Author on Tour: Marie NDiaye
Books & Ideas
Catherine Hélie © Éditions Gallimard
Author Marie NDiaye will be in the United States to promote the release of her novel Vengeance Is Mine (trans. by Jordan Stump, Knopf, 2023).
About Marie NDiaye
Over a literary career that spans almost 40 years, novelist, playwright, and scenarist Marie NDiaye has carved herself a unique position amid the landscape of French literature. Her work has received France’s highest literary distinctions, including the 2009 Prix Goncourt for Three Strong Women (trans. by John Fletcher, Knopf). Dedicated to aesthetics, musicality, and psychology, NDiaye looks “for the music in a sentence; the subtextual harmony emanating from a book of imagination that makes us feel that it could not have been written any other way.” Literary critic Hugo Pradelle describes her as a writer “of unique discomfort.” In her latest book, Vengeance is Mine (trans. by Jordan Stump, Knopf), she portrays a woman afflicted by failing memories and a tortured uncertainty about her past that threatens to become her undoing.
About Vengeance Is Mine
(trans. By Jordan Stump, Knopf, 2023)
The heroine of Vengeance Is Mine is Maître Susane, a quiet middle-aged lawyer living a modest existence in Bordeaux, known to all as a consummate and unflappable professional. But when Gilles Principaux shows up at her office asking her to defend his wife, who is accused of a horrific crime, Maître Susane begins to crack. She seems to remember having been alone with him in her youth for a significant event, one her mind obsesses over but can’t quite reconstruct. Who is this Gilles Principaux? And why would he come to her, a run-of-the-mill lawyer, for such an important trial? Vengeance Is Mine is a dreamlike portrait of a woman afflicted by failing memories and a tortured uncertainty about her own past that threatens to become her undoing.
Vengeance is Mine will be released in the United States in October 2023.
Program
Marie NDiaye will be on tour on the East Coast in October 2023.
Her public program include:
- Monday, October 16: conversation with Judith Thurman @ Albertine Books (New York, NY) – event in English;
- Tuesday, October 17: talk @ Yale University (New Haven, CT) – event in French;
- Friday, October 20: conversation with Sylvie Kandé @ Maison Française Columbia (New York, NY) – event in French;
- Friday, October 20: talk @ Community Bookstore (Brooklyn, NY) – event in English.
For more information, please email Valentine Richet at valentine.richet@villa-albertine.org.
