Emmanuel Carrère, born in Paris in 1957, is a writer, scriptwriter, and film producer. He is the award-winning, internationally renowned author of Limonov, The Mustache, Class Trip, The Adversary (a New York Times Notable Book), My Life as a Russian Novel, and Lives Other Than My Own, which was awarded the Globe de Cristal for Best Novel in 2010. For Limonov, Carrère received the Prix Renaudot and the Prix des Prix in 2011 and the Europese Literatuurprijs in 2013.
John Lambert has translated Monsieur, Reticence, and Self-Portrait Abroad by Jean-Philippe Toussaint, as well as Emmanuel Carrère's Limonov. He lives in Nantes with his wife and three children.
Carrère has managed to renovate the idea of what nonfiction writing
can be. Profoundly intimate, historically and philosophically
serious but able to cast compulsive narrative spells, Carrère's
books are hybrids, marrying deep reporting to scholarly
explorations of theology, philosophy, psychology, personal history
and historiography . . . Carrère has managed to write one
masterpiece after another . . . The need to understand the role you
have in the larger human story is at the heart of this beautiful,
difficult book. Difficult not in form but in feeling, The Kingdom
manages to get at the contradictions of what we call intimacy.
--Wyatt Mason, The New York Times MagazineAn amazingly various
book, [The Kingdom] narrates the author's crises of religious faith
in the nineteen-nineties; combines conventional history and
speculative reconstruction to describe the rise of early
Christianity; deftly animates the first-century lives and journeys
of Paul, Luke, and John; and attempts to explain how an unlikely
cult, formed around the death and resurrection of an ascetic
lyrical revolutionary, grew into the established Church we know
today . . . What makes The Kingdom so engrossing is this element of
personal struggle, our sense that the agnostic author is looking
over his shoulder at the armies of faith, as they pursue him to the
wall of rationality." --James Wood, The New YorkerTo open the pages
of this book is to fall into a world of speculation, memoir,
history, and belief and disbelief in untidy measures. . . . a
masterwork that takes readers into the heart of Christianity's
first days, as well into the depths of the author's psyche. . . .
The only category it really belongs in is tour de force. --Ilene
Cooper, Booklist (starred review)Memoir, fiction, and history
combine in a stirring portrayal of the world of the first
Christians . . . A passionate, digressive, empathetic history of
religious rebels and the mystery of faith. --Kirkus Reviews
(starred Review)
The latest from Carrère (Limonov) is a tale of modern and ancient
Christianity, filtered through a text that's equal parts memoir,
academic essay, and fictional exploration. . . . a frequently
fascinating book written by a curious, sharp mind. --Publishers
WeeklyEmmanuel Carrère [is] one of the best known and most
innovative French writers. --Rachel Donadio, The New York TimesI
left the Catholic Church at thirteen and have not spent much time
thinking about religion since then. But Emmanuel Carrère's The
Kingdom kept me pinned to its pages until the end. It is personal
and rigorous, skeptical and open, casual and profound, and its
speculative portrait of Saint Luke, its main character, is as
compelling as any fictional life I've read lately. --Luc Sante,
author of The Other ParisMy favorite books about Christianity are
Augustine's Confessions, Origen's Contra Celsum, and, now, Emmanuel
Carrère's The Kingdom. Both a pocket history and a gripping (and
surprising!) intellectual self-portrait, I know of nothing else
quite like it --and I wish like all hell I'd written it. Carrère is
one of our planet's most compelling, inimitable writers, and The
Kingdom is, in my view, his greatest book yet. --Tom Bissell,
author of Apostle: Travels Among the Tombs of the Twelve
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