Böcker av Nelly Arcan

Fiction. Translated from the French by David Scott Hamilton. Governor General's Award, Finalist. Top 10 Books of 2011, Shelf Unbound. The Globe 100: The very best of 2011. Recommended read, 49th Shelf. Book club pick, Shelf Unbound. Somewhere in Montréal, in the not too distant future, an obscure company offers custom-designed suicides for its clients with one condition: their desire to die must be pure and absolute. Antoinette Beauchamp is a successful candidate but her suicide is not. Now a bedridden paraplegic, hooked up to machines that monitor all her bodily functions. she tells her story, taking the reader into the Kafkaesque world of the company and its bewildering cast of characters. EXIT is at once a profound examination of what it is that drives someone to want to end their life, as well as how that urge can be turned on its head against all odds. Written with her signature brio and acerbic wit, Nelly Arcan's last novel is a hymn to life. A work of originality pushed to the limit. It's crazy. Full of imagination. Even funny at times. A story unlike any other.--Le Devoir a compelling crawl through the claustro confines of depression and sweeping suicidal desire... Dark, beautiful, poignant and clever, Arcan's EXIT is a powerful read.--The Globe & Mail Praise for Nelly Arcan: ...Fantastically intelligent, always trying to second- guess how a woman should be, Arcan finds death the only answer to her predicament. In style and emotion--and honesty--her work is a much closer cousin to Edouard Leve's Suicide than to the archness of Belle de Jour or Catherine Millet. The best way to absorb Arcan's work is to read it in chronological order, and then to lament that the titles of her work--Whore, Hysteric, Breakneck, Exit--so succinctly and poignantly summarize the short life and hard-won philosophy of this exceptional writer.--The Times Literary Supplement

Burqa of Skin is a dense collection of writings from Nelly Arcan, channelling harrowing disenchantment and indignation. From her very first novel, Putain (Seuil, 2001), Arcan shook the literary landscape with her flamboyant lyricism and her preoccupations with such recurring themes as our culture's vertiginous obsession with youth, and its reverse: the draw of death. Now beyond the ripples of scandal Arcan's work has caused, here are the last echoes of her work, and it is as stunning as it is brief. Burqa of Skin, with its gruesome title, catapults her work into contemporary debates on culture and gender. The book collects three previously unpublished works: "e;The Dress,"e; "e;The Child in the Mirror"e; and "e;Shame."e; The first two are written in the first person, in that turbulent, suffocating language that was Arcan's singular brand, that of a writer on the edge. In the third text, she analyses with inexhaustible ferocity her humiliating experience on the set of a TV talk show. Two lesser-known non-fiction pieces are also included in this collection: a reflection on speed dating and a column published in 2004 titled "e;Suicide Can Be Harmful to Your Health."e;Praise for Burqa of Skin:"e;A masterpiece, a rare and poisonous plant whose posthumous publication makes [the work] all the more striking."e; (Juliette Einhorn, Le Figaro)"e;... When Arcan's writing is at its sharpest-as it nearly always was, and as Melissa Bull's translation convincingly conveys-practically every sentence can serve as a jumping-off point for sustained contemplation and/or heated debate. ..."e; (The Montreal Gazette)"e;... the writing is genuine and lived, giving an almost real-time picture of the author's philosophical wrestlings ... stylishly translated by Melissa Bull Fantastically intelligent, always trying to second-guess how a woman should be, Arcan finds death the only answer to her predicament. In style and emotion-and honesty-her work is a much closer cousin to Edouard Leve's Suicide than to the archness of Belle de Jour or Catherine Millet. The best way to absorb Arcan's work is to read it in chronological order, and then to lament that the titles of her work-Whore, Hysteric, Breakneck, Exit-so succinctly and poignantly summarize the short life and hard-won philosophy of this exceptional writer."e; (The Times Literary Supplement)

ReLit Long Shortlist, 2015Winner, Type Books AwardIn this daring act of self-examination and confession, the late novelist Nelly Arcan explores the tortured end of a love affair. All the wrong signals were there from the start, but still, she could not help falling. More than a portrait of an affair gone wrong, Hysteric is a chronicle of life among the twenty- and thirty-somethings, a life structured by text messages, missed cell phone calls, the latest DJs and Internet porn. When the writer's aunt read her tarot cards, no predictions for her future ever appeared. This tale, an astounding feat of literary realism, shares the story of a woman who loses her identity in a man in hopes of finding love. Told in the same voice that made her first novel Whore an international success, Nelly Arcan manages to answer the challenges she set down for herself in her previous books.Praise for Hysteric:"e;She writes from a place that is both deeply embodied and highly intellectual-if someone's womb really did end up on their brain, and that person then wrote a book, it might read something like Hysteric. English readers are lucky to have access to more of Arcan's brains and guts, and this translation is hopefully a herald of growing appreciation for a uniquely talented and brutally brave writer."e; (Montreal Review of Books)"e;Hysteric is a raw stroke of wild love that explores desire and memory, fear and love, a novel that leaves the lights on for its readers, hurts as much as it haunts, and brings a much-needed philosophy to the genre of urban literary fiction."e; (The Georgia Straight)One of the Telegraph Journal's Most Anticipated Books of 2014Praise for Nelly Arcan: "e;... With the publication of Breakneck this month (A Ciel ouvert, 2007), the small Canadian publisher Anvil Press concludes its project of publishing all of Arcan's novels in translation. ... Fantastically intelligent, always trying to second-guess how a woman should be, Arcan finds death the only answer to her predicament. In style and emotion-and honesty-her work is a much closer cousin to Edouard Leve's Suicide than to the archness of Belle de Jour or Catherine Millet. The best way to absorb Arcan's work is to read it in chronological order, and then to lament that the titles of her work-Whore, Hysteric, Breakneck, Exit-so succinctly and poignantly summarize the short life and hard-won philosophy of this exceptional writer."e; (The Times Literary Supplement)