to viewing and discussing the world's ills.