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  • Published: 14 May 2024
  • ISBN: 9781787332355
  • Imprint: Jonathan Cape
  • Format: Trade Paperback
  • Pages: 192
  • RRP: $34.99
Categories:

Wrong Norma




Wrong Norma is Anne Carson's first book of original material in eight years

Wrong Norma is Anne Carson's first book of original material in eight years

'I would read anything she wrote'
SUSAN SONTAG

'If she was a prose writer she would instantly be recognised as a genius'
COLM TÓIBÍN

As with her most recent publications, Wrong Norma is a facsimile edition of the original hand-designed book, annotated and corrected by the author.

Anne Carson is probably our most celebrated living poet, winner of countless awards and routinely tipped for the Nobel Prize in Literature. Famously reticent, asking that her books be published without cover copy, she has agreed to say this:

'Wrong Norma is a collection of writings about different things, like Joseph Conrad, Guantanamo, Flaubert, snow, poverty, Roget's Thesaurus, my Dad, Saturday night, Sokrates, writing sonnets, forensics, encounters with lovers, the word "idea", the feet of Jesus, and Russian thugs. The pieces are not linked. That's why I've called them "wrong".'

  • Published: 14 May 2024
  • ISBN: 9781787332355
  • Imprint: Jonathan Cape
  • Format: Trade Paperback
  • Pages: 192
  • RRP: $34.99
Categories:

About the author

Anne Carson

Anne Carson was born in Canada and has been a professor of Classics for over thirty years. Her awards and honours include the T. S. Eliot Prize, a Lannan Award, the Pushcart Prize, the Griffin Prize, on two occasions, and fellowships from the Guggenheim and MacArthur Foundations.

Also by Anne Carson

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Praise for Wrong Norma

Anne Carson is, for me, the most exciting poet writing in English today

Michael Ondaatje, author of The English Patient

She is one of the few writers writing in English that I would read anything she wrote

Susan Sontag, author of Against Interpretation

Her work is full of moments of startling originality and beauty. The poems play with character and plot, myth and magic; they are rich with attitude and wit and the undertow of grief. If she was a prose writer she would instantly be recognised as a genius

Colm Tóibín, author of Brooklyn

Carson applies the habits of classical scholarship, the linguistic rigor, the relentless search for evidence, the jigsaw approach to scattered facts, to the trivia of contemporary private life

New York Magazine

I'm a big fan of her work... There's a joy in encountering a mind that takes nothing for granted... She pinpoints the collision of oracle and anachronism

Teju Cole, author of Tremor

Strikes a range of scintillating, strangely affecting, and largely unconnected scenes… Each prose poem displays a precision, an attentiveness to the mildest of incidents as well as the most monumental of aftershocks

Skinny

Uncompromisingly intelligent, while being effortlessly readable, and – a word critics don’t often use about Carson – fun

Daily Telegraph

Reading this astounding, virtuosic book is a sampling of interiority. It is extraordinary because the form partakes the unjoined nature of human thought…. A triumph of a book

Observer

Carson’s latest work displays her brilliance and originality through a series of hybrid, free-flowing text interspersed with images and digressions… These prose poems evince clarity, precision and attention

Guardian

Powerfully moving... Wrong Norma can also be funny… Full of wit, pain and the wonder of language

Spectator

Wrong Norma is the poet at her best: humorous, whimsical, erudite, moving, unpretentious

Times Literary Supplement

Reading these fizzingly intelligent short pieces…it’s easy to see why she’s regularly tipped to win a Nobel Prize

Daily Telegraph, *Summer Reads of 2024*
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