Boston Book Festival with Christine Angot

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For the fourth year in a row, the French Library is delighted to host four events, co-presented with the Boston Book Festival and the Cultural Services of the French Embassy. At 2:15 PM, Christine Angot will present her book, Incest.

Format: 45 min lecture on the book with a moderator followed by a 15 min Q&A with the public and a book signing.
Language: English

Free

About the Book

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The narrator is falling out from a torrential relationship with another woman. Delirious with love and yearning, her thoughts grow increasingly cyclical and wild, until exposing the trauma lying behind her pain. With the intimacy offered by a confession, the narrator embarks on a psychoanalysis of herself, giving the reader entry into her tangled experiences with homosexuality, paranoia, and, at the core of it all, incest. In a masterful translation from the French by Tess Lewis, Christine Angot’s Incest audaciously confronts its readers with one of our greatest taboos.

About the Author

Novelist, short story writer, and playwright Christine Angot is acclaimed for her unselfconscious, insistent prose style, which, although deceptively direct, elaborates, often in fragmented form, her intensely personal, often traumatic experiences. She is one of France’s boldest and most distinctive contemporary writers. Angot co-authored Claire Denis’s film, Un beau soleil interieur, which premiered at Cannes in 2017, and won the Prix SACD; her most recent novel, Un amour impossible (forthcoming in English translation with the title Incest from Archipelago Books), was awarded the Prix Décembre 2015, was successfully adapted for the stage (Théâtre de l’Odéon) in 2017, and is currently in pre-production as a film.

About the Moderator

Annabel Kim is Assistant Professor of French in the department of Romance Languages and Literatures at Harvard University. Her research interests center on feminist writing and theory, the novel (in particular, the contemporary novel), and, more broadly, the ethical and political implications of writing and reading fiction. Her first book, Unbecoming Language: Anti-Identitarian French Feminist Fiction, on Nathalie Sarraute, Monique Wittig, and Anne Garréta, will be published by the Ohio State University Press in Fall 2018.

About the Boston Book Festival

Since 2009, the Boston Book Festival celebrates the power of words to stimulate, agitate, unite, delight, and inspire by holding year-round events culminating in an annual, free festival that promotes a culture of reading and ideas and enhances the vibrancy of Boston.

About the Cultural Services at the French Embassy

The Cultural Services of the French Embassy in the U.S. provide a platform for exchange and innovation between French and American artists, intellectuals, educators, students, the tech community, and the general public. Based in New York City, Washington D.C., and eight other cities across the US, the Cultural Services develop the cultural economy by focusing on six principal fields of action: the arts, literature, cinema, the digital sphere, French language and higher education.

Photo © Léa Crespi

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