Bøker av Alice Kaplan

"On November 22, 1947, a fifteen-year-old prodigy from colonial Algeria named Baya exhibited her paintings and clay sculptures at the Parisian gallery of the art dealer Aimâe Maeght. Her opening attracted some of the most influential cultural figures of postwar Paris, including Albert Camus, Andrâe Breton, Henri Matisse, and Georges Braque. Alice Kaplan's biography begins on that November day, in that gallery, then moves from Baya's beginnings as a farmworker to her Parisian triumph, through her death in Algeria in 1998, by then a cultural icon of independent Algeria. Orphaned at age nine, Baya was working on a flower farm when she caught the eye of a French woman, Marguerite Caminat, whose interest in the girl changed her life. The relationship of support and affection between the indigenous Algerian artist and her French mentor was fraught with ambiguity. Baya worked as Caminat's maid but came to see herself as the woman's adoptive daughter; Caminat nurtured Baya's gift and saw the child as the artist she herself once aspired to be. The French press of 1947 celebrated the young artist with all the predictable clichâes: the orphan rescued by the white fairy godmother, the wild child civilized, the ignorant genius on display. In Seeing Baya: Portrait of an Algerian Artist in Paris, Kaplan considers the differences that Baya makes to the stories we have told about modern art and postwar culture in France. She unravels the human sentiments at play in this history, from the noble to the venal to the obscure, and probes the motivations of the characters surrounding Baya, scrutinizing them from different angles as they respond to the singular itinerary of the young artist. Seeing Baya reveals a fascinating and significant life, one of survival, resistance, and irrepressible talent"--

'OK, Joe!' the American lieutenant calls out to his driver. He hops into his jeep and heads out through French countryside just liberated from the Nazis. With him is the narrator of this novel, Louis, a Frenchman engaged by the American Army as an interpreter. Louis serves a group of American officers charged with bringing GIs to account for crimes - including rape and murder - against French citizens. The friendly banter of the American soldiers and the beautiful Breton landscape stand in contrast to Louis's task and his growing awareness of the moral failings of the Americans sent to liberate France. For not only must Louis translate the accounts of horrific crimes, he comes to realize that the accused men are almost all African American. Based on diaries that the author kept during his service as a translator for the US Army in the aftermath of D-Day, OK, Joe follows Louis and the Americans as they negotiate with witnesses, investigate the crimes, and stage the courts-martial. Guilloux has an uncanny ear for the snappy speech of the GIs and a tenderness for the young, unworldly men with whom he spends his days, and, in evocative vignettes and dialogues, he sketches the complex intersection of hope and disillusionment that prevailed after the war. Although the American presence in France has been romanticized in countless books and movies, OK, Joe offers something exceedingly rare: a penetrating French perspective on post-D-Day GI culture, a chronicle of trenchant racism and lost ideals.

"Albert Camus's novel The Plague will go down in literary history as one of the most talked about books of the Covid-19 crisis. Originally intended as an allegory of World War II, this story of an Algerian city gripped by an epidemic has been a staple of literature classes since 1947. Generations of students have learned that Camus was "really" writing about his experience of occupied Paris. In 2020, that reading tradition was transformed. The epidemic brought the novel close to readers who began to read it as a book about their own lives-a book to help them get through a global health crisis. Alice Kaplan, who teaches Camus at Yale, and Laura Marris, translator of a new edition of The Plague, wondered how Camus could know so much about what we were living through in mid-2020. His novel has it all: the official denials in the face of mounting deaths, the end of travel, the separation from one another during quarantine, the numbing grief. They wrote States of Plague in response-as a guide to these moments where the written and the real collide. For many people, The Plague feels personal now. And through this lens, certain features became vital: Camus's sensitivity toward illness, his experience of a contagious disease, the cost of separation in his own life, and the psychology and politics of the city in quarantine. Because they come to the book from different perspectives, Kaplan and Marris alternate their voices so that their chapters offer two complementary ways of looking at Camus. They find that their sense of Camus evolves under the force of a new reality, alongside the pressures of illness, recovery, concern, and care in their own lives. Kaplan herself is struggling with a case if Covid as the book opens; as it closes, Marris receives her first vaccine shot. In between, they find, aspects of Camus's novel that once seemed merely literary spoke directly to their own fear and grief. They uncover for us the mysterious way a great writer can imagine the world during a crisis and draw back the veil on our possible futures"--

A biography of the novel that tells us how this poor, sickly young writer from Algeria happened to write perhaps the century's most ubiquitous novel.

A professor of French Literature at Duke University, Kaplan offers a passionate memoir of her life and its intricate involvement with the French language. "A rare and moving evocation of what it feels like--and what it means--to fall in love with a language not one's own".--New York Review of Books.

The US Army executed seventy of its own soldiers between 1943 and 1946 - almost all of them black. This work narrates two different trials: one of a white officer, one of a black soldier, both accused of murder. Both they were court-martialed in the same room, yet the outcomes could not have been more different.

A year in Paris.... Since World War II, countless American students have been lured by that vision - and been transformed by their sojourn in the City of Light. This book tells three stories of that experience, and how it changed the lives of three extraordinary American women.