Awards

• Winner of Prix Goncourt de la nouvelle 2022

Overview

""A novel-manifesto, enraged and sublime"" -Olivia de Lamberterie, Elle ""We have known from the start that Wauters' writing would be the voice of humanity."" -Michel Zumkir, Le Carnet et les Instants Armed with the inflection of a poet, Wauters unfurls the moments that everyday people who have been silenced by injustice find their voice and speak out. Their words become weapons against the excesses of an era that has evolved to threaten our humanity. Teenagers leave their city estates for the freedom of the coast where they are arrested at the beach for disorder; care home residents escape under a starlit sky and return to the embrace of their memories, clear as the night air; young mothers rage at an arrogant world that has left a climate under threat and the future of their children at risk; a young farm boy addresses the neighbour whose privilege and interference has resulted in a ferocious beating that has left his brother deaf and disfigured . . . Human contradictions link each of these stories set in a polarised world that demands we choose sides. Acting alone or in groups, Wauters' protestors struggle to find sense where none exists, and together with their antagonists they breathe, hesitate, suffer, and doubt. Strangled by fury and the hopelessness of their predicament, they resolve against logic and expectation to step forward and fight for change. With the award-winning stories in The Museum of Contradictions, Wauters has captured our zeitgeist. In their defining moment he gives voice to the many.

Full Product Details

9781917254229

Table of Contents

Reviews

""This new, incandescent book . . . was born from Wauters' desire to . . . create a 'portrait of our world today with its problems, its tensions and its injustices, and to ensure voices of contradiction are heard.'""-Axelle Thiry, RTBC ""The superb new book by Antoine Wauters. Twelve scathing, poetic [stories] that invite us to reclaim our lives and return to sense.""-La Libre Belgique ""Aiming for more bearable alternatives, Antoine Wauters takes the pulse of an accelerated world jammed in an absence of meaning.""-Focus Le Vif ""The Museum of Contradictions eviscerates as much as it excites . . . Wauters writes about humanity with his nerves.""-Karoo

Author Information

Born in 1981, Antoine Wauters is a Belgian poet and novelist, winner of numerous literary awards including the the Prix Wepler, the Prix Marguerite Duras, and the Prix du Livre Inter for Mahmoud or the Rising of the Waters. The Museum of Contradictions which won the Prix Goncourt de la nouvelle is his first book to be translated into English. Stephanie Smee's translations of contemporary classics have won critical praise and multiple awards. She is the translator of Joseph Ponthus' award-winning novel in verse, On The Line, Notes from a Factory, for which she won the Australian Academy of the Humanities Medal of Excellence in Translation. Her translation of Hannelore Cayre's The Godmother won the CWA Crime Fiction in Translation Dagger. She is the winner of the JQ-Wingate Prize for Francoise Frenkel's No Place to Lay One's Head.

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