A fine introduction to Carrere, though devotees (and I am one) may be a bit disappointed in how much of this collection appears in his long-form works - Adversary, Limonov, the Philip K Dick Book, My Life as a Russian Novel, Lives Other Than My Own, and the extraordinary The Kingdom are all excerpted here, resulting in strange deja vu. But what was a 3 star experience for may likely won't be for you - at his best, there is no non-fiction writer like Carrere, who has a keen wit, a need to confess...

It’s trite, it’s terrible. It’s even more terrible when it’s not things but a single thing, and that single thing abandons you.The rating was based on a simple premise, whenever I read a collection or anthology there are always duds, but here I truly loved every piece. Crucial to that joy, was likely the freshness, the odd voice which I didn't anticipate. My wife had read the author years ago, his novella The Class trip. I don't believe I had ever read a line of his before this. I had acquired T...

I'm the Carrère fan in the household, but, to my delight, it was my husband who bought this one, shortly after reading the Guardian piece about the Dice Man. It was all we talked about for roughly a week, opting, even, to throw the die ourselves on one occasion (with low stakes and mostly in jest, though I was still horrified. There's something very dark about Luke Rhinehart and his following.)Like other reviewers have mentioned, there is some familiar territory here for those who have already r...

“The prize goes to the Barclays banking group for its food-speculation activities: in the second quarter of 2010 alone, it put 44 million people below the poverty line by artificially raising food prices.”There were quite a few memorable highlights in here, the story of a Hungarian man shipped off to a Siberian mental institutions for decades in “The Lost Hungarian”. Then there’s Carrere’s dark experience of being in Sri Lanka during the Boxing Day tsunami of 2004. Though one of the funniest and...

Though I do think Carrere's tendency to grapple deeply with the subjectivity of writing/reporting works better in his longer-form pieces (two or three or more of which grew out of pieces collected here), there are some memorable among these, including a dirty relationship column, a vivid portrait of Macron and a visit with the author of The Dice Man in Upstate New York. I guess the thing with a subjectivity--or at least with Carrere's subjectivity--is that it is not fleeting, but follows you aro...

The pieces about crime, death, loss, etc., are unsentimental and unsparing: flat and European, in a good way. They resonate, as do some of the other odds and ends in this assortment. Less flat and more European, and not a little off-putting, are the occasional detours into sex. Very occasional, and so not a significant knock on the book, but very off-key compared with the best of the work here.

Not really essays: more reportage and rumination. So if you come expecting essays, you may be disappointed. If you're a journalist or a fan of journalism, and want to read not only great examples of the form but also some fourth-wall breaking on it, then you'll probably love this.Carrere explains that he thinks it isn't possible to keep the journalist out of the journalism, and so he doesn't try. A journalist myself, I disagree for most situations, but at least Carrere does it in a way that isn'...

"96,196 Words: Essays" is a charming collection of essays from a man I don't know. Emmanuel Carrere is an accomplished writer from France. The articles cover topics as wide-ranging as Philip K Dick and true crime. One example of a great piece is The Romand Case. How do you pretend to be a doctor for 18 years and have no one suspect anything? It boggles my mind that someone can pull that off. Furthermore, rather than admit his whole life was a lie, he went on a killing spree.Carrere's writing dra...

Amazing An absolutely stunning book of essays about the famous and infamous... A true dissection of human nature .. can’t recommend it enough

Some brilliant pieces, some meh. The one about the last soldier of WW2 and a doctor living a fake life were the best.Good writer, too much book.

I read this because I wanted to see for myself the writings of Carrère, who according to “The New York Times” “reinvented nonfiction.” And I’m glad I did. The strongest pieces in this collection are the reportage pieces. There’s a piece about Jean-Claude Romand, a guy who faked his being a doctor for years without anyone finding out about it, who killed his own family when he was about to be found out. There’s also an emotional piece about a Hungarian prisoner of war who finally goes home after

i love the authorial voice: friendly, confiding, half thinking out loud. best pieces are on philip k. dick, macron, the dice man. i did not know he wrote so much on sex -- here's a long excerpt from the eighth of the pieces he wrote for an italian magazine:I thought back to my previous columns and said to myself that for someone who’d been hired on the basis of his reputation as an amiable pornographer, I’d been remarkably chaste up to now. Flirts with no tomorrow, lame blind dates, ruminations

One of the downsides of reading a lot is that nothing surprises you anymore. You could be reading the grimmest climate projections and rather than imagining a Mad Max future and getting alarmed you find yourself wondering whether the model used was really robust enough. The bar for what is an impressive read is set very high, seldom crossed but when it does, the experience is unmatched. It is a journey into uncharted waters with the next turn of the page opening up new islands never laid eyes up...

This is the first time I am reading anything by Emmanuel Carrere and it is nice to start with his essays. The first few are very engaging. A few like the one on the politics in Russia and the time he is a writer in residence at the Santa Maddalena Foundation can be quickly skipped through. The ones I liked the most were, Three Crime Stories, The Romand Case, Philip K Dick, The Lost Hungarian, Death in Sri Lanka, Room 304, The Life of Julie and Four Days in Davos. This is from Four Days in Davos"...

One gets the impression reading this that it is kind of a greatest hits--mostly it collects articles he has written, some of which he has expanded into whole books. This volume includes essays on Jean-Claude Romand and Truman Capote's method of writing In Cold Blood, which feel like a teaser for his book L'Adversaire (2000) about Jean-Claude Romand. Ditto the two articles dealing with Eduard Limonov, subject of his book Liminov. If these essays were advertisements for his book-length treatments

Interesting sampling of wide-ranging journalist's fare, written with passion and a voracious curiosity. His essays cover some celebs, such as a wry piece about the non-disclosures of Catherine Deneuve, appreciations of genre gumshoe, true crime, current events and plenty of profiles of odd types. My personal favorite just because it brims with detail is the Orbiting Jupiter essay. Carrere trots after the imperturbable Emmanuel Macron, who doesn't perspire and handshakes with a wrestler's intensi...

“Whom your work resembles doesn’t matter that much, I believe; what counts is that there’s a resemblance.” I’d never read any Emmanuel before, so this latest essay collection of his was a great intro to his work. They’re assorted essays ranging from free-ranging short anecdotes on hetero romantic relationships to longer newsier pieces that often hinge on one critical decision made in an otherwise unremarkable moment. The man who faked being a WHO doctor for 20 years, the woman who photographed a...

I really liked different accounts of Russia, a mix of politics, and finally a touch upon Macron’s biography. Qs: •It’s like getting old: there are things you could once do, things you liked to do, that you now have a hard time doing, and you sense it that soon you won’f be able to do them at all. It’s trite, it’s terrible. It’s even more terrible when it’s not things but a single thing, and that single thing abandons you. •... the presence of the observer invariably modifies the observed phenome...

A collection of journalistic articles published in various magazines and periodicals from the 90s onwards. I'd never heard of Carrere before, but his pieces are interesting, sometimes they seem to present life as stranger than fiction, sometimes they ask important questions which are so obvious we seem to overlook them. Whatever essay you read in this very well written collection, it will hold your attention and it will teach you something you didn't know before. By the time I was completing the...