Works by
André Aciman
(Writer)
[January 2, 1951 - ]

As Editor

• The Proust Project (2004)
  For The Proust Project, editor André Aciman asked twenty-eight writers -- Alain de Botton, Diane Johnson, Edmund White, Lydia Davis, Richard Howard, Shirley Hazzard, and others--to choose a favorite passage from In Search of Lost Time and introduce it in a brief essay. Gathered together, along with the passages themselves (and a synopsis that guides the reader from one passage to the next), these essays form the perfect introduction to the greatest novel of the last century, and the perfect gift for any Proustian.

Biography/Memoirs

• Out of Egypt (1996)
  This richly colored memoir chronicles the exploits of a flamboyant Jewish family, from its bold arrival in cosmopolitan Alexandria to its defeated exodus three generations later. In elegant and witty prose, André Aciman introduces us to the marvelous eccentrics who shaped his life:Uncle Vili, the strutting daredevil, soldier, salesman, and spy; the two grandmothers, the Princess and the Saint, who gossip in six languages; Aunt Flora, the German refugee who warns that Jews lose everything at least twice in their lives. And through it all, we come to know a boy who, even as he longs for a wider world, does not want to be led, forever, out of Egypt.

Essays

• False Papers: Essays on Exile and Memory (2001)
  In these fourteen essays, André Aciman, one of the most poignant stylists of his generation, dissects the experience of loss, moving from his force departure from Alexandria as a teenager, through his brief stay in Europe, and finally to the home he's made (and half invented) on Manhattan's Upper West Side.

Fiction

• Call Me by Your Name: A Novel (2007)
  Call Me by Your Name is the story of a sudden and powerful romance that blossoms between an adolescent boy and a summer guest at his parents' Cliffside mansion on the Italian Riviera. André Aciman's beautifully wrought debut novel is a frank, unsentimental, heartrending elegy to human passion.

Non-fiction

• Entrez: Signs of France (2001) by André Aciman and Steven Rothfeld, Photographer
  The signs of France are a gateway into a country proud of its artistic heritage—a past that reveals itself in every nuance of daily life.
  
  Steven Rothfeld has been recording these images for decades, capturing the milky cornflower blues and faded yellows, the hand-lettered, the neatly printed, even signs made from blown glass and wooden carvings. Their uniqueness and the beauty and sensibility of these signs reflect the visual sense of identity that is France. Rothfeld's gallery is accompanied by acclaimed author André Aciman's text, transporting the reader fully to another world.

See also:

• Letters of Transit: Reflections on Exile, Identity, Language and Loss (1999)
  Haunting reflections on exile and memory from five award-winning authors. All of the award-winning writers in Letters of Transit have written powerfully on exile, home, and memory, using the written word as a tool for revisiting their old homes or fashioning new ones. Now, in five newly commissioned original essays, they offer moving distillations of all of their most important thinking on these themes.

  • André Aciman traces his migration from his home in Egypt to Italy and the United States and compares his own transience with the unrootedness of many moderns.

  • Eva Hoffman examines the crucial role of language and what happens when your first is lost.

  • Returning to the political themes of his earlier work, Edward Said defends his conflicting political and cultural allegiances.

  • Novelist Bharati Mukherjee explores her own struggle with assimilation.

  • Finally, Charles Simic remembers the comedy of bureaucracy he experienced as a sixteen-year-old "displaced person" in Paris after the war, and his thwarted attempts at "fitting in" in America.

  Letters of Transit is a wonderful introduction to the works of these extraordinary writers.