Includes 14 color still-life photographs by the authors.
A LitHub Most Anticipated Book of 2024

A must-read for lovers of words, images, and Ernaux herself. So. . . everyone?--Jessie Gaynor, LitHub

Annie Ernaux has long foregrounded physical and emotional sensations as the building blocks of her autobiographical writing. However, it is in The Use of Photography where the connection between the body and subjectivity most powerfully emerges.--Lisa Connell in French Forum

These photos, in which the bodies are absent, and the eroticism is only represented by the abandoned clothes, were a reminder of my possible, permanent absence.--Annie Ernaux

Annie Ernaux and Marc Marie met in January 2003 and became lovers almost immediately. A short time later, he accompanied her to the Institut Curie, where she was having surgery for breast cancer. A deep bond formed between Annie and Marc precisely during this time of great uncertainty within Ernaux as to whether she would live or die from the cancer.

Early in their affair, Ernaux found herself entranced each morning by the sight of clothes strewn about, chairs out of place, and the remains of their last meal of the evening before still on the table. The two lovers began to take still life photographs, and to write. Their efforts to save the fleeting beauty of these moments were, as Ernaux would describe later in an interview, material proof of what had happened there, of love.

The Use of Photography is a defining work in Ernaux's career, leading directly to the book that would come next, her masterpiece, The Years.

Annie Ernaux's work presents a breathtakingly frank, fearless, many-sided account of the female experience during the past century.--Liesl Schillinger, Oprah Daily

One of the New York Times's 100 Best Books of the 21st Century

Shortlisted for the 2019 Man Booker International Prize

Considered by many to be the iconic French memoirist's defining work and a breakout bestseller when published in France in 2008

The Years is a personal narrative of the period 1941 to 2006 told through the lens of memory, impressions past and present--even projections into the future--photos, books, songs, radio, television and decades of advertising, headlines, contrasted with intimate conflicts and writing notes from 6 decades of diaries.

Local dialect, words of the times, slogans, brands and names for the ever-proliferating objects, are given voice here. The voice we recognize as the author's continually dissolves and re-emerges. Ernaux makes the passage of time palpable. Time itself, inexorable, narrates its own course, consigning all other narrators to anonymity. A new kind of autobiography emerges, at once subjective and impersonal, private and collective.

On its 2008 publication in France, The Years came as a surprise. Though Ernaux had for years been hailed as a beloved, bestselling and award-winning author, The Years was in many ways a departure: both an intimate memoir written by entire generations, and a story of generations telling a very personal story. Like the generation before hers, the narrator eschews the I for the we (or they, or one) as if collective life were inextricably intertwined with a private life that in her parents' generation ceased to exist. She writes of her parents' generation (and could be writing of her own book): From a common fund of hunger and fear, everything was told in the we and impersonal pronouns.

Co-winner of the 2018 French-American Foundation Translation Prize in Nonfiction
Winner of the 2017 Marguerite Yourcenar Prize for her entire body of work
Winner of the 2016 Strega European Prize

A New York Times Notable Book

In her spare, stark style, Annie Ernaux documents the desires and indignities of a human heart ensnared in an all-consuming passion.

Blurring the line between fact and fiction, an unnamed narrator attempts to plot the emotional and physical course of her 2 year relationship with a married foreigner where every word, event, and person either provides a connection with her beloved or is subject to her cold indifference.

With courage and exactitude, she seeks the truth behind an existence lived entirely for someone else, and, in the pieces of its aftermath, she is able to find it.

Another masterpiece of remembering from Annie Ernaux, the Man Booker International Prize-shortlisted author of The Years.

In A Girl's Story, Annie Ernaux revisits the season 50 years earlier when she found herself overpowered by another's will and desire. In the summer of 1958, 18-year-old Ernaux submits her will to a man's, and then he moves on, leaving her without a master, bereft.

Now, 50 years later, she realizes she can obliterate the intervening years and return to consider this young woman that she wanted to forget completely. And to discover that here, submerged in shame, humiliation, and betrayal, but also in self-discovery and self-reliance, lies the origin of her writing life.

Happening recounts what it was like to be a young woman whose life changed -- and world ominously narrowed -- in 1963 with an unwanted pregnancy. . . . It feels urgently of the moment.
--The New York Times

In 1963, Annie Ernaux, 23 and unattached, realizes she is pregnant. Shame arises in her like a plague: Understanding that her pregnancy will mark her and her family as social failures, she knows she cannot keep that child.

This is the story, written forty years later, of a trauma Ernaux never overcame. In a France where abortion was illegal, she attempted, in vain, to self-administer the abortion with a knitting needle. Fearful and desperate, she finally located an abortionist, and ends up in a hospital emergency ward where she nearly dies.

In Happening, Ernaux sifts through her memories and her journal entries dating from those days. Clearly, cleanly, she gleans the meanings of her experience.

Now an award-winning film by Audrey Diwan
Winner of the Golden Lion at the Venice International Film Festival
Official Selection of the Sundance Film Festival

A New York Times Notable Book

Annie Ernaux's father died exactly two months after she passed her practical examination for a teaching certificate. Barely educated and valued since childhood strictly for his labor, Ernaux's father had grown into a hard, practical man who showed his family little affection.

Narrating his slow ascent towards material comfort, Ernaux's cold observation reveals the shame that haunted her father throughout his life. She scrutinizes the importance he attributed to manners and language that came so unnaturally to him as he struggled to provide for his family with a grocery store and cafe in rural France.

Over the course of the book, Ernaux grows up to become the uncompromising observer now familiar to the world, while her father matures into old age with a staid appreciation for life as it is and for a daughter he cautiously, even reluctantly admires. A Man's Place is the companion book to her critically acclaimed memoir about her mother, A Woman's Story.

A New York Times Notable Book

A deeply affecting account of mothers and daughters, youth and age, and dreams and reality (Kirkus Reviews)

Upon her mother's death from Alzheimer's, Ernaux embarks on a daunting journey back through time, as she seeks to capture the real woman, the one who existed independently from me, born on the outskirts of a small Normandy town, and who died in the geriatric ward of a hospital in the suburbs of Paris.

She explores the bond between mother and daughter, tenuous and unshakable at once, the alienating worlds that separate them, and the inescapable truth that we must lose the ones we love. In this quietly powerful tribute, Ernaux attempts to do her mother the greatest justice she can: to portray her as the individual she was. She writes, I believe I am writing about my mother because it is my turn to bring her into the world.

One of Annie Ernaux's most exciting and idiosyncratic works now in paperback for the first time.

In this novel, which takes the form of journal entries made over the course of seven years, Annie Ernaux concentrates on the ephemeral encounters that take place just on the periphery of a person's lived environment. She captures the feeling of contemporary living on the outskirts of a great city: tortured, chaotic, lyrical, and powerfully alive. Exteriors is in many ways the most ecstatic of Ernaux's books--the first in which she appears largely free of the haunting personal relationships she has written about so powerfully elsewhere, and the first in which she is able to leave the past behind her.

The diary of one of France's most important, award-winning writers during the year she had a passionate and secret love affair with a Russian diplomat.

Getting Lost is the diary Annie Ernaux kept during the year and a half she had a secret love affair with a younger, married man, a Russian diplomat. Her novel, Simple Passion, was based on this affair, but here her writing is immediate, unfiltered.

In these diaries it is 1989 and Annie is divorced with two grown sons, living outside of Paris and nearing fifty. Her lover escapes the city to see her there and Ernaux seems to survive only in expectation of these encounters, saying his desire for me is the only thing I can be sure of. She cannot write, she trudges distractedly through her various other commitments in the world, she awaits his next call; she lives only to feel desire and for the next rendezvous. When he is gone and the desire has faded, she feels that she is a step closer to death.

Lauded for her spare prose, Ernaux here removes all artifice, her writing pared down to its most naked and vulnerable. Getting Lost is as strong a book as any that she has written, a haunting, desperate view of strong and successful woman who seduces a man only to lose herself in love and desire.

Once again the work of the writer Annie Ernaux appears as both a rigorous study of life and an experiment. These fragments of living, however evanescent, are precious, irreplaceable, like a skin that never fades. --Caroline Montpetit in Le Devoir

The Young Man is Annie Ernaux's account of her passionate love affair with A., a man some 30 years younger, when she was in her fifties. The relationship pulls her back to memories of her own youth and at the same time leaves her feeling ageless, outside of time-- together with a sense that she is living her life backwards.

Amidst talk of having a child together, she feels time running its course, and menopause approaching. The Young Man recalls Ernaux as the scandalous girl she once was, but is composed with the mastery and the self-assurance she has achieved across decades of writing. It was first published in France in 2022.

My father tried to kill my mother one Sunday in June, in the early afternoon, begins Shame, the probing story of the 12 year old girl who will become the author herself, and the single traumatic memory that will echo and resonate throughout her life.

With the emotionally rich voice of great fiction and the diamond-sharp analytical eye of a scientist, Annie Ernaux provides a powerful reflection on experience and the power of violent memory to endure through time, to determine the course of a life.

A New Yorker Best of the Week Pick - A World Literature Today Notable Translation of 2023

Translated from the French with great intelligence and sensitivity by Alison Strayer. . . . Ernaux's diary is a provocation: to accept these life scenes as worthy of our time and attention.--Kate Briggs, Washington Post

A dryly charming look at the way the French live now, through the sharp eyes of its most acclaimed chronicler.--Kirkus Reviews

For half a century, the French writer Annie Ernaux has transgressed the boundaries of what stories are considered worth telling, what subjects worth exploring. In this probing meditation, Ernaux turns her attention to the phenomenon of the big-box superstore, a ubiquitous feature of modern life that has received scant attention in literature.

Recording her visits to a store near Paris for over a year, she captures the world that exists within its massive walls. Through Ernaux's eyes, the superstore emerges as a great human meeting place, a spectacle--a flashy, technologically advanced incarnation of the ancient marketplace where capitalism, cultural production, and class converge, dictating our rhythms of desire. With her relentless powers of observation, Ernaux takes the measure of a place we thought we knew, calling us to question the experiences we overlook and to gaze more deeply into ordinary life.

I Remain in Darkness is a new high water mark for Ernaux, surging with raw emotional power and her sublime ability to use language to apprehend her own life's particular music.

A Washington Post Top Memoir of 1999

Self-regard, in the works of Annie Ernaux, is always an excruciatingly painful and exact process. Here, she revisits the peculiar kind of self-fulfillment possible when we examine ourselves in the aftermath of a love affair, and sometimes, even, through the eyes of the lost beloved.

A Frozen Woman charts Ernaux's teenage awakening, and then the parallel progression of her desire to be desirable and her ambition to fulfill herself in her chosen profession - with the inevitable conflict between the two. And then she is thirty years old, a teacher married to an executive, mother of two infant sons. She looks after their nice apartment, raises her children. And yet, like millions of other women, she has felt her enthusiasm and curiosity, her strength and her happiness, slowly ebb under the weight of her daily routine. The very condition that everyone around her seems to consider normal and admirable for a woman is killing her.

While each of Ernaux's books contain an autobiographical element, A Frozen Woman, one of Ernaux's early works, concentrates the spotlight piercingly on Annie herself. Mixing affection, rage and bitterness, A Frozen Woman shows us Ernaux's developing art when she still relied on traditional narrative, before the shortened form emerged that has since become her trademark.

Originally published in 1977, Do What They Say or Else is the second novel by French author Annie Ernaux. Set in a small town in Normandy, France, the novel tells the story of a fifteen-year-old girl named Anne, who lives with her working-class parents. The story, which takes place during the summer and fall of Anne's transition from middle school to high school, is narrated in a stream-of-consciousness style from her point of view. Ernaux captures Anne's adolescent voice, through which she expresses her keen observations in a highly colloquial style.

As the novel progresses and Anne's feelings about her parents, her education, and her sexual encounters evolve, she grows into a more mature but also more conflicted and unhappy character, leaving behind the innocence of her middle school years. Not only must she navigate the often-confusing signals she receives from boys, but she also finds herself moving further and further away from her parents as she surpasses their educational level and worldview.

GANADORA DEL PREMIO NOBEL DE LITERATURA 2022

La pasión amorosa, observada con lucidez por una de las autoras francesas más reconocidas de la actualidad.

Desde el mes de septiembre del año pasado no he hecho más que esperar a un hombre: he estado esperando que me llamara y que viniera a verme , así arranca la historia sobre la pasión de una mujer culta, inteligente, económicamente independiente, divorciada y con hijos ya mayores, que pierde la cabeza por un diplomático de un país del Este que siente debilidad por la buena ropa y los coches aparatosos. Muy pocas veces antes se había hablado con tan descarnado descaro de cómo el deseo puede trastocarnos.

La escritura desnuda de Annie Ernaux introduce a los lectores, con la precisión de un entomólogo, en el febril y devastador desvarío que cualquiera puede haber experimentado alguna vez en su vida.

ENGLISH DESCRIPTION

WINNER OF THE 2022 NOBEL PRIZE IN LITERATURE

The passion of love, observed with clarity by one of today's most renowned French authors.

Since last September, all I've done is wait for a man: I've been waiting for him to call me and come see me, thus begins the story of a cultured, intelligent, financially independent woman, divorced with grown children, who loses her mind over a diplomat from an Eastern country with a weakness for fine clothes and flashy cars. Rarely has anyone spoken so bluntly about how desire can turn our lives upside down.

Annie Ernaux's bare writing introduces readers, with the precision of an entomologist, to the feverish and devastating delirium that anyone may have experienced at some point in their life.

«J'écrirai por venger ma race

It was as a young woman that Annie Ernaux first wrote these words in her diary, giving a name to her purpose in life as a writer. She returns to them in her stirring defense of literature and of political writing in her Nobel Lecture, delivered in Stockholm on December 7, 2022.

To write of her own life, she asserts, is to shatter the loneliness of experiences endured and repressed; to mine individual experience is to find collective emancipation. Ernaux's speech is a bold assertion of the capacity of writing to give people a sense of their own worth, and of one writer's commitment to bearing witness to life, its joys and its injustices.

Includes Annie Ernaux's Nobel lecture, her Nobel banquet speech, a congratulatory speech by Professor Anders Olsson, Chair of the Nobel Committee for Literature, and the Nobel opening address by Professor Carl-Henrik Heldin, Chairman of the board of the Nobel Foundation.

GANADORA DEL PREMIO NOBEL DE LITERATURA 2022

En abril de 1967, la autora y protagonista, por entonces joven aspirante a profesora de secundaria, supera el examen de capacitación en un liceo de Lyon para orgullo (y recelo) de su padre, antiguo obrero que, procedente del medio rural y tras trabajar duramente, ha acabado convertido en propietario de un pequeño comercio en las provincias. Para él, eso significa otro paso adelante en su difícil ascenso social; sin embargo, poco le dura esta satisfacción, ya que fallece dos meses después. Padre e hija han traspasado sus respectivos lugares dentro de la sociedad. Pero se han mirado entre sí con suspicacia, y la distancia entre ambos ha ido tornándose cada vez más dolorosa. Aquí, Annie Ernaux indaga, pues, no sólo en los complejos y los prejuicios, los usos y las normas de comportamiento de un segmento social de límites difusos, cuyo espejo es la culta y educada burguesía urbana, sino también en la dificultad de habitar un espacio propio dentro de la sociedad.

WINNER OF THE 2022 NOBEL PRIZE IN LITERATURE

When we stray from the marked path, the distances with those around us sometimes become insurmountable.

Includes a colorful limited edition poster.

The harrowing beauty and brevity of these books and their apparent simplicity disguise somewhat the punishing cost of their honesty. --Rachel Cusk, New York Times Magazine

Winner of the 2022 Nobel Prize in Literature, Annie Ernaux is considered one of Europe's most important contemporary writers. She has expanded the very meaning of literature and has asserted her feminism and class consciousness in the stories she tells.

Spanning Annie Ernaux's English language oeuvre from 1991-2023, this collection of all thirteen titles published by Seven Stories attests to Ernaux's range, depth, and enduring literary presence. Includes translations by Linda Coverdale, Tanya Leslie, Anna Moschovakis, and Alison L. Strayer.

Annie Ernaux: The Boxed Set includes:
- The Years
- Getting Lost
- Simple Passion
- A Girl's Story
- Happening
- Shame
- A Man's Place
- A Woman's Story
- A Frozen Woman
- I Remain in Darkness
- Exteriors
- The Possession
- The Young Man

A folded limited edition poster is included in the boxed set. When unfolded, the beautiful vertical format features a portrait of Annie Ernaux on one side and all of the books listed above on the other side with a colorful design by Seven Stories Press art director Stewart Cauley.