New from Hyperbole Books, an SDSU Press Imprint: PROUST IN BLACK Los Angeles: A Proustian Fantasy by Fanny Daubigny

PROUST IN BLACK 

Los Angeles: A Proustian Fiction 

{Full Color Special Limited Edition} 

by Fanny Daubigny 

translated from the French by Bruce Whiteman 

HYPERBOLE BOOKS AN IMPRINT OF SDSU PRESS ISBN-10: 1-938537-81-5 ISBN-13: 978-1-938537-81-3 $30.95 USA | $42 CANADA | $600 MEXICO | €29 EURO

Fanny Daubigny's PROUST IN BLACK fuses French Literature, cultural studies, film noir, film studies, and Los Angeles, the City of Angels, in a dynamic synthesis of imagination and invention that remakes cultural criticism in the here and now. With lucid and evocative readings of Proust, Billy Wilder, Hollywood film noir and more, Daubigny emerges as a literature and film studies critic with a compelling vision and a lyrical prose artistry that tracks manifestations of Proust in and across the dark night of Southern California. 

Advance word on PROUST IN BLACK 


“A book about Proust and film noir and Los Angeles, yes, but so much more: it is about fear and desire, about guilt and insomnia, about the ‘chiaroscuro of consciousness’ in text and film and culture, about the ‘aesthetics of fear.’ And like a detective searching around dark corners of the city, we are constantly surprised. Buster Keaton joins Robert Wiene and Fritz Lang as an inaugurator of film noir! Pasolini’s debt to Proust! Albertine as femme fatale! It is criticism as detection, criticism as collision, criticism as crime, criticism as confession. It is critique noire.” Tom Lutz, Founder and Editor-in-Chief, Los Angeles 
 Review of Books 

“It is a tour de force of dexterous and poetically rendered cross-referencing. In Proust in Black Fanny Daubigny has composed a multi-layered cultural exchange between the country of France and the City of Los Angeles. The polarities, oddly drawn toward each other, will involve, on the French end, the great literary masterpiece of its age, Marcel Proust's In Search of Lost Time, and from the U.S. seaside dream city, L.A.'s body of films noir, those darkly gorgeous, cheaply made black and white crime movies from the 40s and 50s. At the center of all this is Desire. At the center of all this are the fluid permutations of memory, persistent yet illusive, and (as Elizabeth Bishop once said of another intangible essence, knowledge) ‘flowing and flown.’” 
 Suzanne Lummis, L.A. Noir Poet 

“Fanny Daubigny maps the liminal spaces where Proust’s romanticism collides with the cynical yearning of the film noir, in a Los Angeles that is at once real and cinematic, present and impossibly distant, smoldering-look cool and branding-iron hot. Like a half-remembered dream, her city floats above the smog line and gets caught in the palms.” 
Richard Schave, Founder, Los Angeles Visionary Association 

About the author: Fanny Daubigny is a writer, translator, and poet--she's also a Professor of French at CSU Fullerton. She has published many articles on Marcel Proust and is a specialist in the nineteenth and twentieth century literatures of France and the French-speaking countries. She lives in Los Angeles, city of angels.