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Aurelia, Aurélia: A Memoir Audiobook
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Publisher Description
An eerily dream-like memoir, and the first work of nonfiction by one of our most inventive novelists
Aurelia, Aurélia begins on a boat. The author, sixteen years old, is traveling to Europe. She has the confidence of a teenager cultivating her earliest obsessions—Woolf, Durrell, Bergman—sure of her maturity, sure of the life that awaits her. Soon she finds herself in a Greece far drearier than the Greece of fantasy, “climbing up and down the steep paths every morning with the real old women, looking for kindling.”
Kathryn Davis’s hypnotic new book is a meditation on the way imagination shapes life and how life, as it moves forward, shapes imagination. At its center is the death of her husband, Eric. The book unfolds as a study of their marriage, its deep joys and stinging frustrations; it is also a book about time, the inexorable events that determine beginnings and endings.
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“The ordinariness of author Kathryn Davis’s voice, which is light and pleasant despite being slightly nasal, focuses listeners on the extra-ordinariness of her brief memoir…[She] delivers her writing carefully, with a poet’s word-by-word unhurried pace.”
— AudioFile
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“A memoir that mimics the atemporal quality of the episodes that give meaning to life…an entrancing song.”
— New York Times -
“A glimmering memoir…[that] successfully transcend[s] the conventional let-me-tell-you style of memoir in favor of something rarer, more ethereal.”
— Los Angeles Times -
“It’s the consideration of grief’s reverberations―that is, not what grief is, but what grief makes one think about―that serves to sharpen the sense of loss.”
— Cleveland Review of Books -
“A profound meditation on grief…A transcendent work of literary divination.”
— Kirkus Reviews (starred review) -
“[An] exquisite, lightning-bolt bright, zigzagging, and striking musing on the self, life, death.”
— Booklist -
“[Davis] has a gift for writing about the most difficult subjects with honesty, precision, and grace, and though much of it is heartbreaking Aurelia, Aurélia made me rejoice.”
— Sigrid Nunez, author of Naked Sleeper -
“[An] acutely intelligent memoir, sometimes sorrowful, sometimes quietly funny, but always wide awake to the strange wonder of being.”
— Kevin Brockmeier, author of The Truth about Celia
Awards
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A New Yorker Best Books of the Year Pick
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About Kathryn Davis
Kathryn Davis is an award-winning American novelist. She is a recipient of the Kafka Prize, both the Morton Dauwen Zabel Award (1999) and the Katherine Anne Porter Award (2016) from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, a 2000 Guggenheim Fellowship, and the Lannan Literary Award for Fiction in 2006. Davis is senior fiction writer on the faculty of the writing program at Washington University in St. Louis; she lives in Montpelier, Vermont.