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Title details for Parisian Lives by Deirdre Bair - Available

Parisian Lives

by Deirdre Bair
ebook
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A The Times & Sunday Times Book of the Year
'Fascinating... Wonderfully entertaining and absorbing' Sunday Times

'Gripping... A story well told.' New York Times Book Review
Finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for Biography 2020
In 1971 Deirdre Bair was a journalist with a recently acquired PhD who managed to secure access to Nobel Prize-winning author Samuel Beckett. He agreed that she could write his biography despite never having written - or even read - a biography herself. The next seven years of intimate conversations, intercontinental research, and peculiar cat-and-mouse games resulted in Samuel Beckett: A Biography, which went on to win the National Book Award and propel Deirdre to her next subject: Simone de Beauvoir. The catch? De Beauvoir and Beckett despised each other - and lived essentially on the same street. While quite literally dodging one subject or the other, and sometimes hiding out in the backrooms of the great cafés of Paris, Bair learned that what works in terms of process for one biography rarely applies to the next. Her seven-year relationship with the domineering and difficult de Beauvoir required a radical change in approach, yielding another groundbreaking literary profile.
Drawing on Bair's extensive notes from the period, including never-before-told anecdotes and details that were considered impossible to publish at the time, Parisian Lives is full of personality and warmth and gives us an entirely new window on the all-too-human side of these legendary thinkers.

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Publisher: Atlantic Books
Awards:

OverDrive Read

  • ISBN: 9781786492678
  • Release date: February 6, 2020

EPUB ebook

  • ISBN: 9781786492678
  • File size: 828 KB
  • Release date: February 6, 2020

Formats

OverDrive Read
EPUB ebook

subjects

Biography & Autobiography Nonfiction

Languages

English

A The Times & Sunday Times Book of the Year
'Fascinating... Wonderfully entertaining and absorbing' Sunday Times

'Gripping... A story well told.' New York Times Book Review
Finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for Biography 2020
In 1971 Deirdre Bair was a journalist with a recently acquired PhD who managed to secure access to Nobel Prize-winning author Samuel Beckett. He agreed that she could write his biography despite never having written - or even read - a biography herself. The next seven years of intimate conversations, intercontinental research, and peculiar cat-and-mouse games resulted in Samuel Beckett: A Biography, which went on to win the National Book Award and propel Deirdre to her next subject: Simone de Beauvoir. The catch? De Beauvoir and Beckett despised each other - and lived essentially on the same street. While quite literally dodging one subject or the other, and sometimes hiding out in the backrooms of the great cafés of Paris, Bair learned that what works in terms of process for one biography rarely applies to the next. Her seven-year relationship with the domineering and difficult de Beauvoir required a radical change in approach, yielding another groundbreaking literary profile.
Drawing on Bair's extensive notes from the period, including never-before-told anecdotes and details that were considered impossible to publish at the time, Parisian Lives is full of personality and warmth and gives us an entirely new window on the all-too-human side of these legendary thinkers.

Expand title description text
Biography & Autobiography Nonfiction