Alice Blackhurst

Oct 16, 2024 | the-tls.co.uk | European Literature |Alice Blackhurst

Welcome to the TLSWinner of the 2024 Niche Market Newspaper of the Year Award and proudly niche since 1902.

Mar 28, 2024 | newleftreview.org | Alice Blackhurst

Heather Lewis’s Notice – recently republished after decades out of print – is a blistering and disturbing work. Rigorously deviant, technically merciless, to read it is almost an act of physical exertion, the effect viscerally stunning like a gut-punch. The resignation implied by its title – in the sense of ‘giving’ notice, abandoning a task – impels you to encounter it as an agonizingly extended suicide note.

Oct 5, 2023 | newleftreview.org | Alice Blackhurst

Best-known in the English-speaking world for her 1992 debut The Governesses, a frenzied modern-day conte of female appetite translated in 2018, the French writer Anne Serre says she has little time for the vogue of fictionalised autobiography. ‘It’s not enough to write in your own voice, come to the page with what you have to say, and call it a novel’, she has argued. ‘The whole point of a novel should be that we don’t know who is speaking’.

May 21, 2023 | theguardian.com | Alice Blackhurst

When Annie Ernaux opens the front door to me at her home in Cergy, 40 minutes outside Paris, she immediately bursts out laughing. The source of her hilarity is my extensive baggage, which I’ve dragged from London on an early Eurostar. “Don’t worry,” I say, mortified, “I’m not planning to move in”, which causes more chuckles. Ernaux has a laugh that is delicate and raucous, generous and earthy. She laughs with and not at. Ernaux is the first French woman to win the Nobel prize in literature.

Mar 1, 2023 | jacobin.com | Alice Blackhurst

In 1985, the French newspaper Libération sent the celebrated writer Marguerite Duras to cover a sensational crime captivating France: the death of a four-year-old boy, “little Grégory,” in the Vologne, a river in the east of the country. What made this case so shocking to onlookers was that the child was presumed to have been murdered and disposed along the riverbank by his mother, Christine Villemin.