Biography
Born in 1969 in the Aveyron region of southern France, Emmanuelle Pagano studied fine art and the aesthetics of cinema. She now lives and works on the Ardèche plateau. She has written more than a dozen works of fiction, and in France is primarily published by P.O.L. She has won the EU Prize for Literature and her books have been translated into more than a dozen languages. She regularly collaborates with artists working in other disciplines such as dance, cinema, photography, illustration, fine art and music.
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Reviews
Emily Rhodes
The Guardian
‘Emmanuelle Pagano arranges poetic vignettes into an elaborate mosaic about love . . . a beautiful treasury of amorous moments.’
Sarah Gilmartin
Irish Times
‘Objects, gestures, smells, emotions – Trysting is a mosaic of the myriad things that define a relationship.’
Chris Power
The Guardian
‘Trysting uses polyphony to map the many different strains of love and sexuality . . . Reading the book is a kaleidoscopic experience. [It] succeeds because of the range of her insight and the skill with which she shifts register: from wistfulness to blunt force, or from fantasy to naturalism.’
Lorna Scott Fox
Times Literary Supplement
‘The original title points to the sensuous materiality of this collection of fragments about coupledom . . . we’re in a defiantly physical consciousness. If Trysting asks the question ‘What is love?’, it also says that there’s no answer.’
Joanna Walsh
‘Trysting is a mirror shattered in play: inscribed on each bright shard of glass, a fable about a fragment of love.’
Lauren Elkin
‘Polyphonic, arboreal, rhizomatic, desperate, stunning.’
Christopher Reid
‘The interactions of men and women, infinitely varied and minutely scrutinised, are Emmanuelle Pagano’s central concern here. No oddity or anomaly of behaviour is too slight to escape her notice, but the effect is less forensic than boundlessly compassionate and wise. She is a prose poet worthy to stand with the great exponents of the genre.’
Patrick McGuinness
‘A bold, experimental book of cohering fragments, full of intimately-spoken truths about desire, about love, and about their aftermaths. It is like having strangers whisper their secrets into our minds.'
Juliet Jacques
‘Subtle and moving, the fragments of life presented in Trysting question the relationships between love, sex and gender, making the everyday strange and the strange everyday’