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by Maylis De Kerangal
A colorful cast of female characters contends with UFOs, sonic waves, and the legend of Buffalo Bill in a spellbinding novella and 7 short stories about the mysteries of place and language.
Ricocheting off of the book's exhilarating central novella and 7 short stories, the women we meet in Canoes are by turns indelibly witty, insightful, intimate, bracing, and profoundly interconnected.
"When did I start placing myself in the fable?" a young Parisian wonders as she tells her son the legend of Buffalo Bill, a spectral presence atop the mountain in their small Colorado town. She has just moved to the United States and everything disorients her – suburbs stretching along reptilian highways, a new house rigged like a studio set, but most of all, the sound of her husband's voice. Sam speaks with a different tone in English, not the soft and swift timbre of his native French. From a voice made new, Maylis de Kerangal opens up a torrent of curiosities, hauntings, and questions about place and language.
The women of these stories are mad about: stones, molds of human jaws, voicemail recordings, sonic waves, UFOs, and always how the texture of human voice entwines with their obsessions. With cosmic harmonics, vivid imagery, and a revelatory composition, Canoes will leave readers forever altered.
"De Kerangal's masterful collection examines alienation and grief at pivotal moments in her characters' lives ... Each story is richly complex, and the collection's recurring canoe imagery gives it the feel of a treasure map ... This understated volume packs a powerful punch." —Publishers Weekly (starred review)
"Exquisite ... De Kerangal pairs gloriously sensuous and caustically incisive visual descriptions of interiors, cities, highways, sprawling suburbs, land, and sky with uncanny and revealing soundscapes that capture the layered timbres of nature, humans, and machines. These unusual and vibrant stories are poetically recalibrating, droll, and intriguing." —Booklist (starred review)
"The stories capture fleeting ideas and moments ... Above all there's an appealing tone of exploration, of reaching for the ineffable in the past, present, and future ... An accomplished braid of explorations into sound and significance." —Kirkus Reviews
"The characters in Maylis de Kerangal's haunting stories are impassioned detectives or solitary archaeologists taking the measure of those traces by which we find our way. In their immersive observation they track the minute changes that transform everything they thought they knew about the way we're both jettisoned and anchored by those around us." —Jim Shepard
This information about Canoes was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Maylis de Kerangal is the award winning and critically acclaimed author of several books, including Naissance d'un pont (Birth of a Bridge), winner of the Prix Franz Hessel and Prix Médicis; Réparer les vivants, which won the Grand Prix RTL-Lire and whose English translation, The Heart, was one of the Wall Street Journal's Ten Best Fiction Works of 2016 and the winner of the 2017 Wellcome Book Prize; and Un chemin de tables, whose English translation, The Cook, was a New York Times Book Review Editors' Choice. Mend the Living was Longlisted for the Booker International Prize 2016.
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