VIRTUAL - Damion Searls MARSHLANDS

Start: 
Tuesday, January 19, 2021 - 7:00pm
Location: 

This event will be hosted on Zoom Webinar. Click here to register.

Damion Searls will be in conversation with Brazos' own Mark Haber.


A slim but powerful work of metafiction by a Nobel Prize-winning French writer and intellectual.

André Gide is the inventor of modern metafiction and of autofiction, and his short novel Marshlands shows him handling both forms with a deft and delightful touch. The protagonist of Marshlands is a writer who is writing a book called Marshlands, which is about a reclusive character who lives all alone in a stone tower. The narrator, by contrast, is anything but a recluse: He is an indefatigable social butterfly, flitting about the Paris literary world and always talking about, what else, the wonderful book he is writing, Marshlands. He tells his friends about the book, and they tell him what they think, which is not exactly flattering, and of course those responses become part of the book in the reader’s hand. Marshlands is both a poised satire of literary pretension and a superb literary invention, and Damion Searls’s new translation of this early masterwork by one of the key figures of twentieth-century literature brings out all the sparkle of the original.


Damion Searls has translated eleven books for NYRB Classics, including Uwe Johnson’s four-book novel Anniversaries (published in two volumes). This is his second translation of Gide’s Marshlands; he also rewrote it as “56 Water Street,” the first short story in his collection What We Were Doing and Where We Were Going.

Mark Haber's 2008 collection of stories, Deathbed Conversions, was translated into Spanish in 2017. He has served as a juror for the National Endowment for the Arts translation grant as well as the Best Translated Book Award. He lives in Houston, Texas, where he is a bookseller and the operations manager of Brazos Bookstore.

Marshlands By Andre Gide, Damion Searls (Translated by), Dubravka Ugresic (Preface by) Cover Image
By Andre Gide, Damion Searls (Translated by), Dubravka Ugresic (Preface by)
$14.95
ISBN: 9781681374727
Availability: BACKORDERED
Published: NYRB Classics - January 5th, 2021

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Reinhardt's Garden By Mark Haber Cover Image
$16.95
ISBN: 9781566895620
Availability: On Our Shelves Now
Published: Coffee House Press - October 1st, 2019