Fiction. Translated from the French by Mark Polizzotti. A new translation of Marguerite Duras, YANN ANDREA STEINER is a dedication to Duras' companion with whom she spent the last decade of her life. A haunting dance between two parallel stories of love and solitude: the love between Duras and the young Yann Andrea and a seaside romance observed-or imagined-by the narrator between a camp counselor and an orphaned camper, a Holocaust survivor who witnessed his sister's murder at the hands of a German soldier. Memory blurs into desire as the summer of 1980 flows into 1944. An enigmatic elegy of history, creation, and raw emotion. Duras made over a dozen films and wrote 45 novels over the course of her life. Her bestselling novel The Lover won the Prix Goncourt.

Marguerite Donnadieu, better known as Marguerite Duras (4 April 1914 - 3 March 1996) was a French writer and film director. She was born at Gia-Dinh, near Saigon, French Indochina (now Vietnam), after her parents responded to a campaign by the French government encouraging people to work in the colony. Marguerite's father fell ill soon after their arrival, and returned to France, where he died. After his death, her mother, a teacher, remained in Indochina with her three children. The family lived in relative poverty after her mother made a bad investment in an isolated property and area of farmland in Cambodia. The difficult life that the family experienced during this period was highly influential on Marguerite's later work. An affair between the teenaged Marguerite and a Chinese man was to be treated several times (described in quite contrasting ways) in her subseqent memoirs and fiction. She also reported being beaten by both her mother and her older brother during this period. At 17, Marguerite went to France, her parents' native country, where she began studying for a degree in law. This she soon abandoned to concentrate on political sciences, and then law. After completing her studies, she became an active member of the PCF (the French Communist Party). In the late 1930s she worked for the French government office representing the colony of Indochina. During the war, from 1942 to 1944, she worked for the Vichy government in an office that allocated paper to publishers (in the process operating a de facto book censorship system), but she was also a member of the French Resistance. Her husband Robert Anthelme was deported to Bergen-Belsen for his involvement in the Resistance, and barely survived the experience (weighing on his release, according to Marguerite, just 84 lbs). In 1943 she changed her surname for Duras, the name of a village in the Lot-et-Garonne département, where her father's house was located. She is the author of a great many novels, plays, films,