“Fall in love with the stories you’re told, and they will be that much harder to change,” Catherine Lacey writes in her introduction to Life Sciences, the brilliant English debut from acclaimed French novelist Joy Sorman.
An inventive coming-of-age novel, Life Sciences boldly investigates the female condition, bodily autonomy, and the failings of modern medicine as Ninon Moise, a young woman, confronts a centuries-old matrilineal curse.
On October 17 at 2pm, join Joy Sorman and Catherine Lacey for a virtual conversation as they discuss Ninon Moise’s adventures, the limited–and limiting–stories about women available in our literary canon, and writing fiction as a way to break out of these patterns.
When: October 17 at 2 pm Eastern
Where: Albertine (New York, NY) via Zoom
Joy Sorman is a novelist and documentarian who lives and works in Paris. Her first novel, Boys, boys, boys, was awarded the 2005 Prix de Flore. In 2013, she received the Prix François Mauriac from the Académie française for Comme une bête. Life Sciences is her first novel to be translated into English.
Catherine Lacey is a Guggenheim fellow, a Whiting Award winner, and the author of four works of fiction: Nobody Is Ever Missing, The Answers, Certain American States, and Pew.
By Joy Sorman
Translated from the French by Lara Vergnaud
Introduction by Catherine Lacey
“Joy Sorman’s Life Sciences takes an overtly political premise—the medical establishment’s inability or perhaps refusal to take seriously the physical struggles of women—and transforms it into a surreal and knife-deep work of fiction that asks: What pain can we abide, and what pain must we fight back against, even if the fight hurts more than the disease itself?”
—Lena Dunham, The New York Times Book Review, Editors’ Choice
Paperback • ISBN: 9781632062956
Publication date: Oct 12, 2021