"The power of Colette's work comes from its modernist storytelling.
Colette was a pioneering, groundbreaking modernist writer, but has not always had her originality and worth recognized in Britain. Her work provocatively uses unstable narratives, gaps, silences, fairytale, mythical tropes, and sensual evocations of childhood, sex, and landscapes.
In this book, Michèle Roberts examines how Colette invents new forms to express her unsettling content on desire, perversion, aging, and different forms of love. Delving into four key texts, Roberts explores Colette's willingness to break open taboos about older woman and desire, as well as hidden and forbidden aspects of human longings and pleasures.
Through these re-readings, Roberts discovers that Colette's work is even more entrancing, more disturbing, and more original than she first thought."
"Yesterday ended in disaster. Very late at night, I decided to write down everything that had happened; the only way I could think of coping. So here goes.
So begins Michele Roberts’s intimate and honest account of the year after her latest novel has been rejected by her then publisher. Written with warmth and sensitivity, she navigates the difficult road from depression and anxiety to acceptance and understanding of the value of the friendships which nurture her and make life worth living – whatever happens.
Michele Roberts is the author of twelve highly acclaimed novels, including The Looking Glass and Daughters of the House, which won the WHSmith Literary Award and was shortlisted for the Booker Prize, and, most recently, the highly-acclaimed Ignorance, which was longlisted for the Women's Prize for Fiction, 2013. Her memoir Paper Houses was a BBC Radio 4 Book of the Week. She has also published poetry and short stories, most recently collected in Mud: Stories of Sex and Love. Half-English and half-French, Michele Roberts lives in London and in the Mayenne, France. She is Emeritus Professor of Creative Writing at the University of East Anglia, a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and a Chevalier de l'Ordre des Arts et Lettres.
“A wonderful writer: one in possession of immense feeling.” THE OBSERVER"
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