Claire Vaye Watkins explore le paysage et les vies de l'Ouest américain, particulièrement les coins négligés et reculés du désert de Mojave. Son écriture se caractérise par une prose brute mais lyrique qui plonge dans des thèmes tels que la survie, la famille et la recherche d'identité dans des environnements hostiles. Watkins capture habilement la tension entre la sauvagerie de la nature et les désirs humains, avec des personnages confrontés à des défis existentiels. Son œuvre offre une perspective unique sur le mythe et la réalité américains, plongeant les lecteurs dans ses mondes impitoyables mais captivants.
Nevada jaillit de la confluence entre une sensibilite et un lieu. Avec ce recueil de nouvelles a la puissance d'evocation exceptionnelle, Claire Vaye Watkins se fraye vaillamment un chemin a travers la mythologie de l'Ouest americain, et par le biais de la creation litteraire affronte un heritage sanglant dont elle est la depositaire, celui de la Famille de Charles Manson. Comme les oeuvres de Cormac McCarthy ou d'Annie Proulx, ses histoires se deploient du sublime aux grands espaces, de l'intime a l'infini, de la Ruee vers l'or a la ville fantome en passant par le desert et le bordel, hommages poignants a tous les etres en lutte. Ce livre ressemble a un portrait du coeur humain, affame de beaute et d'amour, presque toujours dechiquete par ses appetits. Paul Harding (auteur des Foudroyes , prix Pulitzer)
Drawing on personal experiences with grief, loss, sisterhood, violence and death, these stories form a response to the genre of the Western, adding a rare, powerful, female voice to that tradition.
"The much-anticipated first novel from a Story Prize-winning "5 Under 35" fiction writer. In 2012, Claire Vaye Watkins's story collection, Battleborn, swept nearly every award for short fiction. Now this young writer, widely heralded as a once-in-a-generation talent, returns with a first novel that harnesses the sweeping vision and deep heart that made her debut so arresting to a love story set in a devastatingly imagined near future. Unrelenting drought has transfigured Southern California into a surreal, phantasmagoric landscape. With the Central Valley barren, underground aquifer drained, and Sierra snowpack entirely depleted, most "Mojavs," prevented by both armed vigilantes and an indifferent bureaucracy from freely crossing borders to lusher regions, have allowed themselves to be evacuated to internment camps. In Los Angeles' Laurel Canyon, two young Mojavs. Luz, once a poster child for the Bureau of Conservation and its enemies, and Ray, a veteran of the "forever war" turned surfer--squat in a starlet's abandoned mansion. Holdouts, they subsist on rationed cola and whatever they can loot, scavenge, and improvise. The couple's fragile love somehow blooms in this arid place, and for the moment, it seems enough. But when they cross paths with a mysterious child, the thirst for a better future begins. They head east, a route strewn with danger: sinkholes and patrolling authorities, bandits and the brutal, omnipresent sun. Ghosting after them are rumors of a visionary dowser a diviner for waterand his followers, who whispers say have formed a colony at the edge of a mysterious sea of dunes. Immensely moving, profoundly disquieting, and mind-blowingly original, Watkins's novel explores the myths we believe about others and tell about ourselves, the double-edged power of our most cherished relationships, and the shape of hope in a precarious future that may be our own"-- Provided by publisher
From "the most captivating voice to come out of the West since Annie Proulx" (Vogue), the furious, hilarious, soul-rending story of one woman's reckoning with marriage, work, sex, and motherhood.
In zehn beeindruckenden Geschichten erzählt Claire Vaye Watkins den Mythos des Wilden Westens neu. Sie thematisiert das Leben von Verlassenden und Zurückgelassenen vor der Kulisse des Westens, Las Vegas und Geisterstädten, während sie auch ihre eigene Familiengeschichte einfließen lässt.
