 First edition (US) | |
| Author | Siri Hustvedt |
|---|---|
| Language | English |
| Publisher | Simon & Schuster (US) Sceptre (UK) |
| Publication place | United States |
Memories of the Future is a 2019 novel by American writer Siri Hustvedt. The novel concerns a narrator, known as S.H. or by her nickname, "Minnesota", who discovers her journal from 40-years before the novel's events.
Hustvedt has said she "[...] actively [hoped] to undermine" the assumption that autobiographical fiction by women tends to be less imaginative than equivalent works by men. [1]
The novel contains autobiographical elements. [2] Writing for the New York Times , Judith Shulevitz referred to the novel as an example of autofiction. [2] The novel contains drawings by Hustvedt of several men, including Marcel Duchamp and Donald Trump. [1]
According to literary review aggregator Book Marks, the novel received mostly "Positive" reviews. [3] In a review for The Financial Times , Catherine Taylor compared the work to the "best" of the filmography of American director David Lynch. [4] Critics highlighted Hustvedt's depiction of New York City, with Sam Sacks crediting the depiction of S.H.'s relationship with a neighbor, Lucy, as accurate to the experience of living in a large city. [5] In her review for The Guardian , Sarah Crown praised the inclusion of the city, writing that Hustvedt "joyously depicts" New York as "hot, dirty and cacophonous". [6]
Writing for The Los Angeles Review of Books , Elena Goukassian compared Memories of the Future unfavorably to Hustvedt's debut novel, The Blindfold. [7] Goukassian praised The Blindfold for "leaving readers to draw [their] own conclusions" while writing that Memories of the Future "suffers from over-explanation". [7] Goukassian attributes this tendency to the "Trump era", during which she writes that there "[...] appears to be a wider trend among writers and artists of all kinds in creating works that drill their themes into the minds of their audiences". [7]
The novel was long-listed for the 2020 Andrew Carnegie Medals for Excellence in Fiction and Nonfiction. [8]
Paul Benjamin Auster was an American writer, novelist, memoirist, poet, and filmmaker. His notable works include The New York Trilogy (1987), Moon Palace (1989), The Music of Chance (1990), The Book of Illusions (2002), The Brooklyn Follies (2005), Invisible (2009), Sunset Park (2010), Winter Journal (2012), and 4 3 2 1 (2017). His books have been translated into more than 40 languages.
Chloe Anthony Wofford Morrison, known as Toni Morrison, was an American novelist and editor. Her first novel, The Bluest Eye, was published in 1970. The critically acclaimed Song of Solomon (1977) brought her national attention and won the National Book Critics Circle Award. In 1988, Morrison won the Pulitzer Prize for Beloved (1987); she was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1993.
Judith Krantz was an American magazine writer, fashion editor, and novelist. Her first novel Scruples (1978) was a New York Times best-seller and was translated into 50 languages. Scruples, which describes the glamorous and affluent world of high fashion in Beverly Hills, California, helped define a new sub-genre of the romance novel - the bonkbuster or "sex-and-shopping" novel. She also became a "celebrity author" through her extensive touring and promotion. Her later books included Princess Daisy (1980), Mistral's Daughter (1982) Till We Meet Again (1988), Dazzle (1990), and Spring Collection (1996). Her autobiography, Sex and Shopping: The Confessions of a Nice Jewish Girl, was published in 2000.
Siri Hustvedt is an American novelist and essayist. Hustvedt is the author of a book of poetry, seven novels, two books of essays, and several works of non-fiction. Her books include The Blindfold (1992), The Enchantment of Lily Dahl (1996), What I Loved (2003), for which she is best known, A Plea for Eros (2006), The Sorrows of an American (2008), The Shaking Woman or A History of My Nerves (2010), The Summer Without Men (2011), Living, Thinking, Looking (2012), The Blazing World (2014), and Memories of the Future (2019). What I Loved and The Summer Without Men were international bestsellers. Her work has been translated into over thirty languages.
The Plot Against America is a novel by Philip Roth published in 2004. It is an alternative history in which Franklin D. Roosevelt is defeated in the presidential election of 1940 by Charles Lindbergh. The novel follows the fortunes of the Roth family during the Lindbergh presidency, as antisemitism becomes more acceptable in American life and Jewish-American families like the Roths are persecuted on various levels. The narrator and central character in the novel is the young Philip, and the novel follows his coming of age, as well as American politics.
McSweeney's Publishing is an American nonprofit publishing house founded by Dave Eggers in 1998 and headquartered in San Francisco. The executive director is Amanda Uhle.
Tobias S. Buckell is a Caribbean science fiction writer.
Edmund Valentine White III is an American novelist, memoirist, playwright, biographer and an essayist on literary and social topics.
Nicole Krauss is an American author best known for her four novels Man Walks into a Room (2002), The History of Love (2005), Great House (2010) and Forest Dark (2017), which have been translated into 35 languages. Her fiction has been published in The New Yorker, Harper's, Esquire, and Granta's Best American Novelists Under 40, and has been collected in Best American Short Stories 2003, Best American Short Stories 2008 and Best American Short Stories 2019. In 2011, Nicole Krauss won an award from the Anisfield-Wolf Book Awards for Great House. A collection of her short stories, To Be a Man, was published in 2020 and won the Wingate Literary Prize in 2022.
Judith Ortiz Cofer was a Puerto Rican author. Her critically acclaimed and award-winning work spans a range of literary genres including poetry, short stories, autobiography, essays, and young-adult fiction. Ortiz Cofer was the Emeritus Regents' and Franklin Professor of English and Creative Writing at the University of Georgia, where she taught undergraduate and graduate creative writing workshops for 26 years. In 2010, Ortiz Cofer was inducted into the Georgia Writers Hall of Fame, and in 2013, she won the university's 2014 Southeastern Conference Faculty Achievement Award.
Leila Fuad Aboulela is a fiction writer, essayist, and playwright of Sudanese origin based in Aberdeen, Scotland. She grew up in Khartoum, Sudan, and moved to Scotland in 1990 where she began her literary career. Until 2023, Aboulela has published six novels and several short stories, which have been translated into fifteen languages. Her most popular novels, Minaret (2005) and The Translator (1999) both feature the stories of Muslim women in the UK and were longlisted for the International Dublin Literary Award and Orange Prize. Aboulela's works have been included in publications such as Harper's Magazine, Granta, The Washington Post and The Guardian. BBC Radio has adapted her work extensively and broadcast a number of her plays, including The Insider, The Mystic Life and the historical drama The Lion of Chechnya. The five-part radio serialization of her 1999 novel The Translator was short-listed for the Race In the Media Award (RIMA).
Elif Shafak is a Turkish-British novelist, essayist, public speaker, political scientist and activist.
Rachel Cusk FRSL is a Canadian novelist and writer.
The Sorrows of an American is Siri Hustvedt's fourth novel. It was first published in 2008 and is about a Norwegian American family and their troubles. The novel is partly autobiographical in that Hustvedt herself is of Norwegian descent and in that passages from her own deceased father's journal about the Depression in America and the Pacific theatre of war during World War II are scattered through the book.
Adam Levin is an American fiction author. His short fiction has been published in places like Timothy McSweeney's Quarterly Concern and Tin House. Currently, he resides in Chicago, where he teaches Creative Writing and Literature at the School of the Art Institute. His first novel, The Instructions, was published in 2010 by McSweeney's.
What I Loved is a novel written by American writer Siri Hustvedt first published in 2003 by Hodder and Stoughton in London. It is written from the point of view of Leo Hertzberg, an art historian living in New York. The author herself grew up in Northfield, Minnesota, and then moved to New York in 1978. In a discussion of the September 11 attacks, she describes New York as "as much an idea as an actual place".
Elena Ferrante is a pseudonymous Italian novelist. Ferrante's books, originally published in Italian, have been translated into many languages. Her four-book series of Neapolitan Novels are her most widely known works. Time magazine called Ferrante one of the 100 most influential people in 2016.
Namwali Serpell is an American and Zambian writer who teaches in the United States. In April 2014, she was named on Hay Festival's Africa39 list of 39 sub-Saharan African writers aged under 40 with the potential and talent to define trends in African literature. Her short story "The Sack" won the 2015 Caine Prize for African fiction in English. In 2020, Serpell won the Belles-lettres category Grand Prix of Literary Associations 2019 for her debut novel The Old Drift.
The Neapolitan Novels, also known as the Neapolitan Quartet, are a four-part series of fiction by the pseudonymous Italian author Elena Ferrante, published originally by Edizioni e/o, translated into English by Ann Goldstein and published by Europa Editions. The English-language titles of the novels are My Brilliant Friend (2012), The Story of a New Name (2013), Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay (2014), and The Story of the Lost Child (2015). In the original Italian edition, the whole series bears the title of the first novel L'amica geniale. The series has been characterized as a bildungsroman, or coming-of-age story. In an interview in Harper's Magazine, Elena Ferrante has stated that she considers the four books to be "a single novel" published serially for reasons of length and duration. The series has sold over 10 million copies in 40 countries.
The Story of the Lost Child is a 2014 novel written by Italian author Elena Ferrante. It is the fourth and final installment of her Neapolitan Novels, preceded by My Brilliant Friend, The Story of a New Name, and Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay. It was translated into English by Ann Goldstein in 2015.