Transcriptions de conversations courageuses, traversées subjectives, incarnations du désir en action, décalages ou fragments d'origines, les Voluptés de Marianne Apostolides sondent la vie - cette trame qui se tisse - comme une perpétuelle mise en scène. Ces neuf récits jouent le jeu de l'oeuvre littéraire, cherchant au passage à « connaître le fin fond de l'histoire », celle d'un adultère, d'une première fois, ou celle du père et de son enfance troublée par la guerre. Voluptés ou la réalité de l'écriture de soi explore intelligemment la place qu'occupent le langage et le désir au sein de nos existences. Aspirant à devenir « pur plaisir », Marianne Apostolides se laisse aller au récit comme glisserait un vaisseau de vérité absolue. Traduction de Madeleine Stratford.

What does it mean to say "I love you"?Ariadne is a single, fortysomething writer and mother embroiled in an affair with a married man. At the core of her current manuscript, a book about the declaration of love, is the need to understand why: why her lover has returned to his wife, why their relationship still lingers in her mind, why she's unable to conquer her longing. To make ends meet while writing, she joins a research study in which she's paid to live with an AI device called Dirk.But the study quickly enters uncharted territory. Capable of mapping Ariadne's brain—and, to some extent, reading her mind—Dirk calls into question issues of both privacy and consciousness: how we communicate our thoughts to others, what it means to embody our desires, and whether we ought to act on them.

Deep Salt Water is an intimate memoir about abortion, expressed through a layering of language and imagery of the ocean. The story gravitates around the reconnection and ongoing entanglements of a couple who'd had an abortion twenty years earlier. Interdisciplinary in nature and entre-genre in style, Deep Salt Water is organized as thirty-seven separate pieces, divided into three sections (or 'trimesters') that detail the couple's love affair and unwanted pregnancy; the abortion itself; their separation and tenuous reconnection; and the sorrowful, urgent attempt to come to terms with the abortion and its consequences. Included in its pages are two innovative elements—a series of collages by visual artist Catherine Mellinger and a section entitled the 'Afterbirth,' which discusses environmental issues that informed Apostolides' writing and moves the book from a place of intense intimacy to an outward focus that engages with the broader world and our shared responsibility and hope.

Because fear can transform into confidence, recklessness, the kind of power you can't imagine until you're inside it. And then, once you've felt it, you can't feel alive when it's gone. Sophrosyne. You understood this feeling. I know you did, though you never said it. I saw it, instead, on your face when you danced. Sophrosyne is one of only four virtues identified by Socrates – four traits which, if lived deeply, define who we are as human beings. But sophrosyne is a concept our culture has long forgotten. 'Self-restraint,' 'self-control,' 'modesty,' 'temperance' – none of these terms expresses the essence of the word. In this provocative new novel about desire and restraint in a digital age by acclaimed author Marianne Apostolides, 21-year-old Alex is consumed by the elusive problem of sophrosyne for reasons he cannot share with others. While Alex's philosophy professor believes studying it will help shed light on the malaise of our era, Alex hopes it will release him from his darkly disturbing relationship with his mother. As he attempts to uncover his mother's truth, Alex is drawn inside an amorphous, indefinable undercurrent of love and violation. Only through his lover, Meiko, does Alex open into a new understanding of sophrosyne, with all its implications. Reminiscent of Anne Carson's Autobiography of Red, Sophrosyne asks readers to surrender themselves to the book's logic and language. Infused with a sensuality balanced by its intellect, Sophrosyne reads like "the music's rhythm... soft like wax and supple, warm," pulsing through your veins.