New Arrivals: PQ 1 - PQ 4000.9999
Showing 1 - 25 of 101 new items.
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© 1988,To write this history of the imagination, Le Goff has recreated the mental structures of medieval men and women by analyzing the images of man as microcosm and the Church as mystical body; the symbols of power such as flags and oriflammes; and the contradictory world of dreams, marvels, devils, and wild forests. "Le Goff is one of the most distinguished of the French medieval historians of his generation . . . he has exercised immense influence."-Maurice Keen, New York Review of Books"The whole book turns on a fascinating blend of the brutally materialistic and the generously imaginative."-Tom Shippey, London Review of Books "The richness, imaginativeness and sheer learning of Le Goff's work . . . demand to be experienced."-M. T. Clanchy, Times Literary Supplement -
© 2010,-Ce matin-la, je recus une lettre d'un genre nouveau.-"Par une mise en abyme fictionnelle des plus reussies, la romanciere devoile ce qui fonde son rapport au langage et a l ecriture. En un mot, une forme de vie " Christine Rousseau, Le Monde des livres."
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© 2015,A haunting novel of suspense from the winner of the 2014 Nobel Prize in Literature In the stillness of his Paris apartment, Jean Daragane has built a life of total solitude. Then a surprising phone call shatters the silence of an unusually hot September, and the threatening voice on the other end of the line leaves Daragane wary but irresistibly curious. Almost at once, he finds himself entangled with a shady gambler and a beautiful, fragile young woman, who draw Daragane into the mystery of a decades-old murder. The investigation will force him to confront the memory ofa trauma he had all but buried. With So You Don't Get Lost in the Neighborhood Patrick Modiano adds a new chapter to a body of work whose supreme psychological insight and subtle, atmospheric writing have earned him worldwide renown -- including the Nobel Prize in Literature. This masterly novel, now translated into twenty languages, penetrates the deepest enigmas of identity and compels us to ask whether we ever know who we truly are.
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© 2015,Marie de France was a medieval poet who was probably born in France and who lived in England during the twelfth century. Prominent among the earliest poets writing in the French vernacular, Marie de France helped shape the style and genres of later medieval poetry. This Norton Critical Edition includes all of Marie's lais (short narrative verse poems); selected fables; and a generous excerpt from Saint Patrick's Purgatory, a long poem based on a well-known medieval legend. Each text is accompanied by detailed explanatory annotations. For comparative reading, two lais, "Bisclavret" and "Yönec," are accompanied by Marie's facing-page originals."Backgrounds and Contexts" is thematically organized to provide readers with a clear sense of Marie's inspirations. Topics include "The Supernatural," "Love and Romance," "Medical Traditions," "Fable Sources and Analogues: Similar Themes," and "Purgatory and the Afterlife." Ovid, Chaucer, Andreas Capellanus, Boccaccio, Aristotle, and Bede are among the authors included.From the wealth of scholarly work published on Marie de France, Dorothy Gilbert has chosen excerpts from nine pieces that address issues of history and authorship as well as major themes in the lais, fables, and Saint Patrick's Purgatory. The contributors are Thomas Warton, Abbé Gervais de la Rue, Joseph Bedier, Leo Spitzer, R. Howard Bloch, E. A. Francis, Jill Mann, and Jacques Le Goff.A selected bibliography is also included.
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© 2000,Georges Perec, the celebrated author of Life A User's Manual (Godine, 1987), was working on this "literary thriller" at the time of his death. He had completed only 11 chapters of a planned 28, but left extensive drafts and notes supplying the rest of the mystery, as well as numerous twists and subplots. From these, Harry Mathews and Jacques Roubaud have assembled the elements of the unfinished mystery, along the way providing a fascinating view into the author's mind as he fashioned his literary conundrum. Absorbing, allusive, and joyously playful, "53 Days" is the ultimate detective story. The narrator, a teacher in a tropical French colony, is trying to track down the famous crime-writer Robert Serval, who has mysteriously disappeared. Serval has left behind the manuscript of his last, unfinished novel, which may contain clues to his fate. From this beginning, Perec lures the reader into a labyrinth of mirror-stories whose solutions can only be glimpsed before they in turn recede around the corner. In the tradition of Agatha Christie's And Then There Were None, Perec's "53 Days" is a supremely satisfying, engrossing, and truly original mystery. Like his previous work, it is also "a kaleidoscope of ingenious juxtapositions" (Le Monde) from one of the century's most inventive and important writers.
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© 2015,A new translation of Georges Simenon's gripping tale of lost identity. Book sixteen in the new Penguin Maigret series. A man picked up for wandering in obvious distress among the cars and buses on the Grands Boulevards. Questioned in French, he remains mute . . . A madman? In Maigret's office, he is searched. His suit is new, his underwear is new, his shoes are new. All identifying labels have been removed. No identification papers. No wallet. Five crisp thousand-franc bills have been slipped into one of his pockets. A distressed man is found wandering the streets of Paris, with no memory of who he is or how he got there. The answers lead Maigret to a small harbour town, whose quiet citizens conceal a poisonous malice. Penguin is publishing the entire series of Maigret novels in new translations. This novel has been published in a previous translation as Death of a Harbour Master . 'Compelling, remorseless, brilliant.' - John Gray 'One of the greatest writers of the twentieth century . . . Simenon was unequalled at making us look inside, though the ability was masked by his brilliance at absorbing us obsessively in his stories.' - The Guardian 'A supreme writer . . . unforgettable vividness.' - The Independent
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© 2015,Le 14e Congrès de l'Association pour l'étude des littératures africaines (APELA) entendait poser la question de l'auteur dans le champ spécifique des littératures africaines (domaines francophone et lusophone notamment). Après la question de l'« invention » de l'auteur africain, des raisons et des opérations qui la rendraient possible, il convient en effet de se pencher sur les instances de légitimation de l'auteur africain et de son œuvre : outre les éditeurs du « centre », les collections patrimoniales, les prix littéraires, les festivals, salons et rencontres littéraires, la critique littéraire, les médias audio-visuels et jusqu'aux réseaux sociaux jouent aujourd'hui un rôle dans la « fabrique » de l'auteur reconnu. Les contributions réunies ici examinent enfin la négociation, dans le contexte africain, entre les figures et postures d'auteur et l'insistante question de l'oralité anonyme et collective.
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© 2014,By turns amusing and offensive, Pierre Louÿs' "Pybrac" is possibly the filthiest collection of poetry ever published, and offers a taste of what the Marquis de Sade might have produced if he had ever turned his hand to verse. First published posthumously in 1927, "Pybrac" was, with "The Young Girl's Handbook of Good Manners," one of the first of Louÿs' secret erotic manuscripts to see clandestine publication. Composed of 313 rhymed alexandrine quatrains, the majority of them starting with the phrase "I do not like to see," "Pybrac" is in form a mockery of sixteenth-century chancellor poet Guy Du Faur, Seigneur de Pibrac, whose moralizing quatrains were common literary fare for young French readers until the nineteenth century. Louÿs spent his life coming up with his own ever-growing collection of rhymed moral precepts (suitable only for adult readers): a dizzying litany describing everything he "disliked" witnessing, from lesbianism, sodomy, incest and prostitution to perversions extreme enough to give even a modern reader pause. With the rest of his erotic manuscripts, the original collection of over 2,000 quatrains was auctioned off and scattered throughout private collections; but like everything erotic, what remains, collected here, conveys an impression of unending absurdity and near-hypnotic obsession.
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© 2000,The plays collected in this volume illustrate Moliere's broad range of comic devices, from satire and farce to slapstick and wordplay. In Tartuffe and The Doctor Despite Himself, Moliere mocks those taken in by a religious hypocrite and a bogus physician, while Such Foolish Affected Ladies and Those Learned Ladies ridicule the excessive refinement of the Parisian smart set. And in The Misanthrope and The Would-Be Gentleman, Moliere warns us of the dangers of obsession and intolerance. Exposing duplicity, snobbery and hypocrisy, his plays are masterly studies in the absurdities of human nature. John Wood's and David Coward translation preserves the humour of the original French. In his introduction, David Coward discusses changing views of the plays over the centuries. This edition includes a chronology, bibliography and notes.
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© 1995,The Life of Henry Brulard is the autobiography of one of France's greatest writers. In this book, written with such frankness that it remained unpublishable for more than a century after its composition, the author of The Charterhouse of Parma and The Red and the Black tells the story of his unhappy childhood in a stuffy provincial town and uncovers the roots of his rebellious and skeptical temperament. Stendhal conjures up the elusive presence of his beloved mother, who died when he was only seven, while castigating the smug complacency and social climbing of his father, and the cruelty of the aunt whose care blighted his early years. At the same time he recalls the sights, sounds, places, and people of his youth, its pleasures and sorrows, with an almost preternatural clarity and immediacy. A book of brilliant images and burning emotions, The Life of Henry Brulard, like Nabokov's Speak, Memory, is not only a vivid literary memoir but an extraordinary work of the imagination.
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© 2015,In the opening scene of Paris Nocturne, the nameless narrator is hit by a car near Place des Pyramides. He and the woman driving the car are taken in a police van to the hospital. He's sure he has met her somewhere. He is given ether, wakes up in a different hospital, and the woman, Jacqueline Beausergent, has vanished. A mysterious figure presents him with an account of the accident and hands him an envelope stuffed with bank notes. Does Jacqueline Beausergent have the answers to the narrator's questions about the past, about his father?
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© 2015,In this highly accessible introduction, Brian Nelson provides an overview of French literature – its themes and forms, traditions and transformations – from the Middle Ages to the present. Major writers, including Francophone authors writing from areas other than France, are discussed chronologically in the context of their times, to provide a sense of the development of the French literary tradition and the strengths of some of the most influential writers within it. Nelson offers close readings of exemplary passages from key works, presented in English translation and with the original French. The exploration of the work of important writers, including Villon, Racine, Molière, Voltaire, Balzac, Flaubert, Zola, Proust, Sartre and Beckett, highlights the richness and diversity of French literature.
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© 2015,What do a weak lion king, a grief-stricken rooster, a dim-witted bear, and one really angry wolf have in common? The answer is they've all been had by one sly fox named Reynard. Originally bursting forth from Europe in the twelfth century, Reynard the Fox--a classic trickster narrative centered on a wily and gleefully amoral fox and his numerous victims in the animal kingdom--anticipated both Tex Avery and The Prince by showing that it's better to be clever than virtuous. However, where The Prince taught kings how to manipulate their subjects, Reynard the Fox demonstrated how, in a world of ruthless competition, clever subjects could outwit both their rulers and enemies alike. In these riotous pages, Reynard lies, cheats, or eats anyone and anything that he crosses paths with, conning the likes of Tybert the Cat, Bruin the Bear, and Bellin the Ram, among others. Reynard's rapacious nature and constant "stealing and roving" eventually bring him into conflict with the court of the less-than-perceptive Noble the Lion and the brutal Isengrim the Wolf, pitting cunning trickery against brute force. Unlike the animal fables of Aesop, which use small narratives to teach schoolboy morality, Reynard the Fox employs a dark and outrageous sense of humor to puncture the hypocritical authority figures of the "civilized" order, as the rhetorically brilliant fox outwits all comers by manipulating their bottomless greed. As James Simpson, one of the world's leading scholars of medieval literature, notes in his introduction, with translations in every major European language and twenty-three separate editions between 1481 and 1700 in England alone, the Reynard tales were ubiquitous. However, despite its immense popularity at the time, this brains-over-brawn parable largely disappeared. Now, for the first time in over a century, the fifteenth-century version of Reynard the Fox reemerges in this rollicking translation. Readers both young and old will be delighted by Reynard's exploits, as he excels at stitching up the vain, pompous, and crooked and escapes punishment no matter how tight the noose. Highlighted by new illustrations by Edith E. Newman, Simpson's translation of the late Middle English Caxton edition restores this classic as a part of a vital tradition that extends all the way to Br'er Rabbit, Bugs Bunny, and even Itchy & Scratchy. As Stephen Greenblatt writes in his foreword, Reynard is the "animal fable's version of Homer's Odysseus, the man of many wiles," proving that in a dog-eat-dog world the fox reigns supreme.
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© 2015,Thirty tales of theft, onanism, incest, murder and a host of other forms of perversion and cruelty from the "ungrateful beggar" and "pilgrim of the absolute," Léon Bloy. "Disagreeable Tales," first published in French in 1894, collects Bloy's narrative sermons from the depths: a cauldron of frightful anecdotes and inspired misanthropy that represents a high point of the French Decadent movement and the most emblematic entry into the library of the "Cruel Tale" christened by Villiers de l'Isle-Adam. Whether depicting parents and offspring being sacrificed for selfish gains, or imbeciles sacrificing their own individuality on a literary whim, these tales all draw sustenance from an underlying belief: the root of religion is crime against man, nature and God, and that in this hell on earth, even the worst among us has a soul. A close friend to Joris-Karl Huysmans, and later admired by the likes of Kafka and Borges, Léon Bloy (1846-1917) is among the best known but least translated of the French Decadent writers. Nourishing antireligious sentiments in his youth, his outlook changed radically when he moved to Paris and came under the influence of Barbey d'Aurevilly, the unconventionally religious novelist best known for "Les Diaboliques." He earned the dual nicknames of "The Pilgrim of the Absolute" through his unorthodox devotion to the Catholic Church, and "The Ungrateful Beggar" through his endless reliance on the charity of friends to support him and his family.
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© 2015,"A tour-de-force reimagining of Camus's The Stranger , from the point of view of the mute Arab victims." --The New Yorker He was the brother of "the Arab" killed by the infamous Meursault, the antihero of Camus's classic novel. Seventy years after that event, Harun, who has lived since childhood in the shadow of his sibling's memory, refuses to let him remain anonymous: he gives his brother a story and a name--Musa--and describes the events that led to Musa's casual murder on a dazzlingly sunny beach. In a bar in Oran, night after night, he ruminates on his solitude, on his broken heart, on his anger with men desperate for a god, and on his disarray when faced with a country that has so disappointed him. A stranger among his own people, he wants to be granted, finally, the right to die. The Stranger is of course central to Daoud's story, in which he both endorses and criticizes one of the most famous novels in the world. A worthy complement to its great predecessor, The Meursault Investigation is not only a profound meditation on Arab identity and the disastrous effects of colonialism in Algeria, but also a stunning work of literature in its own right, told in a unique and affecting voice.
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© 2015,Casting light on the most serious of problems and at the same time saying not one serious sentence; being fascinated by the reality of the contemporary world and at the same time completely avoiding realism--that's The Festival of Insignificance. Readers who know Kundera's earlier books know that the wish to incorporate an element of the "unserious" in a novel is not at all unexpected of him. In Immortality, Goethe and Hemingway stroll through several chapters together, talking and laughing. And in Slowness, Vera, the author's wife, says to her husband, "You've often told me you meant to write a book one day that would have not a single serious word in it . . . I warn you: watch out. Your enemies are lying in wait." Now, far from watching out, Kundera is finally and fully realizing his old aesthetic dream in this novel, which we may easily view as a summation of his whole work. A strange sort of summation. Strange sort of epilogue. Strange sort of laughter, inspired by our time, which is comical because it has lost all sense of humor. What more can we say? Nothing. Just read. The Franco-Czech novelist Milan Kundera was born in Brno and has lived in France, his second homeland, since 1975. He is the author of the novels The Joke, Life Is Elsewhere, Farewell Waltz, The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, The Unbearable Lightness of Being, and Immortality, and the short story collection Laughable Loves--all originally in Czech. His more recent novels, Slowness, Identity, and Ignorance, as well as his nonfiction works, The Art of the Novel, Testaments Betrayed, The Curtain, and Encounter, were originally written in French.
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© 2003,Douze portraits de femmes et d'hommes habités futiles ou de désespoir grave. Ils ne sont pas héroïques, simplement humains. On les croise tous les jours sans leur prêter attention.
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© 2015,Undoubtedly one of Africa s most influential first generation of writers and filmmakers, Ousmane Sembene's creative works of fiction as well as his films have been the subject of a considerable number of scholarly articles. The schemas of reading applied to Sembene's oeuvre (novels, short stories and films) have, in the main, focused either on his militant posture against colonialism, his disenchantment with African leadership, or his infatuation with documenting the past in an attempt to present a balanced and nuanced view of African history. While these studies, unquestionably contribute to a better understanding of his works, they collectively ignore Sembene s relentless preoccupation with culture in his entire career as a writer and filmmaker. The collection of essays in Sembene and the Politics of Culture sets out to fill that gap as the contributors at once foreground Sembene s fixation on the centrality of culture in the articulation of the discourse of national consciousness and reevaluate his intellectual and artistic legacy within an overarching framework of African liberation. The contributors critically reassess the ideological underpinnings of Sembene s thoughts, his role as one of the foundational pillars of African cultural production, and his relevance in current discourses of nationhood. They do so through a wide variety of interdisciplinary approaches that draw on linguistics, feminist theory, film theory, historiography, Marxist criticism, psychoanalysis and a host of other approaches that give novel insights in the critical analysis of the works under study. In the part entitled Testimonies," a collection of conversations with people who worked closely with Sembene, each of the interlocutors provide illuminating insights into the man's life and work. The variety of themes and critical approaches in this critical anthology will certainly be of interest not only to students and scholars of African literature and cinema at various levels of intellectual and cultural sophistication but also anyone interested in the analysis of the nexus between power, culture, and the discourse of liberation."
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© 2006,L'auteur livre ses réflexions sur la beauté et les questions existentielles ainsi que ses considérations littéraires, esthétiques, poétiques, philosophiques et spirituelles.
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© 2014,An NYRB Classics Original Shakespeare, Nietzsche wrote, was Montaigne's best reader--a typically brilliant Nietzschean insight, capturing the intimate relationship between Montaigne's ever-changing record of the self and Shakespeare's kaleidoscopic register of human character. And there is no doubt that Shakespeare read Montaigne--though how extensively remains a matter of debate--and that the translation he read him in was that of John Florio, a fascinating polymath, man-about-town, and dazzlingly inventive writer himself. Florio's Montaigne is in fact one of the masterpieces of English prose, with a stylistic range and felicity and passages of deep lingering music that make it comparable to Sir Robert Burton's "Anatomy of Melancholy" and the works of Sir Thomas Browne. This new edition of this seminal work, edited by Stephen Greenblatt and Peter G. Platt, features an adroitly modernized text, an essay in which Greenblatt discusses both the resemblances and real tensions between Montaigne's and Shakespeare's visions of the world, and Platt's introduction to the life and times of the extraordinary Florio. Altogether, this book provides a remarkable new experience of not just two but three great writers who ushered in the modern world.
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© 2014,"A la porte de Gentilly, en venant de la gare, on n'avait pas vu de porte du tout, rien de rien, pas la moindre casemate, quelque chose, une sorte de monument au moins, une borne qui aurait marqué la limite, un peu comme une clôture de piquet et de barbelés entre des prés". Fille de paysans, Claire monte à Paris pour étudier. Elle n'oublie rien du monde premier et apprend la ville où elle fera sa vie. "Les pays" raconte ces années de passage.
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© 2013,Ceci est l'épopée drolatique d'une cuisinière qui n'a jamais eu peur de rien. Personnage loufoque et truculent, Rose a survécu aux abjections de cet affreux XXe siècle qu'elle a traversé sans rien perdre de sa sensualité ni de sa joie de vivre. Entre deux amours, elle a tout subi : le génocide arménien, les horreurs du nazisme, les délires du maoïsme. Mais, chaque fois, elle a ressuscité pour repartir de l'avant. Grinçant et picaresque, ce livre raconte les aventures extraordinaires d'une centenaire scandaleuse qui a un credo : "Si l'Enfer, c'est l'Histoire, le Paradis, c'est la vie".
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