Magic Hour Press – serie

On December 18, 1974, Linda Rosenkrantz asked her friend Peter Hujar to write down everything he did one day. Hujar met Rosenkrantz at her apartment on 94th street the following day where she asked him about it in detail. She tape-recorded their conversation and this book is a full transcript of that exchange, published here for the first time since it was recorded 47 years ago. The book features an introduction by Stephen Koch, director of the Peter Hujar Estate.“Peter Hujar’s monologue, prompted by Linda Rosenkranz, is a Warholian gem, and a prize discovery for Magic Hour Press.”— Moyra Davey“This slim volume is Peter’s sexiest self-portrait. Read it and weep if you didn’t know him. Or read it and weep if you did that we lost him.”— Nan Goldin“It’s wonderful to hear Peter’s voice again. The voice I channel when I make his prints [since 2008]. He was my friend, mentor - an inspired printer - my teacher. Thank you, Linda, for your brilliant idea, and thanks for this book, it’s a great gift.”— Gary Schneider

The first English translation of an important and evocative interview-turned-book project in Marguerite Duras' illustrious oeuvre"I could talk for hours about this house, this garden. I know it all, I know where every old door is, everything, the walls of the pond, all the plants, the location of every plant, even the wild plants I know the place of, everything." So begins Marguerite Duras’ rhapsody on the spaces she has inhabited throughout her life. The Places of Marguerite Duras was filmed and aired as a two-part television documentary in 1976. Her reminiscences are structured around her memories of specific locations: her house in Neauphle-le-Château; her childhood home in French Indochina, which inspired her acclaimed novel The Sea Wall; the Hôtel des Roches Noires in Trouville, where she wrote The Ravishing of Lol Stein; and the vast seascapes of Indochina, Bengal and Normandy, whose powerful tides compelled her art and life.The transcript of the documentary was published in French two years after the documentary aired, and is now published in English for the first time, just shy of 50 years since the film’s creation. True to the original French edition, Duras’ reflections are accompanied by photographs and film stills. The complete English translation by Alison Strayer includes a new essay by writer and director Durga Chew-Bose.Marguerite Duras (1914–96) was a filmmaker and author, and a leading figure in French postwar cinema. Her novel L’Amant won the Prix Goncourt in 1984. She was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay for the film Hiroshima mon amour (1959).

A fresh edition of the novel that expands upon the autofictional world introduced in Guibert's cult classic, Suzanne and Louise (1980)Hervé Guibert's novel The Gangsters opens at the front door of a Paris townhouse inhabited by the narrator's elderly great-aunts, Suzanne and Louise. The narrator, distracted by a health crisis and his pursuit of an ambivalent lover, arrives to find suspicious renovation work taking place. But even after the great-aunts confess to being intimidated and extorted, neither he nor the incompetent police can stop the ongoing larceny. Readers of Guibert's writing may already recognize the narrator (also named Hervé) and his great-aunts from the groundbreaking photo-novel Suzanne and Louise (1980). Like his other books, The Gangsters is a work of autofiction. Here, he uses the crime-novel format to explore universal motifs, such as cruelty, desire and mortality. "When I disappear," Guibert continued, "I will have said it all. I will have striven to reduce this distance between the truths of experience and writing." Originally published in 1988, The Gangsters was his first book to be translated into English. This new edition from Magic Hour features Iain White's original translation and a new afterword by the writer Janique Vigier.Astoundingly prolific, the French writer and photographer Hervé Guibert (1955–91) authored 25 books and published numerous texts on photography. Memorialized as a leading exponent of French autofiction, Guibert rose to acclaim for his bestselling AIDS novel, To the Friend Who Did Not Save My Life (1990).