On April 10, join us for a book talk with Laura Linstedt and translator David Hackston on My Friend Natalia, the author’s U.S. debut, available from Liveright Publishing on March 23, 2021. My Friend Natalia is a linguistic sexual thriller centered on one woman’s potent affliction: Natalia cannot stop thinking about sex. The unnamed, ungendered therapist who narrates the novel has leapt at the chance to…
Since the scandal surrounding Dominique Strauss-Kahn’s arrest in New York City in 2011, several momentous affairs have shaken longstanding French taboos around sexual harassment: Vanessa Springora’s memoir about her damaging relationship as a 14-year-old with writer Gabriel Matzneff, Adèle Haenel’s accusation against film-director Christophe Ruggia of sexually harassing her when she was in her early teens, and very recently, Camille…
Sex, Love, and Letters is the first study of a virtually unexplored cache of letters to Simone de Beauvoir, the brilliant, magnetic, and polarizing French feminist and philosopher from ordinary women and men around the world. This author-reader bond was fraught with misunderstanding, thwarted desire, and illusions, but also, Judith Coffin argues, emphatically reciprocal.
