American Notebooks

A note to US-based customers: All Lit Up is pausing print orders to the USA until further notice. Read more

It is the spring of 1963. The young Quebec author Marie-Claire Blais, bursting with energy and talent, has just won a coveted Guggenheim fellowship. She chooses Cambridge, Massachusetts, as the place where she will begin her writer’s apprenticeship with her mentor, Edmund Wilson.

American Notebooks is much more than a fascinating autobiographical account of the intellectual flowering of a great writer. An album of exquisitely drawn literary portraits of companions, intellectuals, writers, musicians, artists and social activists of the period—Edmund and Elena Wilson; Mary Meigs; Maud Maugan; Barbara Deming; Truman Capote; Jacques Hébert, her first Quebec publisher, then senator; and many others—it also introduces many of the real life personalities who have inspired her fictional characters.

AUTHOR

Linda Gaboriau

Linda Gaboriau is a Montreal-based dramaturge and literary translator. She has worked as a freelance journalist for the CBC as well as the Montreal Gazette, and worked in Canadian and Quebecois theatre. Gaboriau has won awards for her translations of more than 100 plays and novels by Quebec writers, including many of the Quebec plays best known to English Canadian audiences. She is the founding director of the Banff International Literary Translation Centre.

Reviews

“I picked this up by chance, not having it on any list to get to one day — but ended up reading it bit by bit during lunch breaks and spare moments. It kept me interested over a long while, as I read each short essay and then pondered it until I found time for the next. It seemed to capture a certain era, a particular style of artistic life, that I felt close to while I spent time with this book. It was an interesting and unexpected effect, and I’m always pleased when I’m surprised by my reading.”
– the indextrious reader

“Marvelously constructed … beautifully cadenced character studies.”
– Books in Canada