A Truce That Is Not Peace
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- $349.00
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- $349.00
Descripción editorial
Finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, Autobiography
NAMED A BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR BY THE NEW YORKER, TIME, THE WASHINGTON POST, THE WASHINGTON INDEPENDENT REVIEW OF BOOKS, NPR, LIT HUB, ELECTRIC LITERATURE, AND BOOKPAGE
"Revelatory." -New York Times Book Review
"Essential reading. A companion for turbulent times." -Laura van den Berg
"Nothing short of a masterpiece." -The San Francisco Chronicle
Internationally bestselling author Miriam Toews' memoir of the will to write-a work of disobedient memory, humor, and exquisite craft set against a content-hungry, prose-stuffed society.
"Why do you write?" the organizer of a literary event in Mexico City asks Miriam Toews. Each attempted answer from Toews-all of them unsatisfactory to the organizer-surfaces new layers of grief, guilt, and futility connected to her sister's suicide. She has been keeping up, she realizes, a decades-old internal correspondence, filling a silence she barely understands. And we, her readers, come to see that the question is as impossible to answer as deciding whether to live life as a comedy or a tragedy.
Marking the first time Toews has written her own life in nonfiction, A Truce That Is Not Peace explores the uneasy pact a writer makes with memory. Wildly inventive yet masterfully controlled; slyly casual yet momentous; wrenching and joyful; hilarious and humane-this is Miriam Toews at her dazzling best, remaking her world and inventing an astonishing new literary form to contain it.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Novelist Toews (Fight Night) delivers a haunting meditation on writing and death in her first work of nonfiction. When Toews was invited to a literary conference in Mexico City, organizers asked her to submit an answer to the question "Why do you write?" Personal anecdotes, literary quotes, and biographical snippets about authors who died by suicide tumbled onto the page in response. Expanding on those thoughts, Toews unearths layers of grief in between bouts of profane humor ("My four-year-old grandson calls his one-year-old brother a fucking noodle head, and now I'm the one in a trouble") and mundane memories of backpacking trips and encounters with wildlife near her Toronto home. Her father and sister both killed themselves, each enveloped by long bouts of silence before their deaths, and Toews struggled to hold on in the aftermath, dreaming of being shot in the face and envisioning her own drowning. While often conversational, Toews's prose has the power stop the reader in her tracks: "Silence and writing are, if not quite the same thing, then allies," Toews muses, "each a misdirection of the unspeakable, and each a way of holding on." At once modest and profound, this slim volume packs a major punch. Readers will be wowed.
