{"product_id":"these-possible-lives-9780811226875","title":"These Possible Lives","description":"New Directions is proud to present Fleur Jaeggy's strange and mesmerizing essays about the writers Thomas De Quincey, John Keats, and Marcel Schwob. A renowned stylist of hyper-brevity in fiction, Fleur Jaeggy proves herself an even more concise master of the essay form, albeit in a most peculiar and lapidary poetic vein. Of De Quincey's early nineteenth-century world we hear of the habits of writers: Charles Lamb \"spoke of 'Lilliputian rabbits' when eating frog fricassse\"; Henry Fuseli \"ate a diet of raw meat in order to obtain splendid dreams\"; \"Hazlitt was perceptive about musculature and boxers\"; and \"Wordsworth used a buttery knife to cut the pages of a first-edition Burke.\" In a book of \"blue devils\" and night visions, the Keats essay opens: \"In 1803, the guillotine was a common child's toy.\" And poor Schwob's end comes as he feels \"like a 'dog cut open alive'\" \"His face colored slightly, turning into a mask of gold. His eyes stayed open imperiously. No one could shut his eyelids. The room smoked of grief.\" Fleur Jaeggy's essays--or are they prose poems?--smoke of necessity: the pages are on fire.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003eAbout the Author\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003e\u003ci\u003eJaeggy, Fleur:\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e - \u003cstrong\u003eFleur Jaeggy\u003c\/strong\u003e-- \"a wonderful, brilliant, savage writer\" (Susan Sontag) --was born in 1940 in Zurich and lives in Milan. Her work has been acclaimed as \"small-scale, intense, and impeccably focused \"(The New Yorker) and \"addictive\" (Kirkus).\u003cb\u003e\u003ci\u003eProctor, Minna:\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e - The author of \u003cem\u003eDo You Hear What I Hear? Religious Calling, the Priesthood, and My Father\u003c\/em\u003e, and the editor of \u003cem\u003eThe Literary Review\u003c\/em\u003e, \u003cstrong\u003eMinna Proctor\u003c\/strong\u003e won the PEN\/Renato Poggioli Award for her translation of Federigo Tozzi's \u003cem\u003eLove in Vain\u003c\/em\u003e.","brand":"New Directions Publishing Corporation","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":50675055690002,"sku":"9780811226875","price":9.99,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0831\/4771\/8930\/files\/img_0fc61d06-3b4b-4108-9346-9c0709e2b73c.jpg?v=1733870751","url":"https:\/\/surprise-castle.myshopify.com\/products\/these-possible-lives-9780811226875","provider":"Surprise Castle","version":"1.0","type":"link"}