Writing, one of Marguerite Duras’s last works, is a meditation on the process of writing and on her need for solitude in order to do it. In the five short pieces collected in this volume, she explores experiences that had an emotional impact on her and that inspired her to write. These vary from the death of a pilot in World War II, to the death of a fly, to an art exhibition. Two of the pieces were made into documentary films, and one was originally a short film. Both autobiographical and fictional, like much of her work, Writing displays Duras’s unique worldview and sensitive insight in her simple and poetic prose.

“Duras manages to combine the seemingly irreconcilable perspectives of confession and objectivity, of lyrical poetry and nouveau roman. The sentences lodge themselves slowly in the reader’s mind until they detonate with all the force of fused feeling and thought—the force of a metaphysical contemplation of the paradoxes of the human heart.”—The New York Times Book Review (for The Lover)

Yann Andréa Steiner is a haunting dance between two parallel loves; the love between Marguerite Duras and the young Yann Andréa, and a love witnessed (or imagined) through the narrator’s window—a seaside romance between a camp counselor and a camper. The summer of 1980 flows into 1944 in this enigmatic journey through history, creation, and raw emotion.

The daughter of French schoolteachers, Marguerite Duras (1914-1996) was born in Vietnam. At 17 she moved to France where she studied law and politics. She is the author of a great many novels, plays, films, and short narratives, including her internationally best-selling, ostensibly autobiographical work, The Lover (1984).