The Lover, Wartime Notebooks, Practicalities: Introduction by Rachel Kushner [Hardcover]

A hardcover omnibus edition of the French writer's most famous novel—the basis for the film Memoir of War—alongside her fascinating wartime writings and a collection of intimate autobiographical essays. 

Marguerite Duras was one of the leading intellectuals and novelists of postwar France, but her wartime writings were not published in full until after her death. TheWartime Notebookstrace Duras's formative experiences—including her difficult childhood in Indochina and her harrowing wait for her husband's return from Nazi internment—revealing the personal history behind her bestselling novels.The Loveris the best known of these; set in prewar Indochina, its haunting tale of a tumultuous affair between an adolescent French girl and her wealthy Chinese lover is based on her own life. In spare and luminous prose, Duras evokes life on the margins in the waning days of France's colonial empire, and the passionate relationship between two unforgettable outcasts.Practicalitiesis a collection of small and intensely personal pieces Duras dictated near the end of her life. These deceptively simple meditations on motherhood, domesticity, sex, love, alcohol, writing, and more are witty, earthy, outspoken, and surprisingly fresh and relevant today.

PRACTICALITIES: A mind alive to the possibilities of human experience and of the word, and a writer with the courage to publish truly her experience as a woman. --Newsday

WARTIME NOTEBOOKS: By turns ardent, raging, sensual and embittered. . . . A dreamlike, savage world, in which the great themes of love, war, and death found their most recklessly impassioned chronicler. --The Observer

THE LOVER: An exquisite jewel of a novel, as multifaceted as a diamond, as seamless and polished as a pearl. --Boston Herald