Annie Ernaux

The Years is a personal narrative of the period 1941 to 2006 told through the lens of memory, impressions past and present—even projections into the future—photos, books, songs, radio, television and decades of advertising, headlines, contrasted with intimate conflicts and writing notes from 6 decades of diaries.

Local dialect, words of the times, slogans, brands and names for the ever-proliferating objects, are given voice here. The voice we recognize as the author’s continually dissolves and re-emerges. Ernaux makes the passage of time palpable. Time itself, inexorable, narrates its own course, consigning all other narrators to anonymity. A new kind of autobiography emerges, at once subjective and impersonal, private and collective.

On its 2008 publication in France, The Years came as a surprise. Though Ernaux had for years been hailed as a beloved, bestselling and award-winning author, The Years was in many ways a departure: both an intimate memoir “written” by entire generations, and a story of generations telling a very personal story. Like the generation before hers, the narrator eschews the “I” for the “we” (or “they”, or “one”) as if collective life were inextricably intertwined with a private life that in her parents’ generation ceased to exist. She writes of her parents’ generation (and could be writing of her own book): “From a common fund of hunger and fear, everything was told in the “we” and impersonal pronouns.”

Considered by many to be the iconic French memoirist’s defining work, The Years is a narrative of the period 1941 to 2006 told through the lens of memory, impressions past and present, cultural habits, language, photos, books, songs, radio, television, advertising and news headlines. Annie Ernaux invents a form that is subjective and impersonal, private and communal, and a new genre – the collective autobiography – in order to capture the passing of time. At the confluence of autofiction and sociology, The Years is ‘a Remembrance of Things Past for our age of media domination and consumerism’ (New York Times), a monumental account of twentieth-century French history as refracted through the life of one woman.

Translated by Alison L. Strayer.

Taking the form of random journal entries over seven years, Exteriors captures the feeling of contemporary living on the outskirts of Paris. Poignantly lyrical, chaotic, and strangely alive.

Born in 1940, ANNIE ERNAUX grew up in Normandy, studied at Rouen University, and began teaching high school. From 1977 to 2000, she was a professor at the Centre National d'Enseignement par Correspondance. Her books, in particular A Man's Place and A Woman's Story, have become contemporary classics in France. She won the prestigious Prix Renaudot for A Man's Place when it was first published in French in 1984. The English edition was a New York Times Notable Book and a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize. The English edition of A Woman's Story was a New York Times Notable Book.

Sibyl's Mouths is the most recent in a series of publications by Pure Fiction, a writing and performance group with shifting members active since 2011.

From February 12 to March 6, 2022, Pure Fiction presented an exhibition and performance program at the Kölnischer Kunstverein in Cologne titled "Shifting Theater: Sibyl's Mouths". The starting point was a collective reading of Mary Shelley's 1826 novel The Last Man, in which the narrator discovers a collection of scribbled oak leaves scattered in a cave outside Naples. Alleged prophecies of the Cumean Sibyl, the textual fragments inscribed on the leaves foretell the story of an epidemic that ravages the globe in the 2100's—a period where solitude, intimacy, and the perception of time is radically renegotiated.
Through a multiplicity of textual genres and writerly approaches, contributors examine the questions and forms that emerge from prophecy: the role of the voice in text, writing and performance; fragmentary heterogeneous narratives.

The mouth is consulted, not only as a mouthpiece or as a cavernous instrument for vocalization but as an essential part of the digestive tract. Processes in the gut, such as assimilation, excretion, and regurgitation involve multiple temporal directionalities, and may function as metaphorical gateways to intuitive truths.

Contributions by Rosa Aiello, Gerry Bibby, Coleman Collins, Ayanna Dozier, Annie Ernaux, Amelia Groom, Michèle Graf & Selina Grüter, Monilola Olayemi Ilupeju, Ellen Yeon Kim, Bitsy Knox, Dan Kwon, Erika Landström, Enad Marouf, Katrin Mayer, Aislinn McNamara, Kamila & Jasmina Metwaly, Luzie Meyer, Vera Palme, Theresa Patzschke, Georgia Sagri, Mahsa Saloor, Elif Saydam, Mark von Schlegell, Simon Speiser, Elaine Tam, C.S. Tolan, Mikhail Wassmer, Anna Zacharoff.

Strangers Within is an anthology exploring the idea of documentary as encounter through essays, stories, interviews and other creative responses by filmmakers, artists, and writers. The texts engage with the risks of encounter, unsettling assumptions about the distinctions between host and guest; stranger and friend; self and other; documentarian and protagonist. Opening up a series of questions about the mystery of another person, whose difference and unknowability is already a part of one’s self, the anthology offers a multidisciplinary approach to understanding the convergences between encounter, hospitality and autobiography.

With Khalik Allah, Ruth Beckermann, Jon Bang Carlsen, Adam Christensen, Annie Ernaux, Gareth Evans, Jane Fawcett, Xiaolu Guo, Umama Hamido, Therese Henningsen, Marc Isaacs, Mary Jiménez Freeman-Morris, Juliette Joffé, Andrew and Eden Kötting, David MacDougall, Trinh T. Minh-ha, Toni Morrison, Bruno de Wachter and Andrea Luka Zimmerman.

'My aim for Mother Reader has been to bring together examples of the best writing on motherhood of the last sixty years, writing that tells firsthand of the mother's experience.

Many of the writings in Mother Reader comment on and interpolate one another, in citations, in footnotes, in direct homage. As I was assembling this collection one text would lead to one another, treasure-hunt fashion, the clue provided by an acknowledgement or bibliography. And just as often the writing circles back.

In Mother Reader chapters are excerpted from autobiographies, memoirs, and novels; entries are lifted from diaries; essays and stories are culled from collections, anthologies, and periodicals. My project has been to assemble a compendium or sampler of these ''kindred spirit'' works on motherhood, so that readers, and especially mothers with limited time on their hands, can access in one volume the best literature on the subject and know where turn to continue reading." [Moyra Davey in the introduction]

Writings by Margaret Atwood, Susan Bee, Rosellen Brown, Myrel Chernick, Lydia Davis, Buchi Emeta, Annie Ernaux, Mary Gaitskill, Susan Griffin, Nancy Hutson, Mary Kelly, Jane Lazarre, Ursula Le Giun, Doris Lessing, Ellen McMahon, Margaret Mead, Vivian Montgomery, Toni Morrison, Tillie Olsen, Alicia Ostrker, Grace Paley, Sylvia Plath, Adrienne Rich, Sara Ruddick, Lynda Schor, Mira Schor, Dena Schottenkirk, Mona Simpson, Elizabeth Smart, Joan Snyder, Elke Solomon, Susan Rubin Suleiman, Alice Walker, Joy Williams, Martha Wilson, Barbara Zucker.