Marguerite Duras’s unflinching portrayals of human desire transformed the literature and cinema of postwar France. As she explains in The Places of Marguerite Duras, “The films I make come from the same place in me as my books, from what I call the place of passion. A place where we are deaf and blind.”

Originally developed from a 1976 French television interview and reissued here for the first time in English, The Places of Marguerite Duras is structured around her memories of specific locations: her house in Neauphle-le-Château, where she wrote many of her novels and screenplays; her childhood home in French Indochina, which inspired her acclaimed novel The Sea Wall; the Hôtel des Roches Noires in Trouville, where she wrote The Ravishing of Lol Stein; and the vast seascapes of Indochina, Bengal, and Normandy, whose powerful tides impelled her art and life. True to the original 1978 edition, Duras’s reflections are accompanied by photographs and film stills. This reissue also includes a new essay by Durga Chew-Bose and a complete English translation by Alison Strayer.