The Factory of Facts

A Memoir

Author Lucy Sante
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Paperback
$19.00 US
On sale Mar 30, 1999 | 320 Pages | 9780679746508

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The acclaimed author of Low Life reinvents the memoir in a cunning, lyrical book that is at once a personal history and a meditation on the construction of identity. Born in Belgium but raised in New Jersey, Luc Sante transformed himself from a pious, timid Belgian boy into a loutish American adolescent, who eschewed French while fantasizing about the pop star Françoise Hardy. To show how this transformation came about—and why it remained incomplete—The Factory of Facts  combines family anecdote and ancestral legend; detailed forays into Belgian history, language, and religion; and deft synopses of the American character.


“Sante has a historian's fiendish taste for information . . . a journalist's wit, resourcefulness and love of idiosyncracy.” —The New York Times Book Review

“Sante's subversion of the usual psychotherapeutics of memoir-writing is refreshing, and his reconstruction of the vanished worlds of the past are elegantly fashioned.” —Publishers Weekly
© Jem Cohen
Lucy Sante is the author of Low Life, Evidence, The Factory of Facts, Kill All Your Darlings, Folk Photography, The Other Paris, Maybe the People Would Be the Times, and Nineteen Reservoirs. Her awards include a Whiting Writers Award, an Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, a Grammy Award (for album notes), an Infinity Award from the International Center of Photography, and Guggenheim and Cullman Center fellowships. She recently retired after twenty-four years teaching at Bard College. View titles by Lucy Sante

About

The acclaimed author of Low Life reinvents the memoir in a cunning, lyrical book that is at once a personal history and a meditation on the construction of identity. Born in Belgium but raised in New Jersey, Luc Sante transformed himself from a pious, timid Belgian boy into a loutish American adolescent, who eschewed French while fantasizing about the pop star Françoise Hardy. To show how this transformation came about—and why it remained incomplete—The Factory of Facts  combines family anecdote and ancestral legend; detailed forays into Belgian history, language, and religion; and deft synopses of the American character.


“Sante has a historian's fiendish taste for information . . . a journalist's wit, resourcefulness and love of idiosyncracy.” —The New York Times Book Review

“Sante's subversion of the usual psychotherapeutics of memoir-writing is refreshing, and his reconstruction of the vanished worlds of the past are elegantly fashioned.” —Publishers Weekly

Author

© Jem Cohen
Lucy Sante is the author of Low Life, Evidence, The Factory of Facts, Kill All Your Darlings, Folk Photography, The Other Paris, Maybe the People Would Be the Times, and Nineteen Reservoirs. Her awards include a Whiting Writers Award, an Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, a Grammy Award (for album notes), an Infinity Award from the International Center of Photography, and Guggenheim and Cullman Center fellowships. She recently retired after twenty-four years teaching at Bard College. View titles by Lucy Sante

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