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Title details for Parisian Lives by Deirdre Bair - Available

Parisian Lives

by Deirdre Bair
Suzanne Toren
Audiobook
Listen to a sample Listen to a sample
PULITZER PRIZE FINALIST
A Publishers Weekly Best Book of 2019
National Book Award-winning biographer Deirdre Bair explores her fifteen remarkable years in Paris with Samuel Beckett and Simone de Beauvoir, painting intimate new portraits of two literary giants and revealing secrets of the biographical art.
In 1971 Deirdre Bair was a journalist and a recently minted Ph.D. who managed to secure access to Nobel Prize-winning author Samuel Beckett. He agreed that she could be his biographer despite her never having written a biography before. The next seven years of probing conversations, intercontinental research, singular encounters with Beckett's friends, and peculiar cat-and-mouse games resulted in Samuel Beckett: A Biography, which went on to win the National Book Award and propel Bair to her next subject: Simone de Beauvoir.
     Where Beckett had been retiring and elusive, Beauvoir was domineering and all encompassing. Plus, there was a catch: Beauvoir and Beckett despised each other—and lived in the same neighborhood. Bair, who resorted to dodging one subject or the other by hiding out in the great cafés of Paris, learned that what works in terms of process for one biography rarely applies to the next. Her seven-year relationship with the forceful and difficult Beauvoir required a radical change in approach and yielded another groundbreaking literary profile while also awakening Bair to an era of burgeoning feminist consciousness.
     Drawing on Bair's extensive notes from the period, including never-before-told anecdotes and details considered impossible to publish at the time, Parisian Lives gives us an entirely new perspective on the all-too-human side of these legendary thinkers. It is also a warmly personal reflection on the writing life—its compromises, its joys, and its rewards.
Expand title description text
Publisher: Books on Tape Edition: Unabridged
Awards:

OverDrive Listen audiobook

  • ISBN: 9780593146873
  • File size: 397975 KB
  • Release date: November 12, 2019
  • Duration: 13:49:06

MP3 audiobook

  • ISBN: 9780593146873
  • File size: 398021 KB
  • Release date: November 12, 2019
  • Duration: 13:54:05
  • Number of parts: 13

Formats

OverDrive Listen audiobook
MP3 audiobook

subjects

Biography & Autobiography Nonfiction

Languages

English

PULITZER PRIZE FINALIST
A Publishers Weekly Best Book of 2019
National Book Award-winning biographer Deirdre Bair explores her fifteen remarkable years in Paris with Samuel Beckett and Simone de Beauvoir, painting intimate new portraits of two literary giants and revealing secrets of the biographical art.
In 1971 Deirdre Bair was a journalist and a recently minted Ph.D. who managed to secure access to Nobel Prize-winning author Samuel Beckett. He agreed that she could be his biographer despite her never having written a biography before. The next seven years of probing conversations, intercontinental research, singular encounters with Beckett's friends, and peculiar cat-and-mouse games resulted in Samuel Beckett: A Biography, which went on to win the National Book Award and propel Bair to her next subject: Simone de Beauvoir.
     Where Beckett had been retiring and elusive, Beauvoir was domineering and all encompassing. Plus, there was a catch: Beauvoir and Beckett despised each other—and lived in the same neighborhood. Bair, who resorted to dodging one subject or the other by hiding out in the great cafés of Paris, learned that what works in terms of process for one biography rarely applies to the next. Her seven-year relationship with the forceful and difficult Beauvoir required a radical change in approach and yielded another groundbreaking literary profile while also awakening Bair to an era of burgeoning feminist consciousness.
     Drawing on Bair's extensive notes from the period, including never-before-told anecdotes and details considered impossible to publish at the time, Parisian Lives gives us an entirely new perspective on the all-too-human side of these legendary thinkers. It is also a warmly personal reflection on the writing life—its compromises, its joys, and its rewards.
Expand title description text
Biography & Autobiography Nonfiction
  • Details

    Publisher:
    Books on Tape
    Edition:
    Unabridged

    Awards:

    OverDrive Listen audiobook
    ISBN: 9780593146873
    File size: 397975 KB
    Release date: November 12, 2019
    Duration: 13:49:06

    MP3 audiobook
    ISBN: 9780593146873
    File size: 398021 KB
    Release date: November 12, 2019
    Duration: 13:54:05
    Number of parts: 13

  • Creators
  • Formats
    OverDrive Listen audiobook
    MP3 audiobook
  • Languages
    English