Non-Fiction Books
From the New York Times bestselling author of Call Me By Your Name , Out of Egypt is a richly colored memoir chronicling the exploits of a flamboyant Jewish family, from its bold arrival in cosmopolitan Alexandria to its defeated exodus three generations later. In elegant and witty prose, André Aciman introduces us to the marvelous eccentrics who shaped his life--Uncle Vili, the strutting daredevil, soldier, salesman, and spy; the two grandmothers, the Princess and the Saint, who gossip in six languages; Aunt Flora, the German refugee who warns that Jews lose everything "at least twice in their lives." And through it all, we come to know a boy who, even as he longs for a wider world, does not want to be led, forever, out of Egypt.
"Moving, deeply introspective and honest" ( Publishers Weekly ) reflections on exile and memory from five award-winning authors. All of the authors in Letters of Transit have written award-winning works on exile, home, and memory, using the written word as a tool for revisiting their old homes or fashioning new ones. Now in paperback are five newly commissioned essays offering moving distillations of their most important thinking on these themes. Andre Aciman traces his migrations and compares his own transience with the uprootedness of many moderns. Eva Hoffman examines the crucial role of language and what happens when your first one is lost. Edward Said defends his conflicting political and cultural allegiances. Novelist Bharati Mukherjee explores her own struggle with assimilation. Finally, Charles Simic remembers his thwarted attempts at "fitting in" in America.
From the highly acclaimed author of Out of Egypt and Call Me by Your Name , a series of linked essays on memory by "the poet of disappointed love--and of the city" ( New York Times Book Review ). In these fourteen essays Andre Aciman, one of the most poignant stylists of his generation, dissects the experience of loss, moving from his forced departure from Alexandria as a teenager, though his brief stay in Europe and finally to the home he's made (and half invented) on Manhattan's Upper West Side. From False Papers : We remember not because we have something we wish to go back to, nor because memories are all we have. We remember because memory is our most intimate, most familiar gesture. Most people are convinced I love Alexandria. In truth, I love remembering Alexandria. For it is not Alexandria that is beautiful. Remembering is beautiful.
The signs of France are a gateway into a country proud of its artistic heritage—a past that reveals itself in every nuance of daily life. Steven Rothfeld has been recording these images for decades, capturing the milky cornflower blues and faded yellows, the hand-lettered, the neatly printed, even signs made from blown glass and wooden carvings. Their uniqueness and the beauty and sensibility of these signs reflect the visual sense of identity that is France. Rothfeld's gallery is accompanied by acclaimed author André Aciman's text, transporting the reader fully to another world.
From André Aciman, the New York Times bestselling author of Call Me By Your Name , comes an eclectic collection of essays on memory and exile inspired by the quiet moments of an introspective traveler A Boston Globe Best Nonfiction Book of the Year Celebrated as one of the most poignant stylists of his generation, André Aciman has written a luminous series of linked essays about time, place, identity, and art that show him at his very finest. From beautiful and moving pieces about the memory evoked by the scent of lavender; to meditations on cities like Barcelona, Rome, Paris, and New York; to his sheer ability to unearth life secrets from an ordinary street corner, Alibis reminds the reader that Aciman is a master of the personal essay. "A beautiful new book of essays . . . Aciman's deep fidelity to the world of the senses, and to the translation of those sensations into prose, makes Alibis a delight."― The New York Times Book Review
A collection of the year’s best essays selected by André Aciman, author of the worldwide bestseller Call Me by Your Name. “An essay is the child of uncertainty,” André Aciman contends in his introduction to The Best American Essays 2020 . “The struggle to write what one hopes is entirely true, and the long incubation every piece of writing requires of a writer who is thinking difficult thoughts, are what ultimately give the writing its depth, its magnitude, its grace.” The essays Aciman selected center on people facing moments of deep uncertainty, searching for a greater truth. From a Black father’s confrontation of his son’s illness, to a divorcée’s transcendent experience with strangers, to a bartender grieving the tragic loss of a friend, these stories are a master class not just in essay writing but in empathy, artfully imbuing moments of hardship with understanding and that elusive grace. The Best American 2020 Essays includes RABIH ALAMEDDINE • BARBARA EHRENREICH • LESLIE JAMISON JAMAICA KINCAID • ALEX MARZANO-LESNEVICH • A. O. SCOTT • JERALD WALKER • STEPHANIE POWELL WATTS and others
'Roman Hours' is the first publication in collaboration between writer André Aciman and photographer Jeannette Montgomery Barron. The idea for this project grew out of a series of conversations between the two authors and their shared desire to capture Rome. The book brings together a selection of images that, put together, offer a reflection on the contradictions, colours, and sounds of Rome, where the ancient is glimpsed through the modern and the bright colours fade into the characteristic ocher tones of the Eternal City.
The New York Times –bestselling author of Find Me and Call Me by Your Name returns to the essay form with his collection of thoughts on time, the creative mind, and great lives and works Irrealis moods are a category of verbal moods that indicate that certain events have not happened, may never happen, or should or must or are indeed desired to happen, but for which there is no indication that they will ever happen. Irrealis moods are also known as counterfactual moods and include the conditional, the subjunctive, the optative, and the imperative―all best expressed in this book as the might-be and the might-have-been. One of the great prose stylists of his generation, André Aciman returns to the essay form in Homo Irrealis to explore what time means to artists who cannot grasp life in the present. Irrealis moods are not about the present or the past or the future; they are about what might have been but never was but could in theory still happen. From meditations on subway poetry and the temporal resonances of an empty Italian street to considerations of the lives and work of Sigmund Freud, C. P. Cavafy, W. G. Sebald, John Sloan, Éric Rohmer, Marcel Proust, and Fernando Pessoa and portraits of cities such as Alexandria and St. Petersburg, Homo Irrealis is a deep reflection on the imagination’s power to forge a zone outside of time’s intractable hold.
The author of Call Me by Your Name returns with a deeply romantic memoir of his time in Rome while on the cusp of adulthood. In Roman Year , André Aciman captures the period of his adolescence that began when he and his family first set foot in Rome, after being expelled from Egypt. Though Aciman’s family had been well-off in Alexandria, all vestiges of their status vanished when they fled, and the author, his younger brother, and his deaf mother moved into a rented apartment in Rome’s Via Clelia. Though dejected, Aciman’s mother and brother found their way into life in Rome, while Aciman, still unmoored, burrowed into his bedroom to read one book after the other. The world of novels eventually allowed him to open up to the city and, through them, discover the beating heart of the Eternal City. Aciman’s time in Rome did not last long before he and his family moved across the ocean, but by the time they did, he was leaving behind a city he loved. In this memoir, the author, a genius of “the poetry of the place” (John Domini, The Boston Globe ), conjures the sights, smells, tastes, and people of Rome as only he can. Aciman captures, as if in amber, a living portrait of himself on the brink of adulthood and the city he worshipped at that pivotal moment. Roman Year is a treasure, unearthed by one of our greatest prose stylists.