Rachel Cusk

A woman writer goes to Athens in the height of summer to teach a writing course. Though her own circumstances remain indistinct, she becomes the audience to a chain of narratives, as the people she meets tell her one after another the stories of their lives. Beginning with the neighbouring passenger on the flight out and his tales of fast boats and failed marriages, the storytellers talk of their loves and ambitions and pains, their anxieties, their perceptions and daily lives. In the stifling heat and noise of the city the sequence of voice begins to weave a complex human tapestry. The more they talk the more elliptical their listener becomes, as she shapes and directs their accounts until certain themes begin to emerge: the experience of loss, the nature of family life, the difficulty of intimacy and the mystery of creativity itself. Outline is a novel about writing and talking, about self-effacement and self-expression, about the desire to create and the human art of self-portraiture in which that desire finds its universal form.

Outline

From the author of the Outline trilogy, a fable of human destiny and decline, enacted in a closed system of intimate, fractured relationships. A woman invites a famed artist to visit the remote coastal region where she lives, in the belief that his vision will penetrate the mystery of her life and landscape. His provocative presence provides the frame for a study of female fate and male privilege, of the geometries of human relationships, and of the struggle to live morally in the intersecting spaces of our internal and external worlds. With its examination of the possibility that art can both save and destroy us, Rachel Cusk's Second Place is deeply affirming of the human soul, while grappling with its darkest demons.

A Novel

Second Place

The stunning second novel of a trilogy that began with Outline, one of The New York Times Book Review’s ten best books of 2015 In the wake of her family’s collapse, a writer and her two young sons move to London. The process of this upheaval is the catalyst for a number of transitions—personal, moral, artistic, and practical—as she endeavors to construct a new reality for herself and her children. In the city, she is made to confront aspects of living that she has, until now, avoided, and to consider questions of vulnerability and power, death and renewal, in what becomes her struggle to reattach herself to, and believe in, life. Filtered through the impersonal gaze of its keenly intelligent protagonist, Transit sees Rachel Cusk delve deeper into the themes first raised in her critically acclaimed novel Outline and offers up a penetrating and moving reflection on childhood and fate, the value of suffering, the moral problems of personal responsibility, and the mystery of change. In this second book of a precise, short, yet epic cycle, Cusk describes the most elemental experiences, the liminal qualities of life. She captures with unsettling restraint and honesty the longing to both inhabit and flee one’s life, and the wrenching ambivalence animating our desire to feel real.

Transit

Kudos

From Rachel Cusk, her first collection of essays about motherhood, marriage, feminism, and art Rachel Cusk redrew the boundaries of fiction with the Outline Trilogy, three “literary masterpieces” (The Washington Post) whose narrator, Faye, perceives the world with a glinting, unsparing intelligence while remaining opaque to the reader. Lauded for the precision of her prose and the quality of her insight, Cusk is a writer of uncommon brilliance. Now, in Coventry, she gathers a selection of her nonfiction writings that both offers new insights on the themes at the heart of her fiction and forges a startling critical voice on some of our most personal, social, and artistic questions. Coventry encompasses memoir, cultural criticism, and writing about literature, with pieces on family life, gender, and politics, and on D. H. Lawrence, Françoise Sagan, and Elena Ferrante. Named for an essay in Granta (“Every so often, for offences actual or hypothetical, my mother and father stop speaking to me. There’s a funny phrase for this phenomenon in England: it’s called being sent to Coventry”), this collection is pure Cusk and essential reading for our age: fearless, unrepentantly erudite, and dazzling to behold.

Essays

Coventry

Moving, riotous, thought-provoking, and extremely illuminating, an intimate account of a year of modern motherhood, set against the backdrop of sexual equality, details the author's many experiences during and after her transformation into a mother, all of which have taught her valuable lessons in life. Reprint. 15,000 first printing.

On Becoming a Mother

A Life's Work

The author chronicles the proces of redefining herself as a single woman while creating a new family life for herself and her dauhgters, as her marrige of ten years has come to an end.

On Marriage and Separation

Aftermath

Cusk escapes dreary England for Tuscany, to relish the landscape, the weather, the food and , most of all, the art.

A Summer in Italy

The Last Supper

Follows a single rainy day in the lives of the inhabitants of Arlington Park in the English suburbs, as they live out the dubious accomplishments of their lives in a world rife with contentment and anxiety, but empty of belief.

Arlington Park

Een schrijfster tekent de verhalen op van de mensen die ze ontmoet als ze een zomercursus in Athene geeft.

roman

Çerçeve

Outline, Transit and Kudos

Rachel Cusk Collection

Stella Benson sets off for Hilltop, a tiny Sussex village housing a family that is somewhat larger than life. Her hopes for the Maddens may be high, but her station among them, as au pair to their irascible son Martin - is undeniably low. What could possibly have driven her to leave her home, job and life in London for such rural ignominy? Why has she severed all contact with her parents? Why is she so reluctant to talk about her past? The Country Life, Rachel Cusk's third novel, is a rich and subtle story about embarrassment, awkwardness and being alone; about families, or the lack of them; and about love in some peculiar guises.

The Country Life

Gecis

Resoconto

Winner of the Whitbread First Novel Award Agnes Day - sub-editor, suburbanite, failure extraordinaire - has discovered disconcerting gaps in her general understanding of the world. Terminally middle-class and incurably romantic, Agnes finds herself chronically confused by the most basic interactions. Life and love go on without her, but with a little façade she can pass herself off as a success. Beneath the fiction, however, the burden of truth becomes harder to bear.

Saving Agnes

Övgü

When one of corporate London’s transient typists unexpectedly crosses Ralph Loman’s path, her disruptive beauty ignites a brief blaze of excitement in his troubled heart. But Francine Snaith is ravenous for attention, driven by a thirst for conquest, and when Ralph tries politely to extricate himself he finds he is bound in chains of consequence from which it seems there is no escape. ‘Brilliantly perceptive . . . a ruthlessly honest dissection of modern sensibilities . . . It says much for her growing skills as a novelist that she is able to make something like a work of art out of her drawerful of our daily junk’ The Times ‘Breathtaking, fascinating and believable . . . The Temporary would be worth reading for its self-regarding, utterly thoughtless anti-heroine alone, yet Cusk’s interpretation of menial office existence and her understanding of its psychology is also piercing’ Financial Times ‘This is the story of a Julie Burchill heroine in a Julian Barnes world . . . Cusk has earned all her eulogies. She is a writer of great promise’ Literary Review ‘ “Temporary”, a category of both employment and lifestyle, is such an apt metaphor of Nineties existence that Cusk deserves special praise just for thinking of it . . . She writes with nervy precision about the vagaries of minor ambitions and desires’ Guardian ‘An exquisitely written gem of a book’ Vogue

The Temporary

In 2003, Rachel Cusk published A Life's Work, a provocative and often startlingly funny memoir about the cataclysm of motherhood. Widely acclaimed, the book started hundreds of arguments that continue to this day. Now, in her most personal and relevant book to date, Cusk explores divorce's tremendous impact on the lives of women. An unflinching chronicle of Cusk's own recent separation and the upheaval that followed—"a jigsaw dismantled"—it is also a vivid study of divorce's complex place in our society. "Aftermath" originally signified a second harvest, and in this book, unlike any other written on the subject, Cusk discovers opportunity as well as pain. With candor as fearless as it is affecting, Rachel Cusk maps a transformative chapter of her life with an acuity and wit that will help us understand our own.

"A woman writer visits a Europe in flux, where questions of personal and political identity are rising to the surface and the trauma of change is opening up new possibilities of loss and renewal. Within the rituals of literary culture, Faye finds the human story in disarray amid differing attitudes toward the public performance of the creative persona. She begins to identify among the people she meets a tension between truth and representation, a fissure that accrues great dramatic force"--

Returning to the site of a garden party where he made some lasting friendships, Michael hopes to escape his troubled marriage and brings along his taciturn young son, but discovers the place to be fraught with long-standing deceptions.

Rachel Cusk

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