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Other Press Newsletter: July 2011
Sent Wednesday, July 6, 2011
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| July 2011 Newsletter | ||||
Sex, Love, and DeathThe Memoirs of Paul Zweig
There is something completely addictive about Paul Zweig's memoir Departures (Other Press just reissued it last month with a lovely new forward by Adam Gopnik). It has the elegance and tightness of a novel, but it is also so intimate and candid that you feel instantly as if you are talking to your closest friend. You may even be tempted to say under your breath, as I often did, "Paul Zweig, c'est moi."
Zweig, a young writer born and raised in Brooklyn, moved to Paris in the 50s in what he thought would be a voyage of self-discovery. He never really figured out who he was--and maybe, after all, he wasn't that keen on finding out: "Ignorance can be a tool," he wrote. Of communism, he concluded: "It was a form of poetry." Love, its meaning and consequences, remained unclear: "My life with women had been a campaign of marches and countermarches." But sex, on the other hand, unveiled an existential angst, "a ball of hurt at the center of my flesh."
What's your summer reading destination? The first fifteen people to email their answer to terrie@otherpress.com will win their choice of one of these four summer reads! Ode to Seven Years You'd have a sly smile too if Zadie Smith wrote about your book: "It really fucks with you."Since we first published his novel Unformed Landscape back in 2005, Peter Stamm has built a reputation among readers and critics as a master portraitist of contemporary life, rendered in spare, deceptively simple prose. His latest publication, Seven Years, has become his most acclaimed novel in the U.S. to date, garnering praise from publications as wide-ranging as The New York Review of Books and The Daily Beast. We're very proud to share a sampling of that praise.
"It gets under your skin, this novel. It welcomes you into a clean, modern space....and then it really fucks with you. Seven Years is a novel to make you doubt your own dogma. What more can a novel do than that?" --Zadie Smith, Harper's Magazine
"Stamm's talent is palpable, but what makes him a writer to read, and read often, is the way he renders contemporary life as a series of ruptures." --New York Times Book Review
"Stamm's cleverness is to align a spareness that works in translation with his characters' instinctive fear of all things rich and intense....The constant disorientation of his characters, their sense that their lives are interchangeable with any number of other lives, seem peculiarly suited to this era of globalization." --The New York Review of Books
 "With a patient and impressive commitment to realism, this Swiss novel follows the course of a complicated, troubled marriage...Though Stamm pulls off a quietly spectacular plot twist halfway through the book, he never loses sight of the quotidian things that erode or transform relationships over time." --The New Yorker
"Stamm is a master of quietly deliberative stories. In Seven Years, as in the best of his work, he puts often simple-seeming characters through extraordinary paces, all the more remarkable given the Carver-like restraint he exercises in his writing." --Bookforum
"Seven Years is a powerful, enlightening novel about the eternal search for contentment in life, the often fickle nature of love, and the knowledge that in reality, happiness is rarely how we dreamed it would be." --The Daily Beast
"Here is Stamm's strength, in a good English translation, the clean uncluttered sentences that take you--as writers since Hemingway have shown -- from one crystalline point to the next, so as to travel great distances in the shortest possible time." --Buffalo News
"Just the kind of thing I like." --Lorin Stein, the Paris Review blog
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