Emmanuel Carrère

FROM THE BESTSELLING AUTHOR OF THE ADVERSARY'Compelling... Carrere has the gift of speaking simply and directly of the essentials' Evening StandardBeset by arguments and the fear that things between them may be falling apart, writer Emmanuel Carrere and his partner, Helene, journey to Sri Lanka to spend Christmas along the coast.

A selection of the best short work by France's greatest living nonfiction writer A New York Times Notable Books of 2020 No one writes nonfiction like Emmanuel Carr re. Although he takes cues from such literary heroes as Truman Capote and Janet Malcolm, Carr re has, over the course of his career, reinvented the form in a search for truth in all its guises. Dispensing with the rules of genre, he takes what he needs from every available form or discipline--be it theology, historiography, fiction, reportage, or memoir--and fuses it under the pressure of an inimitable combination of passion, curiosity, intellect, and wit. With an oeuvre unique in world literature for its blend of empathy and playfulness, Carr re stands as one of our most distinctive and important literary voices. 97,196 Words introduces Carr re's shorter works to an English-language audience. Featuring more than thirty extraordinary essays written over an illustrious twenty-five-year period of Carr re's creative life, this collection shows an exceptional mind at work. Spanning continents, histories, and personal relationships, and treating everything from American heroin addicts to the writing of In Cold Blood, from the philosophy of Philip K. Dick to a single haunting sentence in a minor story by H. P. Lovecraft, from Carr re's own botched interview with Catherine Deneuve to the week he spent following the future French president Emmanuel Macron, 97,196 Words considers the divides between truth, reality, and our shared humanity as it explores remarkable events and eccentric lives, including Carr re's own.

A sweeping fictional account of the early Christians, whose unlikely beliefs conquered the world Gripped by the tale of a Messiah whose blood we drink and body we eat, the genre-defying author Emmanuel Carr re revisits the story of the early Church in his latest work. With an idiosyncratic and at times iconoclastic take on the charms and foibles of the Church fathers, Carr re ferries readers through his "doors" into the biblical narrative. Once inside, he follows the ragtag group of early Christians through the tumultuous days of the faith's founding. Shouldering biblical scholarship like a camcorder, Carr re re-creates the climate of the New Testament with the acumen of a seasoned storyteller, intertwining his own account of reckoning with the central tenets of the faith with the lives of the first Christians. Carr re puts himself in the shoes of Saint Paul and above all Saint Luke, charting Luke's encounter with the marginal Jewish sect that eventually became Christianity, and retracing his investigation of its founder, an obscure religious freak who died under notorious circumstances. Boldly blending scholarship with speculation, memoir with journalistic muckraking, Carr re sets out on a headlong chase through the latter part of the Bible, drawing out protagonists who believed they were caught up in the most important events of their time. An expansive and clever meditation on belief, The Kingdom chronicles the advent of a religion, and the ongoing quest to find a place within it.

'This is a brilliant, shocking book ... also witty, painfully self-critical and humane ... it is a work of great literature' Tim Whitmarsh, Guardian 'The Kingdom, already a huge bestseller in France, is thrilling, magnificent and strange' Bryan Appleyard, Sunday TimesThe sensational international bestseller from one of France's most fêted writers - an epic novel telling the story of Christianity as it has never been told before, and one man's crisis of faith. Corinth, ancient Greece, two thousand years ago. An itinerant preacher, poor, wracked by illness, tells the story of a prophet who was crucified in Judea, who came back from the dead, and whose return is a sign of something enormous. Like a contagion, the story will spread over the city, the country and, eventually, the world. Emmanuel Carrère's astonishing historical epic tells the story of the mysterious beginnings of Christianity, bringing to life a distant, primeval past of strange sects, apocalyptic beliefs and political turmoil. In doing so Carrère, once himself a fervent believer, questions his own faith, asks why we believe in resurrection, and what it means. The Kingdom is his masterpiece.'An utterly brilliant book' Catherine Nixey, The Times

'As a writer, Carrere is straight berserk' Junot DiazIn this non-fiction novel - road trip, confession, and erotic tour de force - Emmanuel Carrere pursues two consuming obsessions: the disappearance of his grandfather amid suspicions that he was a Nazi collaborator in the Second World War;

Himmelriket berättar historien om de första kristna kring slutet av det första århundrandet efter Kristi födelse. Den berättar en historia från kejsar Tiberius regeringstid om hur huvudsakligen två män, Paulus och Lukas, förvandlar en liten judisk sekt samlad kring sin korsfäste förkunnare som de menar är messias, till en religion som på tre sekel först undergräver hela det romerska riket, därpå erövrar hela världen och i våra dagar ännu angår en fjärdedel av jordens befolkning. Emmanuel Carrères berättelse blir en fresk över medelhavsländernas tidiga historia, skakade av politiska och religiösa nycker under en täckmantel i form av pax romana. Den skildrar en stormig tid, med ständiga omvälvningar, tvära vändningar och färgstarka figurer. Men Himmelriket är också, vilket skickligt vävs in i den historiska kontexten, en betraktelse över vad kristendomen är, vad den fortfarande kräver av oss, på vilket sätt den ännu angår oss alla, troende eller inte, och hur de orimligt tvärställda värderingar som den föreskriver (de första skola bliva de sista osv.) har kunnat få en sådan enorm framgång och varaktighet. Det ska dock sägas att dessa reflektioner utan undantag görs med stor respekt och påtaglig ömhet för aktörerna i denna häpnadsväckande historia, både svunna och närvarande, och de hela tiden formuleras utifrån en djupt mänsklig dimension. Det är en respekt och ömhet som Emmanuel Carrère även visar gentemot sig själv som den han en gång var. Här, liksom i alla hans böcker sedan Doktor Romand, är författarens engagemang i det han berättar fullständigt reservationslöst. Under tre år för 25 år sedan var Emmanuel Carrère praktiserande katolik och djupt för att inte säga omåttligt troende. I boken berättas också lite i skymundan av den stora Historien hans egen historia, förändringarna han genomgick då och hur religionen blev en fristad och en tillflykt. Och även om han idag har släppt tron finns fortfarande viljan att granska den, att undersöka vad den egentligen innebär, utan förbehåll och med fullständigt öppna kort och med de brutal uppriktighet och total avsaknad av självcensur som har blivit Emmanuel Carrères signum. Värt att nämna är också Emmanuel Carrères speciella sätt att skriva denna historia. Dels den enormt innehållsrika och samvetsgranna dokumentation som gör att man lär sig saker av berättlesen, många saker. Därtill den speciella tonkänsla som, i kraft av det slags flöde som säkert handlag ger, i en och samma rörelse kan går från det förtroliga till det allvarliga, inte undviker något sammanhang eller fält, och därigenom kan blanda reflektioner kring Lukas med erinringar från en porrfilm, och minnen från en religiös kris som och problem med barnvakten (som, ska sägas, är en amerikans au-pair, väl förtrogen med Philip K. Dick).

Acclaimed master of psychological suspense, Emmanuel Carrere, whose fiction John Updike described as 'stunning' (New Yorker) explores the double life of a respectable doctor, eighteen years of lies, five murders, and the extremes to which ordinary people can go.

"A un moment de ma vie, j'ai été chrétien. Cela a duré trois ans. C'est passé. Affaire classée, alors ? Il faut qu'elle ne le soit pas tout à fait pour que, vingt ans plus tard, j'aie éprouvé le besoin d'y revenir. Ces chemins du Nouveau Testament que j'ai autrefois parcourus en croyant, je les parcours aujourd'hui - en romancier ? en historien ? Disons en enquêteur".

TELEGRAPH BOOKS OF THE YEAR and OBSERVER BOOKS OF THE YEAR 2014Limonov is not a fictional character, but he could have been. He's lived a hundred lives. He was a hoodlum in Ukraine, an idol of the Soviet underground, punk-poet and valet to a billionaire in Manhattan, fashion writer in Paris, lost soldier in the Balkans, and now, in the chaos after the fall of communism a charismatic party leader of a gang of political desperados. Limonov sees himself as a hero, but he is also a bastard. Carrere suspends judgment. Carrère decided to write about Limonov because he thought "that his life, romantic and reckless, tells us something, not just about Limonov or Russia, but the story of all of us after the end of World War II."

Named a Best Book of the Year by The New York Times and The Guardian (London) A thrilling page-turner that also happens to be the biography of one of Russia's most controversial figures This is how Emmanuel Carr re, the magnetic journalist, novelist, filmmaker, and chameleon, describes his subject: "Limonov is not a fictional character. There. I know him. He has been a young punk in Ukraine, the idol of the Soviet underground; a bum, then a multimillionaire's butler in Manhattan; a fashionable writer in Paris; a lost soldier in the Balkans; and now, in the fantastic shambles of postcommunism, the elderly but charismatic leader of a party of young desperadoes. He sees himself as a hero; you might call him a scumbag: I suspend my judgment on the matter. It's a dangerous life, an ambiguous life: a real adventure novel. It is also, I believe, a life that says something. Not just about him, Limonov, not just about Russia, but about all our history since the end of the Second World War." So Eduard Limonov isn't fictional-but he might as well be. This pseudobiography isn't a novel, but it reads like one: from Limonov's grim childhood to his desperate, comical, ultimately successful attempts to gain the respect of Russia's literary intellectual elite; to his immigration to New York, then to Paris; to his return to the motherland. Limonov could be read as a charming picaresque. But it could also be read as a troubling counternarrative of the second half of the twentieth century, one that reveals a violence, an anarchy, a brutality, that the stories we tell ourselves about progress tend to conceal.