Self-Portrait in Green 10th Anniversary Edition by NDiaye

Who are the green women? They are powerful (one is a disciplinarian teacher). They are mysterious (one haunts a house like a ghost). They are seductive (one marries her best friend’s father). And they are unbearably personal (one is the author’s own mother).

They are all aspects of their creator: Marie NDiaye, an author celebrated worldwide as one of France’s leading writers. Here, in her own skewed take on the memoir, NDiaye combs through all the menacing, beguiling, and revelatory memories submerged beneath the consciousness of a singular literary talent. Mysterious, honest, and unabashedly innovative, NDiaye’s self-portrait forces us all to ask questions—about what we repress, how we discover those things, and how those obsessions become us.

This 10^th anniversary hardcover edition of Marie NDiaye’s genre-defying classic restores photographs that appeared in the original French edition alongside Jordan Stump’s dazzling translation, revealing in English, at last, the complete vision of NDiaye’s influential masterpiece.

Marie NDiaye was born in 1967 in Pithiviers, France. She is the author of around twenty novels, plays, collections of stories, and nonfiction books, which have been translated into numerous languages. She's received the Prix Femina and the Prix Goncourt, France's highest literary honor, and her plays are in the repertoire of the Comedie-Francaise.
Jordan Stump is a professor of French at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, the author of two book-length studies of the writing of Raymond Queneau ( Naming and Unnaming and The Other Book ), and the translator of some thirty works of mostly contemporary French fiction, by such authors as Marie NDiaye, Scholastique Mukasonga, Eric Chevillard, and Marie Redonnet. His translation of Marie NDiaye's The Cheffe won the American Literary Translators' Association prize for prose in 2020.
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