A meditation on the social political and philosophical questions of ageing, from the internationally acclaimed author of Returning to Reims

A few years ago, Didier Eribon’s mother began to lose her physical and cognitive autonomy. After several months of resistance, Eribon and his brothers were compelled to place her in a nursing home. A few short weeks later, his mother passed away.

In The Life, Old Age, and Death of a Working-Class Woman, Eribon continues the historical, political and personal reflection he began with Returning to Reims, this time turning his attention to the end of life. Tracing his mother’s rapid decline, and drawing on works by Simone de Beauvoir, Norbert Elias, Annie Ernaux and Michel Foucault, among others, Eribon transmutes his rage, sadness and the shame over her death into a strikingly nuanced portrait of the woman who raised him. Here, Eribon asks: how does our society treat the elderly? What is the place of bodies that can no longer assemble, discuss freedom or protest? Can the completely dependent speak for themselves – and if not, who can speak for them?

An honest, original and wide-ranging exploration of the relationship between ageing and class, politics and literature, this is a profound meditation on a fundamental human experience, too often overlooked.

Gide's Bent investigates the place of sexuality in the writings of Andre Gide, one of the first "out" modern writers. Focusing on his writing of the 1920s and 1930s, the years in which Gide wrote most openly about his homosexuality and also the years of his most notable left-wing political activity, Gide's Bent interrogates both the political content of his reflections on his homosexuality and the ways his sexuality inflected his political interests. Provocative examination of one of the first openly homosexual writers, Andre Gide.

'A brilliant novel... courageous, necessary and deeply touching' Guardian Edouard Louis grew up in a village in northern France where many live below the poverty line. His bestselling debut novel about life there, The End of Eddy, has sparked debate on social inequality, sexuality and violence. It is an extraordinary portrait of escaping from an unbearable childhood, inspired by the author's own. Written with an openness and compassionate intelligence, ultimately, it asks, how can we create our own freedom? 'A mesmerising story about difference and adolescence' New York Times 'Edouard Louis...is that relatively rare thing - a novelist with something to say and a willingness to say it, without holding back' The Times 'Louis' book has become the subject of political discussion in a way that novels rarely do' Garth Greenwell, New Yorker

'A deeply intelligent and searching book, one that makes you re-consider the narrative of your own life and reframe the story you tell yourself' Hilary Mantel A Guardian reader's Best Book of 2018 "There was a question that had come to trouble me a bit earlier, once I had taken the first steps on this return journey to Reims... Why, when I have had such an intense experience of forms of shame related to class ... why had it never occurred to me to take up this problem in a book?" Returning to Reims is a breathtaking account of one man's return to the town where he grew up after an absence of thirty years. It is a frank, fearlessly personal story of family, memory, identity and time lost. But it is also a sociologist's view of what itmeans to grow up working class and then leave that class; of inequality and shifting political allegiances in an increasingly divided nation. A phenomenon in France and a huge bestseller in Germany, Didier Eribon has written the defining memoir of our times. 'I was overwhelmed by this book. I felt I was reading the story of my life' Edouard Louis, author of The End of Eddy 'A book about self-invention and belonging' Colm Toibin

A bestseller in France following its publication in 1999, Insult and the Making of the Gay Self is an extraordinary set of reflections on "the gay question" by Didier Eribon, one of France's foremost public intellectuals. Known internationally as the author of a pathbreaking biography of Michel Foucault, Eribon is a leading voice in French gay studies. In explorations of gay subjectivity as it is lived now and as it has been expressed in literary history and in the life and work of Foucault, Eribon argues that gay male politics, social life, and culture are transformative responses to an oppressive social order. Bringing together the work of Jean-Paul Sartre, Pierre Bourdieu, Judith Butler, and Erving Goffman, he contends that gay culture and political movements flow from the need to overcome a world of insult in the process of creating gay selves.Eribon describes the emergence of homosexual literature in Britain and France at the turn of the last century and traces this new gay discourse from Oscar Wilde and the literary circles of late-Victorian Oxford to Andre Gide and Marcel Proust. He asserts that Foucault should be placed in a long line of authors-including Wilde, Gide, and Proust-who from the nineteenth century onward have tried to create spaces in which to resist subjection and reformulate oneself. Drawing on his unrivaled knowledge of Foucault's oeuvre, Eribon presents a masterful new interpretation of Foucault. He calls attention to a particular passage from Madness and Civilization that has never been translated into English. Written some fifteen years before The History of Sexuality, this passage seems to contradict Foucault's famous idea that homosexuality was a late-nineteenth-century construction. Including an argument for the use of Hannah Arendt's thought in gay rights advocacy, Insult and the Making of the Gay Self is an impassioned call for critical, active engagement with the question of how gay life is shaped both from without and within.

Michael Lucey offers a linguistic anthropological analysis of Proust's In Search of Lost Time. What happens when we talk? This deceptively simple question is central to Marcel Proust's monumental novel In Search of Lost Time. Both Proust's narrator and the novel that houses him devote considerable energy to investigating not just what people are saying or doing when they talk, but also what happens socioculturally through their use of language. Proust, in other words, is interested in what linguistic anthropologists call language-in-use. Michael Lucey elucidates Proust's approach to language-in-use in a number of ways: principally in relation to linguistic anthropology, but also in relation to speech act theory, and to Pierre Bourdieu's sociology. The book also includes an interlude after each of its chapters that contextualizes Proust's social-scientific practice of novel writing in relation to that of a number of other novelists, earlier and later, and from several different traditions, including Honore de Balzac, George Eliot, Virginia Woolf, Nathalie Sarraute, and Rachel Cusk. Lucey is thus able to show how, in the hands of quite different novelists, various aspects of the novel form become instruments of linguistic anthropological analysis. The result introduces a different way of understanding language to literary and cultural critics and explores the consequences of this new understanding for the practice of literary criticism more generally.

Never Say I reveals the centrality of representations of sexuality, and particularly same-sex sexual relations, to the evolution of literary prose forms in twentieth-century France. Rethinking the social and literary innovation of literary works by Marcel Proust, Andre Gide, and Colette, Michael Lucey considers these writers' production of a first-person voice in which matters related to same-sex sexuality could be spoken of. He shows how their writings and careers took on political and social import in part through the contribution they made to the representation of social groups that were only slowly coming to be publicly recognized. Proust, Gide, and Colette helped create - and also sometimes themselves embodied and enacted - persons and characters, points of view, and narrative practices from which to speak and write about people attracted to those of the same sex, or for them, or as them. Considering novels along with journalism, theatrical performances, correspondences, and face-to-face encounters, Lucey focuses on the interlocking social and formal dimensions of the use of the first person. category but also as a collectively produced social artifact, demonstrating that Proust's, Gide's, and Colette's use of the first-person involved a social process of assuming the authority to speak about certain issues, or on behalf of certain people. Lucey reveals the three writers as both practitioners and theorists of the first-person; he traces how, when they figured themselves or another first person in certain statements regarding same-sex identity, they self-consciously called attention to the creative effort involved in doing so.

Michael Lucey offers a linguistic anthropological analysis of Proust's In Search of Lost Time. What happens when we talk? This deceptively simple question is central to Marcel Proust's monumental novel In Search of Lost Time. Both Proust's narrator and the novel that houses him devote considerable energy to investigating not just what people are saying or doing when they talk, but also what happens socioculturally through their use of language. Proust, in other words, is interested in what linguistic anthropologists call language-in-use. Michael Lucey elucidates Proust's approach to language-in-use in a number of ways: principally in relation to linguistic anthropology, but also in relation to speech act theory, and to Pierre Bourdieu's sociology. The book also includes an interlude after each of its chapters that contextualizes Proust's social-scientific practice of novel writing in relation to that of a number of other novelists, earlier and later, and from several different traditions, including Honore de Balzac, George Eliot, Virginia Woolf, Nathalie Sarraute, and Rachel Cusk. Lucey is thus able to show how, in the hands of quite different novelists, various aspects of the novel form become instruments of linguistic anthropological analysis. The result introduces a different way of understanding language to literary and cultural critics and explores the consequences of this new understanding for the practice of literary criticism more generally.

A bestseller in France following its publication in 1999, Insult and the Making of the Gay Self is an extraordinary set of reflections on "the gay question" by Didier Eribon, one of France's foremost public intellectuals. Known internationally as the author of a pathbreaking biography of Michel Foucault, Eribon is a leading voice in French gay studies. In explorations of gay subjectivity as it is lived now and as it has been expressed in literary history and in the life and work of Foucault, Eribon argues that gay male politics, social life, and culture are transformative responses to an oppressive social order. Bringing together the work of Jean-Paul Sartre, Pierre Bourdieu, Judith Butler, and Erving Goffman, he contends that gay culture and political movements flow from the need to overcome a world of insult in the process of creating gay selves.Eribon describes the emergence of homosexual literature in Britain and France at the turn of the last century and traces this new gay discourse from Oscar Wilde and the literary circles of late-Victorian Oxford to Andre Gide and Marcel Proust. He asserts that Foucault should be placed in a long line of authors-including Wilde, Gide, and Proust-who from the nineteenth century onward have tried to create spaces in which to resist subjection and reformulate oneself. Drawing on his unrivaled knowledge of Foucault's oeuvre, Eribon presents a masterful new interpretation of Foucault. He calls attention to a particular passage from Madness and Civilization that has never been translated into English. Written some fifteen years before The History of Sexuality, this passage seems to contradict Foucault's famous idea that homosexuality was a late-nineteenth-century construction. Including an argument for the use of Hannah Arendt's thought in gay rights advocacy, Insult and the Making of the Gay Self is an impassioned call for critical, active engagement with the question of how gay life is shaped both from without and within.

In more than ninety novels and novellas, Honore de Balzac (1799-1850) created a universe teeming with over two thousand characters. The Misfit of the Family reveals how Balzac, in imagining the dense, vividly rendered social world of his novels, used his writing as a powerful means to understand and analyze-as well as represent-a range of forms of sexuality. Moving away from the many psychoanalytic approaches to the novelist's work, Michael Lucey contends that in order to grasp the full complexity with which sexuality was understood by Balzac, it is necessary to appreciate how he conceived of its relation to family, history, economics, law, and all the many structures within which sexualities take form.The Misfit of the Family is a compelling argument that Balzac must be taken seriously as a major inventor and purveyor of new tools for analyzing connections between the sexual and the social. Lucey's account of the novelist's deployment of "sexual misfits" to impel a wide range of his most canonical works-Cousin Pons, Cousin Bette, Eugenie Grandet, Lost Illusions, The Girl with the Golden Eyes-demonstrates how even the flexible umbrella term "queer" barely covers the enormous diversity of erotic and social behaviors of his characters. Lucey draws on the thinking of Michel Foucault and Pierre Bourdieu and engages the work of critics of nineteenth-century French fiction, including Naomi Schor, D. A. Miller, Franco Moretti, and others. His reflections on Proust as Balzac's most cannily attentive reader suggest how the lines of social and erotic force he locates in Balzac's work continued to manifest themselves in twentieth-century writing and society.

In this provocative new book, Michael Lucey examines the unstable convergence of sexual, political, and literary commitments in Andre Gide's writing of the 1920s and 1930s--the years in which Gide wrote most openly about his homosexuality and participated most actively in left-wing politics. Through close readings of his memoirs, novels, and political tracts, Gide's Bent interrogates both the political content of Gide's ways of reflecting on his homosexuality and the ways his sexuality inflected his political interests.
One of the first modern writers to be "out," Gide used his writings during this period to do more than simply publicize his homosexuality. He also wrote in a way that reveals sexuality itself as an arena that challenges easy distinctions between public and private. His writing thus addresses not only the psychoanalytic, but also the social and even political foundations to the formation of any private sexual subjectivity; it further considers the ways personal, private struggles might be implicated in or lead on to larger public engagements. Gide's Bent follows this complicated writing practice in Gide's psychoanalytically complex novel The Counterfeiters and in his attempt at a feminist narrative, The School for Wives; in his explicit memoir of his early life, If It Dies; in Corydon, his idiosyncratic investigation of pederasty; in his anti-colonialist travel journal, Travels in the Congo; and in his disillusioned Return from the U.S.S.R..