Panics
ByPublisher Description
A haunting, bizarre short story collection about violence, mental illness, and the warped contradictions of the twentieth-century female experience.
A close friend and protégé of Marguerite Duras, Barbara Molinard (1921–1986) wrote and wrote feverishly, but only managed to publish one book in her lifetime: the surreal, nightmarish collection Panics.
These thirteen stories beat with a frantic, off-kilter rhythm as Molinard obsesses over sickness, death, and control. A woman becomes transfixed by a boa constrictor at her local zoo, mysterious surgeons dismember their patient, and the author narrates to Duras how she was stopped from sleeping in a cemetery vault, only to be haunted by the pain of sleeping on its stone floor.
In the unsettling tradition of Franz Kafka, Djuna Barnes, Leonara Carrington, and more, Panics recovers the work of a tormented writer who often destroyed her writing as soon as she produced it, and whose insights into violence, mental illness, and bodily autonomy are simultaneously absurdist and razor-sharp.
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Meet readers like you in the Fable For You feed, designed to build bookish communities28 Reviews
Henry Williams II
Created about 1 month ago
“I couldn’t connect with not a singular story in here and it was kind of difficult to sustain attention while reading the stories. I didn’t necessarily find any of them compelling in their prose nearly at all and some of the stories really did drag. The stories are dream like fragments, they don’t flow, more is left unsaid than said. I found out about this book from a book club i’m in and enjoyed the conversation about it more than I did the actual book. i’m giving it some stars because some of the stories had some qualities i liked enough to inspire me to do my own writing.”saosao
Created about 1 month agoabby 🐦🔥
Created 2 months agoJay Cho
Created 2 months agoC
Created 3 months agoAbout Barbara Molinard
Barbara Molinard (1921–1986) wrote and wrote, but published only one book: a collection of short stories titled Viens. Everything she wrote, she immediately tore up, and it was only through the relentless urging from her husband, the filmmaker Patrice Molinard, and her friend Marguerite Duras, that she finally handed over a single collection of stories to Editions Mercure de France in 1969.
Emma Ramadan is an educator and literary translator from French. She is the recipient of the PEN Translation Prize, the Albertine Prize, an NEA Fellowship, and a Fulbright. Her translations include Abdellah Taïa's A Country for Dying, Virginie Despentes's Pretty Things, and Barbara Molinard's Panics.Start a Book Club
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