The author of Call Me by Your Name returns with a deeply romantic memoir of his time in Rome while on the cusp of adulthood.
In Roman Year, André Aciman captures the period of his adolescence that began when he and his family first set foot in Rome, after being expelled from Egypt. Though Aciman’s family had been well-off in Alexandria, all vestiges of their status vanished when they fled, and the author, his younger brother, and his deaf mother moved into a rented apartment in Rome’s Via Clelia. Though dejected, Aciman’s mother and brother found their way into life in Rome, while Aciman, still unmoored, burrowed into his bedroom to read one book after the other. The world of novels eventually allowed him to open up to the city and, through them, discover the beating heart of the Eternal City.
Aciman’s time in Rome did not last long before he and his family moved across the ocean, but by the time they did, he was leaving behind a city he loved. In this memoir, the author, a genius of “the poetry of the place” (John Domini, The Boston Globe), conjures the sights, smells, tastes, and people of Rome as only he can. Aciman captures, as if in amber, a living portrait of himself on the brink of adulthood and the city he worshipped at that pivotal moment. Roman Year is a treasure, unearthed by one of our greatest prose stylists.
The New York Times–bestselling author of Find Me and Call Me by Your Name returns to the essay form with his collection of thoughts on time, the creative mind, and great lives and works.
Irrealis moods are a category of verbal moods that indicate that certain events have not happened, may never happen, or should or must or are indeed desired to happen, but for which there is no indication that they will ever happen. Irrealis moods are also known as counterfactual moods and include the conditional, the subjunctive, the optative, and the imperative—all best expressed in this book as the might-be and the might-have-been.
One of the great prose stylists of his generation, André Aciman returns to the essay form in Homo Irrealis to explore what time means to artists who cannot grasp life in the present. Irrealis moods are not about the present or the past or the future; they are about what might have been but never was but could in theory still happen. From meditations on subway poetry and the temporal resonances of an empty Italian street to considerations of the lives and work of Sigmund Freud, C. P. Cavafy, W. G. Sebald, John Sloan, Éric Rohmer, Marcel Proust, and Fernando Pessoa and portraits of cities such as Alexandria and St. Petersburg, Homo Irrealis is a deep reflection on the imagination’s power to forge a zone outside of time’s intractable hold.
“Aciman’s latest conveys with grace and insight his longing to apprehend ‘myself looking out to the self I am today.’ A resplendent collection from a writer who never disappoints.”
—Kirkus Reviews
“One feels that if Proust had not existed, Mr. Aciman would have invented him.”
—Richard Bernstein, The New York Times
“André Aciman is, quite simply, one of the finest essayists of the last hundred years.”
—Susan Salter Reynolds, Los Angeles Review of Books
A New York Times Bestseller
In this spellbinding exploration of the varieties of love, the author of the worldwide bestseller Call Me by Your Name revisits its complex and beguiling characters decades after their first meeting.
No novel in recent memory has spoken more movingly to contemporary readers about the nature of love than André Aciman’s haunting Call Me by Your Name. First published in 2007, it was hailed as “a love letter, an invocation . . . an exceptionally beautiful book” (Stacey D’Erasmo, The New York Times Book Review). Nearly three quarters of a million copies have been sold, and the book became a much-loved, Academy Award–winning film starring Timothée Chalamet as the young Elio and Armie Hammer as Oliver, the graduate student with whom he falls in love.
In Find Me, Aciman shows us Elio’s father, Samuel, on a trip from Florence to Rome to visit Elio, who has become a gifted classical pianist. A chance encounter on the train with a beautiful young woman upends Sami’s plans and changes his life forever.
Elio soon moves to Paris, where he, too, has a consequential affair, while Oliver, now a New England college professor with a family, suddenly finds himself contemplating a return trip across the Atlantic.
Aciman is a master of sensibility, of the intimate details and the emotional nuances that are the substance of passion. Find Me brings us back inside the magic circle of one of our greatest contemporary romances to ask if, in fact, true love ever dies.
Named a Goodreads, TIME and Vogue Best Book of 2019
Named one of the most anticipated Fall books by ABC News Online, Associated Press, Bustle, BuzzFeed, Canadian Broadcast Corporation, Chicago Tribune, Entertainment Weekly, Goodreads, Huffington Post, Hypable, Lit Hub, Marie Claire, Medium, The Millions, NewNowNext, New York Magazine, Nylon, NY Post, Observer, Oprah.com, Parade, Philadelphia Inquirer, Publishers Weekly, Thrillist, TIME, The Times (UK), Town & Country, USA Today, Vogue, Vox, Vulture, Washington Blade, Washington Post, Woman’s Day, Yahoo
“Dazzling.”
—Parul Sehgal of The New York Times Book Review at the 92nd St Y
“Aciman’s quiet, label-free presentation of bisexual life represents a minor triumph . . . Likewise, his refusal to offer easy resolution, which infuses the whole romantic enterprise with a kind of delicious melancholy. There are moments, particularly in the final chapter, that may have readers gazing tearfully into their fireplaces, real or imaginary, just like Timothée Chalamet at the end of Luca Guadagnino’s superlative film of ‘Call Me by Your Name.’”
—Charles Arrowsmith, The Washington Post
“[Find Me] is a lyrical meditation on being forced to move to another location after the party’s over, on the Sisyphean task of trying to replicate the magic of young passion . . . it strikes an affectingly melancholy chord.”
—Josh Duboff, The New York Times Book Review
“You don’t have to have read Call Me by Your Name, Aciman’s 2007 bestselling novel turned Oscar-nominated movie, to immediately fall in love with this sexy, melancholic follow-up. It stands entirely separate, yet connected, a beautiful ode to the passage of time, to the lasting power of true love and the ache of loneliness . . . the revelations about who these characters have become unraveling slowly like a gorgeous piece of classical music.”
—BuzzFeed
“Call Me By Your Name was widely praised for its treatment of the nature of love, a theme that Find Me continues with subtlety and grace. Its treatment of the characters’ psychology is astute and insightful, but what will ultimately drive reader interest is the question of whether star-crossed lovers Elio and Oliver will reunite. One can only hope.”
—Booklist (starred review)
“Love in all its sublime iterations is at the heart of Aciman’s incandescent sequel to the acclaimed Call Me by Your Name . . . Aciman gifts readers with a beautiful 21st-century romance that reflects on the remembrance of things past and the courage to embrace the future.”
—Library Journal (starred review)
“With all of the richly painted details, emotional nuance, and deeply affecting romance as the first installment, this book will draw you in and make you believe in love again.”
—Good Housekeeping
“Aciman writes about desire with blunt honesty, describing erotic and emotional interactions with equal clarity. Sex can be tender or not, the connection lasting or ephemeral, but it is almost always multilayered and complex.”
—Clea Simon, The Boston Globe
“The sequel is just as maddeningly seductive as the original.”
—ELLE
“Elegant . . . Elio is the heart of the novel, as its core themes—including fatherhood, music, the nature of time and fate, the weight and promise of the past—are infused with eroticism, nostalgia and tenderness in fluid prose. The novel again demonstrates Aciman’s capacity to fuse the sensual and the cerebral in stories that touch the heart.”
—Publishers Weekly
“[Find Me] is touching without being sentimental . . . An elegant, memorable story of enduring love across the generations.”
—Kirkus Reviews
“Soulful.”
—People Magazine
“The focus of Find Me is the unlived life, the real life that comes to a standstill . . . Aciman’s clever arrangement takes advantage of the frustrated desire of the reader to see Elio and Oliver reunited . . . Far more ambitious than Call Me by Your Name . . . great care has gone into the artistic shaping of this narrative.”
—Anne Serre, The Times Literary Supplement
“A structural marvel . . . proves itself indispensable to longtime readers and newcomers alike.”
—Garrett Biggs, The Chicago Review of Books
“Find Me is a sensual delight . . . Throughout his nonfiction and fiction, Aciman has maintained a profound preoccupation with memory and the responsibility of history. An aching sense of vulnerability and fearlessness drives this book past any question of whether or not a sequel was warranted.”
—Lauren LeBlanc, Observer
“Find Me is written in the same spiraling prose . . . full of grace, with some sentences approaching page length—that Call Me by Your Name was. I devoured the novel quickly, and on rereading have found myself unable to break away from Aciman’s hypnotic rhythms.”
—Spencer Kornhaber, The Atlantic
“I’m relishing this indulgent sequel—sex, sculptures, food, villas: everything a person could want from a novel or from life.”
—Richie Hoffman, Poetry Foundation
“Exquisite.”
—Kate Erbland, IndieWire
“Aciman had his work cut out for himself in crafting a sequel as contemplative and gorgeous as Call Me by Your Name, which ended in its own coda of Elio’s and Oliver’s paths crossing years and years hence. Threading that needle perfectly, Aciman continues his story, parsing its very structure in his erudite, knowing style . . . Aciman’s genius holds true and makes Find Me a splendid work in its own right.”
—Dave Wheeler, Shelf Awareness (starred review)
“Stubbornly unsentimental, but nevertheless beautiful . . . Find Me is, at heart, a meditation on how love bends and warps over time, but never quite disappears.”
—Kristin Iversen, Nylon
“This [book] functioned like a medical-grade SAD lamp in the dead of February. It is a lively novel about sentimental Americans in Italy who feel a wider range of emotions in seven minutes than most people do in a month.”
—Molly Young, Vulture
“A devastatingly honest reflection on the authenticity of love and life . . . Find Me is a truly remarkable achievement of love beyond the honeymoon teenage years.”
—Tomás Guerrero Jaramillo, Harvard Crimson
From André Aciman, the author of Call Me by Your Name (now a major motion picture and the winner of the Oscar™ for Best Adapted Screenplay) comes “a sensory masterclass, absorbing, intelligent, unforgettable” (Times Literary Supplement).
Enigma Variations charts the life of a man named Paul, whose loves remain as consuming and as covetous throughout his adulthood as they were in his adolescence. Whether the setting is southern Italy, where as a boy he has a crush on his parents’ cabinetmaker, or a snowbound campus in New England, where his enduring passion for a girl he’ll meet again and again over the years is punctuated by anonymous encounters with men—whether he’s on a tennis court in Central Park or on a New York sidewalk in early spring. Paul’s attachments are ungraspable, transient, and forever underwritten by raw desire.
Ahead of every step Paul takes, his hopes, denials, fears, and regrets are always ready to lay their traps. Yet the dream of love lingers. We may not always know what we want. We may remain enigmas to ourselves and to others. But sooner or later, we discover who we’ve always known we were.
“Aciman writes arousal so beautifully you miss it when it’s gone . . . [Aciman is] up to something bolder this time . . . Aciman is all the way himself here. He writes with the ferocity of a writer who’s finally getting his vision down, and he has to say it, has to get it out. He’s made a magnificent, living thing.”
—Paul Lisicky, New York Times Book Review
“One of the great novels of this century so far.”
—Michael Silverblatt, host of “Bookworm” on KCRW
“Is there any writer out there who can conjure the seismic swings and loop-the-loop giddiness of sexual infatuation the way that André Aciman can? He first revealed this talent in his debut novel, Call Me By Your Name, the book that sealed his reputation along with his sublime memoir, Out of Egypt . . . The allure of Enigma Variations rests in its agile sense of the heart’s paradoxes and might-have-beens.”
—Michael Upchurch, The Boston Globe
“A breathless, sketched rendering of one man’s life in love, Aciman’s novel speaks earnestly not only of longing and lust, but also of more complicated emotions . . . [Aciman] portrays Paul convincingly as a sensuous and self-aware figure, forever treading the border between melodrama and tragedy.”
—Publishers Weekly
Now a Major Motion Picture from Director Luca Guadagnino, Starring Armie Hammer and Timothée Chalamet, and Written by Three-Time Oscar™ Nominee James Ivory
The Basis of the Oscar-Winning Best Adapted Screenplay
A New York Times Bestseller
A USA Today Bestseller
A Los Angeles Times Bestseller
A Vulture Book Club Pick
An Instant Classic and One of the Great Love Stories of Our Time
Andre Aciman’s Call Me by Your Name is the story of a sudden and powerful romance that blossoms between an adolescent boy and a summer guest at his parents’ cliffside mansion on the Italian Riviera. Each is unprepared for the consequences of their attraction, when, during the restless summer weeks, unrelenting currents of obsession, fascination, and desire intensify their passion and test the charged ground between them. Recklessly, the two verge toward the one thing both fear they may never truly find again: total intimacy. It is an instant classic and one of the great love stories of our time.
Winner of the Lambda Literary Award for Fiction
A New York Times Notable Book of the Year • A Publishers Weekly and The Washington Post Best Book of the Year • A New York Magazine “Future Canon” Selection • A Chicago Tribune and Seattle Times (Michael Upchurch’s) Favorite Book of the Year
“The book is incredible. My wife [Elizabeth Chambers] calls it the sexiest book she’s ever read. It humanises love in a really powerful, beautiful way.”
—Armie Hammer, Time Out (London)
“I loved the movie . . . and the book completely blew me away!”
—Marc Jacobs on Instagram
“I finally read André Aciman’s deeply moving novel Call Me by Your Name, racing to do so before I saw Luca Guadagnino’s (sublime) movie adaptation with its sensitive screenplay by James Ivory—and I adored it.”
—Hamish Bowles, Vogue.com (Best Books We Read All Year)
“Superb . . . The beauty of Aciman’s writing and the purity of his passions should place this extraordinary first novel within the canon of great romantic love stories for everyone.”
—Charles Kaiser, The Washington Post Book World
“An extraordinary examination of longing and the complicated ways in which we negotiate the experience of attraction . . . It’s startling that a novel so bracingly unsentimental—alert to the ways we manipulate, second-guess, forestall, and finally reach stumblingly toward one another—concludes with such emotional depths.”
—Mark Doty, O, The Oprah Magazine
“This novel is hot . . . a love letter, an invocation, and something of an epitaph . . . An exceptionally beautiful book.”
—Stacey D’Erasmo, The New York Times Book Review
“If you are prepared to take a hard punch in your gut, and like brave, acute, elated, naked, brutal, tender, humane, and beautiful prose, then you’ve come to the right place.”
—Nicole Krauss, author of The History of Love
“A great love story . . . every phrase, every ache, every giddy rush of sensation in this beautiful novel rings true.”
—Michael Upchurch, The Seattle Times
“The novel is richly, sensuously detailed . . . luminous . . . Aciman deftly charts a burgeoning relationship that both parties want and fear.”
—Karen Campbell, The Boston Globe
“Aciman . . . has an ability to make the finest, the tiniest and most convincing distinctions between moods, responses, and registers. Everything is watched as it shifts and glitters and then hesitates and maybe is shadowed over . . . This really is fiction at its most supremely interesting; every clause and subclause shimmers with a densely observed and carefully rendered invention that seems oddly and delightfully precise and convincing.”
—Colm Tóibín, The New York Review of Books
From André Aciman, the New York Times bestselling author of Call Me by Your Name, comes an eclectic collection of essays on memory and exile inspired by the quiet moments of an introspective traveler
A Boston Globe Best Nonfiction Book of the Year
Celebrated as one of the most poignant stylists of his generation, André Aciman has written a luminous series of linked essays about time, place, identity, and art that show him at his very finest. From beautiful and moving pieces about the memory evoked by the scent of lavender; to meditations on cities like Barcelona, Rome, Paris, and New York; to his sheer ability to unearth life secrets from an ordinary street corner, Alibis reminds the reader that Aciman is a master of the personal essay.
“A beautiful new book of essays . . . Aciman’s deep fidelity to the world of the senses, and to the translation of those sensations into prose, makes Alibis a delight.”
—The New York Times Book Review
“From the acclaimed Egyptian-born author, gorgeous musings on longing and memory fueled by travel . . . These essays sing with bracing clarity.”
—Kirkus Reviews
“Alibis is a much more personal and revealing book than Aciman’s memoir or his first essay collection. Now that the author has dissected his writing methodology and thought process so meticulously, the next book and new direction he’ll go toward seems more of a mystery still . . . That’s part of the excitement of reading Aciman, whose work is never a mere jest or entertaining distraction but genuine self-inquiry.”
—Jake Marmer, Tablet
“In Aciman’s hands [memory] seems fresh and complex once again . . . On the occasion of Alibis, his project is ostensibly the result of his travels, and he does indeed treat readers to lengthy reflections on Rome, Barcelona, Paris, Tuscany, and New York, among other locales . . . Alibis is a quiet, unassuming triumph.”
—John McIntyre, The Millions
“Now and then . . . we are offered a reading experience that reminds us of the gold standard in literature, and one such book is Alibis: Essays on Elsewhere by André Aciman . . . he shares with Proust an ability to plumb the depths of memory and meaning in the observed details of ordinary life.”
—Jonathan Kirsch, The Jewish Journal
“Many of these essays begin with a city—New York, Barcelona, Rome—before spiraling into images and ideas that connect with other places and times in Aciman’s own well-traveled history. Born in Egypt, raised in a French-speaking Jewish family, his complex identity (is he African? French? Jewish?) confronts him with a ‘fundamental distortion’ that he can make sense of only by the transformative power of art.”
—Kate Tuttle, The Boston Globe
“Maddening though this habit of searching for displaced selves might be in a traveling companion—the word ‘alibi’ literally means ‘elsewhere’—it is a pleasure in an essayist. While the roll call of places visited by Mr. Aciman is unexceptional, his angle on them is anything but, since his weakness for traveling ‘in search of lost time’ opens up telescoping possibilities of reverie and speculation.”
—Elizabeth Lowry, The Wall Street Journal
“André Aciman is, quite simply, one of the finest essayists of the last hundred years–you’d have to go back much farther, perhaps a visit to Montaigne, to find the combination of elegance, restraint, and longing that Aciman so generously bestows upon his reader.”
—Susan Salter Reynolds, The Los Angeles Review of Books
A lushly romantic novel from the author of Call Me by Your Name
A young man goes to a Christmas party in upper Manhattan where a woman introduces herself with three simple words: “I am Clara.” Over the following seven days, they meet every evening at the cinema. Overwhelmed yet cautious, he treads softly. The tension between them builds gradually—marked by ambivalence, hope, and distrust—culminating in a final scene on New Year’s Eve charged with magic and passion. André Aciman yet again explores human emotion with uncompromising accuracy in this piercing new novel. Eight White Nights is a brilliant performance from a master prose stylist.
“Eight White Nights . . . envelop[s] the reader in its wintry spell.”
—Jennifer Egan, The New York Times (Editors’ Choice)
“A modern New York City fairy tale.”
—Time Out (New York)
“A bravura re-creation of all the feints and counterfeints, yearnings and frustrations, of modern courtship. It possesses the psychological acuity and intensity one associates not just with Proust but also with Dostoyevsky.”
—Michael Dirda, The New York Review of Books
“Psychologically charged, deeply Dostoyevskian . . . original to the core. Then again, Aciman has never failed to be original. Nor is he a stranger to questions of love.”
—Marie Arana, The Washington Post
“Aciman brilliantly continues his examination into the minefield of longing and attraction . . . For anyone who’s ever smarted from the sharp dreamlike unreality of those obsessive early stages of young love, it’s a blistering quick trip down the rabbit hole.”
—Karen Campbell, The Boston Globe
This richly colored memoir chronicles the exploits of a flamboyant Jewish family, from its bold arrival in cosmopolitan Alexandria to its defeated exodus three generations later.
In elegant and witty prose, André Aciman introduces us to the marvelous eccentrics who shaped his life—Uncle Vili, the strutting daredevil, soldier, salesman, and spy; the two grandmothers, the Princess and the Saint, who gossip in six languages; Aunt Flora, the German refugee who warns that Jews lose everything “at least twice in their lives.” And through it all, we come to know a boy who, even as he longs for a wider world, does not want to be led, forever, out of Egypt.
“It is Mr. Aciman’s great achievement that he has re-created a world gone forever now, and given us an ironical and affectionate portrait of those who were exiled from it.”
—The New York Times Book Review
“Aciman may have gone out of Egypt but, as this evocative and imaginative book makes plain, he has never left it, nor it him.”
—The Washington Post
“With beguiling simplicity, Aciman recalls the life of Alexandria as [his family] knew it, and the seductiveness of that beautiful, polyglot city permeates his book.”
—The New Yorker
“Beautifully remembered and even more beautifully written.”
—Los Angeles Times Book Review
From the highly acclaimed author of Out of Egypt and Call Me by Your Name, a series of linked essays on memory by “the poet of disappointed love—and of the city” (New York Times Book Review).
In these fourteen essays Andre Aciman, one of the most poignant stylists of his generation, dissects the experience of loss, moving from his forced departure from Alexandria as a teenager, through his brief stay in Europe and finally to the home he’s made (and half invented) on Manhattan’s Upper West Side.
From False Papers: We remember not because we have something we wish to go back to, nor because memories are all we have. We remember because memory is our most intimate, most familiar gesture. Most people are convinced I love Alexandria. In truth, I love remembering Alexandria. For it is not Alexandria that is beautiful. Remembering is beautiful.
“Over and over in the course of these linked essays Aciman shows himself wanting to be elsewhere . . . You don’t need to have lost an Alexandria to understand what he does with place and time and memory. After all, we are all exiles in a way—from our own childhoods, our own pasts, if nothing else. It is that remembered aspect of ourselves, that shadowy other life, that Andre Aciman’s new book so piercingly addresses.”
—Wendy Lesser, The New York Times Book Review
“The incomplete and unstable state of nostalgia is what Aciman tries to fix in this beautiful memoir. He lives in his mind. But sharing that mind is a rare privilege.”
—Barbara Fisher, The Boston Sunday Globe
“One feels that if Proust had not existed Mr. Aciman would have invented him.”
—Richard Bernstein, The New York Times
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