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Eleven Hours
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Published:
Tin House Books 2016
Status:
Checked Out
Description
  • An NPR Best Book of 2016

  • A New Yorker Book We Loved in 2016

  • Named to Kirkus Reviews' Best Books of 2016

  • The Millions Most Anticipated Book of 2016

  • Flavorwire Most Anticipated Book
  • From the critically acclaimed author of The Virgins, Eleven Hours is an intimate exploration of the physical and mental challenges of childbirth, told with unremitting suspense and astonishing beauty.


    Lore arrives at the hospital alone—no husband, no partner, no friends. Her birth plan is explicit: she wants no fetal monitor, no IV, no epidural. Franckline, a nurse in the maternity ward—herself on the verge of showing—is patient with the young woman. She knows what it's like to worry that something might go wrong, and she understands the distress when it does. She knows as well as anyone the severe challenge of childbirth, what it does to the mind and the body.


    Eleven Hours is the story of two soon-to-be mothers who, in the midst of a difficult labor, are forced to reckon with their pasts and re-create their futures. Lore must disentangle herself from a love triangle; Franckline must move beyond past traumas to accept the life that's waiting for her. Pamela Erens moves seamlessly between their begrudging partnership and the memories evoked by so intense an experience: for Lore, of the father of her child and her former best friend; for Franckline, of the family in Haiti from which she's exiled. At turns urgent and lyrical, Erens's novel is a visceral portrait of childbirth, and a vivid rendering of the way we approach motherhood—with fear and joy, anguish and awe.
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    Format:
    Adobe EPUB eBook, Kindle Book, OverDrive Read
    Street Date:
    05/03/2016
    Language:
    English
    ISBN:
    9781941040300
    ASIN:
    B017UXACGG
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    Citations
    APA Citation (style guide)

    Pamela Erens. (2016). Eleven Hours. Tin House Books.

    Chicago / Turabian - Author Date Citation (style guide)

    Pamela Erens. 2016. Eleven Hours. Tin House Books.

    Chicago / Turabian - Humanities Citation (style guide)

    Pamela Erens, Eleven Hours. Tin House Books, 2016.

    MLA Citation (style guide)

    Pamela Erens. Eleven Hours. Tin House Books, 2016.

    Note! Citation formats are based on standards as of July 2022. Citations contain only title, author, edition, publisher, and year published. Citations should be used as a guideline and should be double checked for accuracy.
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    Date Added:
    Jun 12, 2018 17:51:13
    Date Updated:
    Jun 12, 2018 17:51:13
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    Last Metadata Change:
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        • bioText: PAMELA ERENS's second novel, The Virgins, was a New York Times Book Review Editor's Choice and was named a Best Book of 2013 by the New Yorker, the New Republic, Library Journal, and Salon. The novel was a finalist for the John Gardner Book Award for the best book of fiction published in 2013. Pamela's debut novel, The Understory, was a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize and the William Saroyan International Prize for Writing. Her essays, articles, and reviews have appeared in publications such as Elle, Vogue, the New York Times, Los Angeles Review of Books, and the Millions.
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  • An NPR Best Book of 2016
  • A New Yorker Book We Loved in 2016
  • Named to Kirkus Reviews' Best Books of 2016
  • The Millions Most Anticipated Book of 2016
  • Flavorwire Most Anticipated Book
  • From the critically acclaimed author of The Virgins, Eleven Hours is an intimate exploration of the physical and mental challenges of childbirth, told with unremitting suspense and astonishing beauty.

    Lore arrives at the hospital alone—no husband, no partner, no friends. Her birth plan is explicit: she wants no fetal monitor, no IV, no epidural. Franckline, a nurse in the maternity ward—herself on the verge of showing—is patient with the young woman. She knows what it's like to worry that something might go wrong, and she understands the distress when it does. She knows as well as anyone the severe challenge of childbirth,...
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    title
    Eleven Hours
    fullDescription
  • An NPR Best Book of 2016
  • A New Yorker Book We Loved in 2016
  • Named to Kirkus Reviews' Best Books of 2016
  • The Millions Most Anticipated Book of 2016
  • Flavorwire Most Anticipated Book
  • From the critically acclaimed author of The Virgins, Eleven Hours is an intimate exploration of the physical and mental challenges of childbirth, told with unremitting suspense and astonishing beauty.

    Lore arrives at the hospital alone—no husband, no partner, no friends. Her birth plan is explicit: she wants no fetal monitor, no IV, no epidural. Franckline, a nurse in the maternity ward—herself on the verge of showing—is patient with the young woman. She knows what it's like to worry that something might go wrong, and she understands the distress when it does. She knows as well as anyone the severe challenge of childbirth, what it does to the mind and the body.

    Eleven Hours is the story of two soon-to-be mothers who, in the midst of a difficult labor, are forced to reckon with their pasts and re-create their futures. Lore must disentangle herself from a love triangle; Franckline must move beyond past traumas to accept the life that's waiting for her. Pamela Erens moves seamlessly between their begrudging partnership and the memories evoked by so intense an experience: for Lore, of the father of her child and her former best friend; for Franckline, of the family in Haiti from which she's exiled. At turns urgent and lyrical, Erens's novel is a visceral portrait of childbirth, and a vivid rendering of the way we approach motherhood—with fear and joy, anguish and awe.
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    reviews
        • premium: False
        • source: Elisa Albert, author of AFTERBIRTH
        • content: Pamela Erens has given us a dream that becomes a nightmare and is restored again to dream, a vital, microcosmic, fundamental, riveting, distilled illumination of our most profound and misunderstood passage, the rite at which every reader can marvel: someone once did that for me. As essential a novel as they come.
        • premium: False
        • source: MARGOT LIVESEY, author of The Flight of Gemma Hardy
        • content: With exhilarating speed the wonderful Pamela Erens describes the stories of two women as one gives birth to her first child and the other tries to contain her fears around motherhood. Miraculously, in these few beautiful pages, we learn everything we need to know about these characters and their lives. A brilliantly suspenseful and moving novel.
        • premium: False
        • source: Karen Russell, author of VAMPIRES IN THE LEMON GROVE
        • content: Childbirth, this uniquely female form of heroism, is rarely documented in our literature, and I've never seen it rendered with the extraordinary insight, urgency, and potency of Eleven Hours. Every dilation and contraction of feeling is recorded, and Erens evokes the layered experience of living in a body— its tides of memory, sensation, and emotion—like no other writer I know.
        • premium: False
        • source: Robin Black, author of LIFE DRAWING
        • content: With Eleven Hours Pamela Erens solidifies her standing as one of the most gifted fiction writers we have. This exploration of a woman's time in labor is at once gritty and graceful, harrowing and compassionate. It is no small challenge to make a subject as old as life itself feel newly observed and newly revelatory, but Erens does exactly that and more. Bravo!
        • premium: False
        • source: KYLE MINOR, author of Praying Drunk
        • content: Quietly, without the fanfare she is due, Pamela Erens has become one of the finest novelists of the twenty-first century, and Eleven Hours is another confirmation.
        • premium: True
        • source: Publisher's Weekly
        • content:

          Starred review from February 22, 2016
          Early one wintry morning, Lore, an elementary school speech therapist who is nine-months pregnant, enters a
          New York City hospital alone. Her contractions have started, and though she isn't terribly far along, her assigned nurse, Franckline, quickly sets her up in the maternity ward, where the duo ride out the long process of Lore's labor together.
          As the hours pass, the women sit in Lore's room and walk the hospital halls, and snippets of their histories come to light—including Franckline's time as a midwife's helper in
          her native Haiti and Lore's difficult childhood, as well as
          the complicated love triangle that resulted in her solo trip
          to the hospital. In addition, it isn't long before Franckline's own early pregnancy is revealed. After several miscarriages, however, Franckline is afraid to tell her husband of her condition until she is certain her baby will survive. Written with incredible clarity, this third novel from Erens (The Virgins) is a wonder, shifting between two protagonists with ease to tell a deeply personal narrative of childbirth, complete with tension, horror, and deep, mature emotion. This novel does not sentimentalize the delivery of a child but rather examines the surprise—mental and physical—that accompanies it. Labor stories are as old as time, but Erens's novel feels incredibly fresh and vivid. An outstanding accomplishment.

        • premium: True
        • source: Kirkus
        • content:

          Starred review from March 1, 2016
          An unflinching look at pregnancy and childbirth. Lore arrives at the hospital alone, carrying a single duffel bag and an extremely detailed birth plan. Franckline, the maternity nurse charged with her care, soon learns this this taciturn, prickly woman is no more enthusiastic about accepting help than she is about fetal monitoring or an IV. But Franckline knows when to recede and when to insist, and, as pain breaks down Lore's self-reliance, these two strangers form a bond that is singular in its intimacy and intensity. Erens' second book, The Virgins (2013), was a study in teenage sex and friendship and a critical favorite. Her debut novel, The Understory--first published in 2007 and rereleased in 2014--was a close look at the devastating power of loneliness. Erens excels at reading the entrails of dreadful experiences and messy relationships. Her exquisite prose is what keeps readers from turning away. In between contractions, Lore remembers her dead mother and her absent father. She alternately loathes and longs for her baby's father as she obsessively revisits scenes from their time together. When she's not tending Lore, Franckline's thoughts turn to her own pregnancy--so new that she hasn't even told her husband about it. These glimpses inside the minds and hearts of two women are richly rendered, but this novel's greatest achievement is its excruciatingly vivid depiction of what it is to grow and carry and deliver a child. Erens makes it clear that--at best--giving birth is an awful ordeal. And, by combining portraits of a woman at the beginning of her pregnancy and a woman on the brink of motherhood, Erens shows that there is not one moment between these two experiences without peril. Powerful--aesthetically and viscerally.

          COPYRIGHT(2016) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

    popularity
    209
    publisher
    Tin House Books
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        • description: Fiction / General
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        • description: Fiction / Contemporary Women
        • code: FIC045000
        • description: Fiction / Family Life / General