But it has sold more than a million and a half copies in English alone. The critical reception to the book was very divided: it was called a “ great gay novel” by one critic, and a “ ghastly litany” by another. Like her magazine, the novel is proudly baroque. Her 2015 book, “ A Little Life,” begins as the story of the friendships among four recent college graduates, then cascades into an operatic, often appalling, chronicle of the abuse suffered by one of the protagonists. Yanagihara is also a novelist with a large readership. When she takes her trips, she packs a suitcase that, a friend says, is “almost as small as the one in ‘Rear Window.’ ” “You either go to Omen, Raoul’s, or Fanelli’s if you live down here, and I go to Omen,” she declared, adding that she wanted to sit at a particular table in the back. She lives in a narrow SoHo loft, decorated with art and antiques and baubles, that she calls her “pod.” She rarely goes out and likes her place to be tidy-she won’t host dinner parties because she doesn’t “want the crumbs.” We once agreed to meet at a local restaurant. Yanagihara’s private life is as constrained as her cultural knowledge is broad. Fashion and design spreads are now steeped in art history, and the magazine publishes essays that are surprising, and sometimes esoteric: an analysis of avant-garde flower arrangers a rigorous survey of artists, from Japan to South Africa, who are “reimagining the animal figurine.” She took over T four years ago, and, thanks to her magpie intelligence, it has become a vibrant cabinet of curiosities. She has spent a lot of time travelling and has an unusually international aesthetic: she is as comfortable speaking about ceramicists in Sendai as about conceptual artists in New York. Through her editorial work, Yanagihara, who is forty-seven, has become conversant with hundreds of creative people and their work. She is the editor-in-chief of T, the style supplement to the Times, which publishes articles and photo-essays about fashion, travel, art, and design. In rich and resplendent prose, Yanagihara has fashioned a tragic and transcendent hymn to brotherly love, a masterful depiction of heartbreak, and a dark examination of the tyranny of memory and the limits of human endurance.Hanya Yanagihara wears her black hair pulled back with a razor-sharp center part, and she prefers to dress in black, especially in clothes by Dries Van Noten, the cerebral Belgian designer. Over the decades, their relationships deepen and darken, tinged by addiction, success, and pride. Yet their greatest challenge, each comes to realize, is Jude himself, by midlife a terrifyingly talented litigator yet an increasingly broken man, his mind and body scarred by an unspeakable childhood, and haunted by what he fears is a degree of trauma that he’ll not only be unable to overcome-but that will define his life forever. There is kind, handsome Willem, an aspiring actor JB, a quick-witted, sometimes cruel Brooklyn-born painter seeking entry to the art world Malcolm, a frustrated architect at a prominent firm and withdrawn, brilliant, enigmatic Jude, who serves as their center of gravity. When four classmates from a small Massachusetts college move to New York to make their way, they're broke, adrift, and buoyed only by their friendship and ambition. Truly an amazement-and a great gift for its audiences. An epic about love and friendship in the twenty-first century that goes into some of the darkest places fiction has ever traveled and yet somehow improbably breaks through into the light. Brace yourself for the most astonishing, challenging, upsetting, and profoundly moving book in many a season.
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