Collapse
The blazing new book from the author of The End of Eddy
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- Pedido anticipado
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- Se espera: 4 jun 2026
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- USD 14.99
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- Pedido anticipado
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- USD 14.99
Descripción editorial
I often hated my brother, but I have to understand his life.
The unflinching story of Édouard Louis’s brother’s violent life and death.
‘One of the most important, politically vital and morally bracing writers of his generation’ GUARDIAN
Édouard’s brother spends much of his life dreaming. He lives in a poor, working-class world, where he imagines that he will become one of the finest butchers in France, that he will travel, that he will make his fortune, that he will restore cathedrals, that he will earn his father’s love.
But his reality allows none of this. There is no way to escape, no one who can show him how, and everything about him – his drinking, his violence, his behaviour with women and with others – condemns him.
At thirty-eight he is found dead on the floor of his small studio apartment. This book is the story of his collapse.
Translated by TASH AW
‘Bracing, pulverising... burns with white-hot truth’ COLIN WALSH
‘Spare, raw... Édouard Louis is someone who makes writing matter’ NEIL BARTLETT
‘Louis has never been tenderer, more sophisticated, or more fully on form’ NAOISE DOLAN
‘Belongs to that vital group of writers, amongst the likes of Cusk, Rankine and Ernaux, who have revitalised and reinvented their own form’ ANDREW McMILLAN
Praise for Édouard Louis
‘I feel so lucky to be living and writing at the same time as Édouard Louis’ MAGGIE NELSON
‘One of the major writers of our time’ GARTH GREENWELL
‘Louis is a master of the poetics of juxtaposition, elucidating the hostile and the intimate... the vulnerable and the resilient’ YIYUN LI
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Louis (History of Violence) opens this revelatory autofiction, which is being published simultaneously with Monique Escapes, by confessing that he felt nothing upon learning of his heavy-drinking older brother's death at 38. The two brothers hadn't seen each other in nearly 10 years, and the unnamed man's fatal heart attack came as little surprise given his history of substance abuse. Nevertheless, Louis resolves to write the history of his late sibling, a would-be master butcher who was "sick because of his dreams" that went unrealized. The brother's story takes shape after their parents' divorce, when he turns to petty crime. Later, he is accused of rape. Alternately cruel and exploitative toward Louis, whom he once threatened to kill for "speaking badly" about their family, the brother doesn't seem redeemable. But Louis reveals the depths of his compassion and his ability to shape a complex story when he adds the perspective of a woman named Stéphanie who knew his brother. She believed he was overlooked by society, and attempted to help him reform. In the end, Louis determines to make the novel "a rampart against forgetting." It's an earnest and richly inquisitive portrait.
