11/12/2023 0 Comments A little life book![]() ![]() If assured 2013 debut, The People in the Trees, a dark allegory of Western hubris, put her on the literary map, her massive new novel.signals the arrival of a major new voice in fiction." - Megan O'Grady, Vogue brought me to tears more than once it is a book that asks the reader to feel as fully as Jude does, with a deep aesthetic and ethical purpose of observing and witnessing the pain of others." - Jenny Davidson, Bookforum A Litle Life is epic in scope, riveting on every page, and frequently stomach-churning in its explorations of pain and loss. "Hanya Yanagihara's second novel asks for a kind of immersion at odds with the practices of contemporary attention-deficit culture. The book shifts from a generational portrait to something darker and more tender: an examination of the depths of human cruelty, counterbalanced by the restorative powers of friendship." - The New Yorker (Briefly Noted) "This exquisite, unsettling novel follows four male friends from their meeting as students at a prestigious Northeastern college through young adulthood and into middle age. Like the axiom of equality, A Little Life feels elemental, irreducible-and, dark and disturbing though it is, there is beauty in it." -Jon Michaud, The New Yorker Yanagihara's novel can also drive you mad, consume you, and take over your life. And having upset our expectations once, Yanagihara does it again, by refusing us the consolations we have come to expect from stories that take such a dark turn. A Little Life becomes a surprisingly subversive novel-one that uses the middle-class trappings of naturalistic fiction to deliver an unsettling meditation on sexual abuse, suffering, and the difficulties of recovery. In A Little Life, it's life's evanescent blessings that maybe, but only maybe, can save you." -John Powers, NPR ![]() "With her sensitivity to everything from the emotional nuance to the play of light inside a subway car, Yanagihara is superb at capturing the radiant moments of beauty, warmth and kindness that help redeem the bad stuff. Here is an epic study of trauma and friendship written with such intelligence and depth of perception that it will be one of the benchmarks against which all other novels that broach those subjects (and they are legion) will be measured." -Sam Sacks, The Wall Street Journal "Yanagihara's immense new book, A Little Life, announces her, as decisively as a second work can, as a major American novelist. In rich and resplendent prose, Yanagihara has fashioned a tragic and transcendent hymn to brotherly love, a masterful depiction of heartbreak, and a dark examination of the tyranny of memory and the limits of human endurance.įINALIST FOR THE 2015 KIRKUS PRIZE FOR FICTION Yet their greatest challenge, each comes to realize, is Jude himself, by midlife a terrifyingly talented litigator yet an increasingly broken man, his mind and body scarred by an unspeakable childhood, and haunted by what he fears is a degree of trauma that he'll not only be unable to overcome-but that will define his life forever. Over the decades, their relationships deepen and darken, tinged by addiction, success, and pride. There is kind, handsome Willem, an aspiring actor JB, a quick-witted, sometimes cruel Brooklyn-born painter seeking entry to the art world Malcolm, a frustrated architect at a prominent firm and withdrawn, brilliant, enigmatic Jude, who serves as their center of gravity. When four classmates from a small Massachusetts college move to New York to make their way, they're broke, adrift, and buoyed only by their friendship and ambition. Truly an amazement-and a great gift for its readers. An epic about love and friendship in the twenty-first century that goes into some of the darkest places fiction has ever traveled and yet somehow improbably breaks through into the light. Brace yourself for the most astonishing, challenging, upsetting, and profoundly moving book in many a season. ![]()
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