Tete-a-Tete (62 page)

Hazel Rowley is the author of two previous books: CHRISTINA STEAD: A BIOGRAPHY and RICHARD WRIGHT: THE LIFE AND TIMES. She has been a Rockefeller Foundation Fellow and a Bunting Institute Fellow at Radcliffe College, and has taught at the University of Iowa and at Deakin University in Melbourne, Australia. She lives in New York and Paris.

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“An enthralling book…. Here we find an ugly, walleyed existentialist philosopher, the elegantly beautiful author of
The Second Sex,
and the Gallic equivalent of a bevy of young starlets who share the bed of one or the other—or sometimes both. Readers will turn these pages alternately mesmerized and appalled.”

—Michael Dirda,
Washington Post Book World

“Rowley is an engrossing narrator. Her book tells Beauvoir and Sartre's repellent, inspiring, and unlikely tale more completely and concisely than it has ever been told before.”

—
New York Times Book Review

“The surprise page-turner of the year. With the deftness of a geometer, Rowley sorts out their many ‘contingent' love affairs, keeping all the eyebrow-raising, overlapping triangles straight.”

—
Newsday

“
Tête-à-Tête
has just about everything: sex, philosophy, politics, and the world's most unconventional love story. Hard as I tried, I could not put it down.”

—Barbara Ehrenreich

“A fast-moving yet vast saga, spanning the bulk of the twentieth century and much of the world…. Rowley aims to capture Beauvoir' sand Sartre's life experiences. She does this vividly and expertly.”

—
Seattle Times

“Enormously rich and utterly absorbing,
Tête-à-Tête
offers just what is needed: a short, concise, penetrating look into the famous couple who changed their century.”

—Brenda Maddox

“An in-depth, unflinching account….
Tête-à-Tête
provides a valuable cultural history by reaching well beyond Sartre's and Beauvoir's cumbersome reputations…. A very good book.”

—
Boston Globe

“Drawing on unpublished letters and new interviews with romantic casualties from both sides, Rowley artfully alternates between depicting Sartre and [Beauvoir] as café-lounging, leftist intellectuals, and jealous, cruel sexual manipulators straight out of
Dangerous Liaisons
.”

—Entertainment Weekly

“A lively and fulfilling portrait…. This wonderfully crafted narrative presents the complicated lives of these two strong-willed individuals and their numerous lovers, companions, friends, concerns, and passions in a way that enthralls like a novel but clearly imparts the force of reality. Thoroughly researched and well written.”

—
Library Journal

“Entrancing….
Tête-à-Tête
is a story of Sartre and Beauvoir's profound love for each other and dependence on each other's intellectual prowess and critical literary abilities. But it is also a vivid story…sufficiently gossipy and prurient to hold any reader's attention.”

—
Providence Journal

“What Rowley so shrewdly and fairly reveals in this explicit and insightful double portrait is that these two charismatic champions for justice and freedom were committed at any cost to transmuting existence into art.”

—
Booklist

“[A] sympathetic but clear-eyed history of Sartre and Beauvoir's lifelong partnership…. Rowley manages to recapture the charm and the brilliance of the relationship in its early stages.”

—
New York Times

“Without undue prurience, Rowley romps through the major entanglements, loves, triangles, friendships, and affairs…and [places] these fascinating interactions into literary and biographical context…. [She] draws from vast stores of published and unpublished writings, correspondence, and interviews.”

—
Publishers Weekly

“Fascinating…. A neatly assembled record of people behaving badly in the name of literature, philosophy, and amour.”

—
Kirkus Reviews

Richard Wright: The Life and Times

Christina Stead: A Biography

This book is a work of fiction. The characters, incidents, and dialogue are drawn from the author's imagination and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

TÊTE-À-TÊTE
. Copyright © 2005 by Hazel Rowley. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.

EPub Edition © May 2007 ISBN: 9780061852909

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

This book is a work of fiction. The characters, incidents, and dialogue are drawn from the author's imagination and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

TÊTE-À-TÊTE
. Copyright © 2005 by Hazel Rowley. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.

EPub Edition © May 2007 ISBN: 9780061852909

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

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