Edouard Louis

1. Edouard Louis

Monique s'évade

Une nuit, j’ai reçu un appel de ma mère. Elle me disait au téléphone que l’homme avec qui elle vivait était ivre et qu’il l’insultait. Cela faisait plusieurs années que la même scène se reproduisait : cet homme buvait et une fois sous l’influence de l’alcool il l’attaquait avec des mots d’une violence extrême. Elle qui avait quitté mon père quelques années plus tôt pour échapper à l’enfermement domestique se retrouvait à nouveau piégée. Elle me l’avait caché pour ne pas « m’inquiéter » mais cette nuit-là était celle de trop. Je lui ai conseillé de partir, sans attendre. Mais comment vivre, et où, sans argent, sans diplômes, sans permis de conduire, parce qu’on a passé sa vie à élever des enfants et à subir la brutalité masculine ? Ce livre est le récit d’une évasion. É. L.

1. Édouard , Louis

Monique evade

1. Édouard , Louis

Collapse

From "one of the most important, politically vital and morally bracing writers of his generation" (The Guardian), an unflinching account of Édouard Louis's brother's life and death.Édouard's brother spent much of his life dreaming. He lived in a poor, working-class world, where he imagined that he would become one of the finest butchers in France, that he would travel, that he would make his fortune, that he would restore cathedrals, and that his father, who had disappeared, would return and love him.But there was no way to escape, no one who could show him how, and everything about him-his drinking, his violence, his behavior with women and with others-condemned him.At thirty-eight, after years of failure and depression, he was found dead on the floor of his small studio apartment. This book is the story of his collapse.Édouard Louis traces the life of a man who was in many ways deplorable: violent, misogynistic, homophobic, brutal. But where might understanding begin, and how far can it extend? In Collapse, Louis pursues every angle for answers-newly consulting writers and psychoanalysts and questioning his siblings, his mother, his brother's partners, and himself. From an outpouring of memory and pain comes a radical gesture of dignity and forgiveness.

1. Édouard , Louis

Monique Escapes

When Édouard's mother reveals she is-not for the first time-enduring an abusive relationship, mother and son plot her next steps in what is at once an edge-of-the-seat escape narrative and a meditation on freedom and renewal.Late one night, Édouard receives a telephone call from his mother. In tears, she tells him that her partner, her first since her abusive marriage with Édouard's father, has been insulting, degrading, and humiliating her. I thought this would be a new life for me and now it's starting all over.From afar, in Athens, Édouard swiftly sets a plan in place for Monique; the next morning, she departs the apartment she has been sharing with the man. What takes shape over the next weeks, over phone calls and informal Internet tutorials, on video chats and train rides, is a powerful and transformative shared experience for mother and son as they navigate the aftermath of male brutality, confront the limitations of class and society, and lay bare the pain of their past. With characteristic insight into society's underpinnings and oversights, and with exquisite and tender portraiture, Édouard Louis's Monique Escapes is a profound story of a woman, a mother, and a family's search for more.

1. Edouard , Louis

Woman's Battles and Transformations

Long-listed for the National Book Critics Circle (NBCC) Barrios Book in Translation PrizeÉdouard Louis's bracing and honest memoir of his mother's liberation-a "poetic, tender, joyous" account (The Guardian).Late one night, Édouard Louis got a call from his forty-five-year-old mother: "I did it. I left your father." Suddenly, she was free.A Woman's Battles and Transformations is the searing and sympathetic story of one woman's escape: of mothers and sons, of history and heartbreak, of politics and power. It reckons with the cruel systems that govern our lives-and with the possibility of escape. Sharp, short, and fine as a needle, it is a necessary addition to the work of Édouard Louis, "one of France's most widely read and internationally successful novelists" (The New York Times Magazine).

1. Edouard , Louis

End of Eddy

The celebrated debut novel from Édouard Louis: the "equal parts frank, provocative and compelling" (Financial Times) coming-of-age story about growing up gay in a working-class town in Picardy."Every morning in the bathroom I would repeat the same phrase to myself over and over again . . . Today I'm really gonna be a tough guy." Growing up in a poor village in northern France, all Eddy Bellegueule wanted was to be a man in the eyes of his family and neighbors. But from childhood, he was different-"girlish," intellectually precocious, and attracted to other men.Translated into more than twenty languages, The End of Eddy captures the violence and desperation of life in a French factory town. It is also a sensitive, universal portrait of boyhood and sexual awakening. Like Karl Ove Knausgaard or Edmund White, Édouard Louis writes from his own undisguised experience, but he writes with an openness and a compassionate intelligence that are all his own. The result-a critical and popular triumph-has made him the most celebrated French writer of his generation.