Literary Nonfiction. Memoir. LGBT Studies. Translated from the French by Linda Gaboriau. It is the spring of 1963. The young Quebec author, Marie-Claire Blais, has just won a coveted Guggenheim fellowship. She chooses Cambridge, Massachusetts, as the place where she will begin her writer's apprenticeship with her mentor, Edmund Wilson. American Notebooks is much more than a fascinating autobiographical account of the intellectual flowering of a great writer. An album of exquisitely drawn literary portraits of companions, intellectuals, writers, musicians, artists and social activists of the period: Edmund and Elena Wilson, Mary Meigs, Maud Morgan, Barbara Deming, Truman Capote, her first Quebec publisher, now Senator, Jacques Hebert, and many others, it also introduces many of the real life personalities who have inspired her fictional characters.

Author City: QUEBEC, ON CAN

Born Oct. 5, 1939, Quebec, Que., Can.) French-Canadian novelist and poet. In two early, dreamlike novels, Mad Shadows (1959) and Tête blanche (1960), she staked out her territory, working-class people doomed to unrelieved sorrow and grinding poverty. A Season in the Life of Emmanuel (1965) received the Prix Médicis and was widely translated and discussed. Later works include The Manuscripts of Pauline Archange (1968, Governor General's Award) and Deaf to the City (1979, Governor General's Award). She received the Governor General's Award again in 1996 for Soifs (1995). She has also published poetry collections and several plays.