• Second Star
1 1

Archipelago Books

Second Star

Second Star

by Philippe Delerm, translated from the French by Jody Gladding

$18.00
$0.00 $18.00
Available as E-Book French Literature
Format
This title can be purchased from your favorite e-book retailer,
including  many independent booksellers.

Buy on Amazon   Buy on iBooks   Buy on Barnes&Noble

Second Star is a series of lyrical meditations on life’s often overlooked joys, from peeling a clementine, sipping a cold mojito, to washing your windows. Whether biting into a bitter turnip or savoring a summer evening, Delerm pauses to consider each pang of pleasure. Vividly translated by Jody Gladding, these glimpses invite us to linger, as if each bite of a ripe watermelon, each exhaled breath on a bitterly cold day, each cloudy evening on the beach, were our last. A still life in motion, Second Star “consumes the present” with a quiet curiosity, asking us to “put off tomorrow” and join Delerm in tasting, touching, listening, and noticing.

Additional Book Information

Series: Archipelago Books
ISBN: 9781953861542
Pages: 164
Publication Date:

Praise

Delerm’s beautiful book of brief meditations reminds us that lingering, observing, noticing, wondering—about a gesture on the soccer pitch; visitors to the public piano; oneself interacting with others on the street, on the train—is one of the ways our lives become meaningful.
—Ross Gay

Throughout this collection of lighthearted vignettes, the author invites readers to slow down and cherish moments . . . getting caught in a rain shower, eating a clementine one-handed . . . or the joy of bouncing a baby in your arms . . . Delerm’s brief observations allow readers to dip in and out, offering moments of reflection and contemplation.
—Kirkus Reviews

Delerm finds resonant meanings in everyday objects, moments, and coincidences, burrowing into surprisingly emotional depths as he probes attachment and loss . . . The point of the exercises in Second Star is to mentally invigorate, to sharpen how we look at the things in plain sight that we take for granted.
—Thomas Filbin, The Arts Fuse

The snapshots refuse to guise their heavy French accents; the reader sinks into the place. The 'music of conversation' persists amid the parentheses of glances, and the captions beneath the silences between laughter and looking elsewhere. Delerm invites us to the tables of his preferred setting and lays a poet’s eye over the details and affects . . . If Delerm wrote the sky, Gladding is the one who named and organized these particular, incandescent constellations.
—Alina Ştefǎnescu

View full details

  • Shopping for someone else but not sure what to give them? Give them the gift of choice with a New York Review Books Gift Card.

    Gift Cards 

  • A membership for yourself or as a gift for a special reader will promise a year of good reading.

    Join NYRB Classics Book Club 

  • Is there a book that you’d like to see back in print, or that you think we should consider for one of our series? Let us know!

    Tell us about it