Ellis Island

by Georges Perec, Harry Mathews (Translator), Mónica de la Torre (Afterword)

Overview

The French novelist Georges Perec has continually captured the American imagination, most recently with the publication of A Voic, a novel written without the letter "e." Ellis Island holds us in thrall once again. With poetic grace, insistent questioning, and a stunning carousel of images, Perec and filmmaker Robert Bober open our eyes to the intriguing blend of permanence and transience that is Ellis Island.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780811229555
Publisher:	New Directions Publishing Corporation
Publication date:	02/09/2021
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	64
File size:	2 MB

About the Author

The many beautiful, complex books of the acclaimed French author Georges Perec (1936–1982) include Life: A User’s Manual, A Void, W: Or the Memory of Childhood, Things: A Story of the Sixties, A Man Asleep, and 53 Days.

Harry Mathews (1930–2017) was born in New York. A founding editor of the literary journal Locus Solus, he wrote novels, poetry, short fiction, essays, and translations from the French. His many books include Cigarettes (1987), The Sinking of the Odradek Stadium (1999), and The Human Country (2002).

Mónica de la Torre’s is the author of Repetition Nineteen; she teaches at Brooklyn College.

Editorial Reviews

"Ellis Island combines poetry with prose and literary quotation with empirical fact, employing the hybridity of text to reflect upon the very concept of integration. While exploring the island—its history, its buildings, its leftovers—Perec identifies Ellis Island as a non-place, an isle of tears, and reveals Emma Lazarus’s metaphor of America’s ‘golden door,’ which is emblazoned upon the Statue of Liberty, to be little but a false promise."

Frieze

"Graceful and intriguing."

Book Beat

"The lyric study of Ellis Island is a mournful counterfactual about what might have been had his parents—and many others—made it across the ocean.… If Perec took pride in not repeating himself, it did not stop him from returning, as if in an elliptical orbit, to the same obsessions: police states, citizens going missing, organized brutality, human fragility."

The New Yorker - Paul Grimstad