Marie-Claire Blais

"In Augustino, Marie-Claire Blais delivers a timely, and unsettling new installment in her ongoing portrait of North American life." "Augustino and the Choir of Destruction is set in a post-September 11 world, on an island in the Gulf of Mexico that is home to the full spectrum of humanity: the rich and the poor, the powerful and the humble, artists and criminals, young, middle-aged, and old. Marie-Claire Blais brilliantly shows in one flashing stroke the teeming lives and uncensored thoughts of men and women; victims and tormentors; kamikaze pilots and petty thieves; Marie Curie sacrificing herself to her thirst for knowledge; Our Lady of the Bags announcing the end of the world; Charles, a great poet cut down by AIDS; Petites Cendres, a transvestite prostituting himself to a customer; Caroline, an artist and photographer who has seen all the hidden treasures of the world; and Augustino, a clairvoyant child-writer who senses the destructive forces at work in the heart of his everyday life. These individual destinies combine in Blais' vision to form a single, harmonic texture, capturing the troubled spirit of our disjointed age."--Jacket.

Thunder and Light is the much-anticipated second book in Marie-Claire Blais's spectacular and ambitious trilogy chronicling the mood of our apocalyptic age. It is the sequel to These Festive Nights, winner of the Governor General's Award for French fiction; a novel Le Devoir called the Divine Comedy of our time.

It is the spring of 1963. The young Quebec author, Marie-Claire Blais, has just won a coveted Guggenheim fellowship. She chooses Cambridge, Massachusetts, as the place where she will begin her writer's apprenticeship with her mentor, Edmund Wilson. American Notebooks is much more than a fascinating autobiographical account of the intellectual flowering of a great writer. An album of exquisitely drawn literary portraits of companions, intellectuals, writers, musicians, artists and social activists of the period: Edmund and Elena Wilson, Mary Meigs, Maud Morgan, Barbara Deming, Truman Capote, her first Quebec publisher, now Senator, Jacques Hebert, and many others, it also introduces many of the real life personalities who have inspired her fictional characters.

The story of Pierre, a little boy whose response to every question, sugeestion, or statement is always, "I don't care!" until an encounter with a lion changes his mind.

Rǐmpression d'un roman paru en 1965. Une vision sombre, ťrange et personnelle. La vie et les pensěs d'un jeune hřos "qui n'est qu'intelligence et sensibilit"̌, rv̌olte et dšir d'innocence. Une grande oeuvre de tendance rǎliste, centrě sur la vie d'une famille qub̌čoise pauvre que domine une grand-mr̈e toute puissante. Prix Mďicis 1966. Prix France-Canada de la mm̊e anně. [SDM].

Autobiographie lyrique en trois volets, respectivement parus en 1968, 1969 et 1970. Le lecteur assiste à l'enfance, puis à "l'enterrement", enfin à la résurrection de Pauline Archange, fille de la misère et d'un monde oublié de Dieu et des hommes, qui quitte couvent et famille pour voler de ses propres ailes. Pas d'appareil critique. Seulement trois brefs extraits critiques. Prix du gouverneur général, section romans, 1968.

"The Execution is Marie-Claire Blais" only play for the stage. Set in a boarding school, it is the story of two schoolboys who plot the murder of one their classmates and enact the crime. As a play, it is a study of innocence, evil, and complicity, themes well-known to readers of Mille. Blais' fiction"--P. of cover.

The Angel of Solitude presides over the lives of eight young lesbian women who strive to achieve an all-female utopia within which homophobia, their pasts and their differences are abolished. As the narrative unfolds, we realize that none of the women are present directly - they come into being, and live their lives, only in and through the memories, observations and imaginations of each of the others. Thus, their mission to establish a fortress for themselves remains inconclusive; they have too much to overcome, both within themselves and in the world at large, to abandon their individual struggles for the sake of the group.

"A middle-aged novelist is on his way to a meeting of writers held at a luxurious villa isolated from the world. Within this dreamlike atmosphere, he falls prey to nightmares in which his beloved--but often rebellious--children and other artists are threatened by the violence of our world. Of all the books in Marie-Claire Blais's masterful novel cycle, A Twilight Celebration is the one that examines the prophetic side of the writer and the burden that falls to him in a world whose fate is yet to be determined."--