Hotel Casanova: and other brief texts

In twelve short texts written between 1984 and 2006, here is Annie Ernaux at her most incisive and intimate, presenting readers with yet another new experience of the razor’s edge of the author’s sensibility, this time in the form of brief works of fiction or nonfiction.

In “Hotel Casanova,” the title story of this collection, Ernaux describes a series of hotel-room trysts with a man who holds no interest for her other than sexually, just after her mother is admitted to hospital suffering fr...