He is the author of Never Say I: Sexuality and the First Person in Colette, Gide, and Proust and The Misfit of the Family: Balzac and the Social Forms of Sexuality, and has translated Returning to Reims by Didier Eribon.‘To speak of the bourgeoisie is to make art. Michael Lucey is a professor of French literature at the University of California, Berkeley. He is the coauthor, with the philosopher Geoffroy de Lagasnerie, of 'Manifesto for an Intellectual and Political Counteroffensive,' published in English by the Los Angeles Review of Books. Laird Hunt, author of Neverhomeīorn Eddy Bellegueule in Hallencourt, France, in 1992, Édouard Louis is a novelist and the editor of a scholarly work on the social scientist Pierre Bourdieu. Édouard Louis is exactly the kind of writer we need right now: honest, fearless and, yes, tough. The End of Eddy is heart-crushing, soul-stabbing, astonishing, exhilarating. No one has told this story as eloquently.' - Edmund White, author of A Boy's Own Story Like a cannonball spilled off the side of a ship, Édouard Louis makes straight for the deeps.

Justin Torres, author of We the Animals The End of Eddy is lean and poignant and masterfully tells the tale of growing up gay, poor, and bullied. Revelatory, queerly tough, as intellectual as it is impolite, The End of Eddy is a book to shake you up. Adam Haslett, author of Imagine Me Gone Èdouard Louis speaks of violence, both social and familiar, with tremendous force and feeling. Louis's remarkably visceral story of growing up queer in working class France quickly transcends its setting precisely because it delivers us into it with such emotional force. Even in the wake of Knausgaard and Ferrante it is hard to find a literary phenomenon that has swept Europe quite like the autobiographical project of Édouard Louis.' -Ane Farsethas, LitHub A bracingly pitiless account of the psychic and physical violence that lies at the root of masculine identity. Michael Cart, Booklist (starred review) Europe's new literary superstars.

Publishers Weekly (starred review) A seamless, universal portrait of the experience of growing up gay and gradually coming to accept oneself. Already translated into 20 languages, this concise novel adroitly captures the downstream effects of reactionary rural culture, heightened by the rise of hard-right ideology and the destabilization of the working class in contemporary Europe, granting its reader an extraordinary portrait of trauma and escape. Louis arrives in the United States (where his novel is published this month in a translation by Michael Lucey) as the bright young thing of the French literary world-an enfant terrible unafraid to discuss the nation's dark underbelly. devastating' -Damian Van Denburgh, The San Francisco Chronicle 'Controversy may have put The End of Eddy in headlines, but it's the nuanced characters and story that make it the rare literary novel that is a modern coming-of-age classic.' - Mitchell Sunderland, Vice 'A powerful coming-of-age novel. ' The End of Eddy marks the beginning of a powerful writer's career.' -Rick Whitaker, The Washington Post 'Haunting. While Eddy's parents are both vivid characters-Louis has a great ear for their patois-what makes the novel special is the way it expands outward. Just released in a highly readable translation by Michael Lucey, this painfully insightful tale of entrapment and escape could've easily been set in Michigan or West Virginia. a devastating emotional force.' - Garth Greenwell, The New Yorker 'Louis' account of growing up gay and poor in a working-class village isn't only a story about France. It is also a mesmerizing story about difference and adolescence, one that is far more realistic than most.' -Jennifer Senior, The New York Times Canny. The End of Eddy, however, is not just a remarkable ethnography. The result-a critical and popular triumph-has made him the most celebrated French writer of his generation. Like Karl Ove Knausgaard or Edmund White, Édouard Louis writes from his own undisguised experience, but he writes with an openness and a compassionate intelligence that are all his own. It is also a sensitive, universal portrait of boyhood and sexual awakening. Already translated into twenty-nine languages, The End of Eddy captures the violence and desperation of life in a French factory town. But from childhood, he was different-'girlish,' intellectually precocious, and attracted to other men. Today I'm really gonna be a tough guy.' Growing up in a poor village in northern France, all Eddy Bellegueule wanted was to be a man in the eyes of his family and neighbors. 'Every morning in the bathroom I would repeat the same phrase to myself over and over again. An autobiographical novel about growing up gay in a working-class town in Picardy.

Edouard louis