These Possible Lives

"Jaeggys book is poetical-biographical, fictional-critical, essayistic-historicala book unlimited." -- Commonweal Magazine "Jaeggy is a master of the short form; her essays are charged with a nearly combustible vitality, her stories without fail are compact and devastating. Long after the pleasure of reading is over, their little hooks tug at what is it, the heart or the mind? These Possible Lives presents brief portraits of three real-life metaphysicians: English opium-eater Thomas De Quincey, Romantic poet John Keats and French symbolist Marcel Schwob. The biographies are constructed from unconnected details culled from accounts by her subjects and contemporaries, rather than from narrative and analysis. The results vibrant and unforced, shimmering with the complexity of reality." -- Financial Times "Enjoy these short, meditative pieces slowly; Jaeggy is addictive." -- Kirkus Reviews "Three spare and telegraphic essays about Thomas De Quincey, John Keats, and Marcel Schwob, in which each account is self-contained and exquisitely precise, capture the arc of a whole life with filigreed economy." -- Los Angeles Review of Books "Terse beauties falling on the reader like a chaste gray rain." -- Robert Byers - The New Republic "In These Possible Lives (2017, translated by Minna Zallman Proctor) Jaeggy offers three very short biographical sketches of Keats, De Quincey, and the fin-de-siecle symbolist orientalist Jewish Parisian Schwob. Their hallucinatory intensity and heightened language recall the prose poems of Baudelaires Le Spleen de Paris, with their invocations of wine and hashish, their pose of le poete maudit." -- Margaret Drabble - The New Statesman "Brilliant, associative and short, Jaeggys essays have the beauty and economy of poems but the souls of portraits, discovering 'human characteristics amidst the chaos' which fairly describes her project overall." -- Martin Riker - The New York Times Book Review "Small-scale, intense, and impeccably focused." -- The New Yorker "She has the enviable first glance for people and things, she harbors a mixture of distracted levity and authoritative wisdom." -- Ingeborg Bachmann "Delicioussuch monstrous control and insight that at moments while reading you experience a distinct feeling of levitation." -- Carole Maso

Fleur Jaeggy a wonderful, brilliant, savage writer (Susan Sontag) was born in 1940 in Zurich and lives in Milan. Her work has been acclaimed as small-scale, intense, and impeccably focused (The New Yorker) and addictive (Kirkus). The author of Do You Hear What I Hear? Religious Calling, the Priesthood, and My Father, and the editor of The Literary Review, Minna Proctor won the PEN/Renato Poggioli Award for her translation of Federigo Tozzis Love in Vain.