It warrants noting that in its even younger life in English - it's just been released in a superb translation by Molly Ringwald (yes, that one) - it has also engendered some preposterous bafflegab. "It took Besson his whole life to write it," Lauren Collins reports in a recent short New Yorker interview with the author, "and, when he was done, he thought that he would never be able to write again." It's as immediately involving and heart-breaking a tale of gay first love as I can recall, credibly said to consume readers, as it did me, as much as it did the author. It's a wonder not just of concision (160 pages), but also of compression and agonizing levels of compassion. "Lie with Me" (Scribner) is Philippe Besson's 18th book, written in 2016 in what one suspects was one of those seizures of composition that produce such searing stuff. Some good writers learn to write shorter.
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