French

An autobiographical work that describes firsthand the great tectonic shifts in English society following the First World War, Robert Graves's Goodbye to All That is a matchless evocation of the Great War's haunting legacy, published in Penguin Modern...

'He who thinks freely for himself, honours all freedom on earth.' Stefan Zweig was already an emigre-driven from a Europe torn apart by brutality and totalitarianism-when he found, in a damp cellar, a copy of Michel de Montaigne's Essais. Montaigne...

Contains: Don Juan, Precious Provincials, The Reluctant Doctor, George Dandin, The Miser, The Would-be Gentleman, Scapin the Schemer Since the second half of the seventeenth century, when Moli`re composed and performed his comedies, scarcely a decade...

Sidonie-Gabrielle Colette was this century's first modern woman. She arrived in Paris around 1900 as the provincial child bride of a notorious rake and brilliant literary impressario, Willy, who signed her first novels, the Claudines, as his own. They...

Whilst French romances of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries have long enjoyed a privileged place in the literary history of France, romances from the later middle ages have been largely neglected by modern scholars, despite their central role in the...

Proust's famous novel A la recherche du temps perdu (Remembrance of Things Past) is a fascinating exploration not only of memory and desire, of high society and everyday life, but also of art. The study focuses on Venice, one of the hero's central...

Despite long-standing assertions that languages, including French and English, cannot sufficiently communicate the experience of smell, much of France's nineteenth-century literature has gained praise for its memorable evocation of odours. As French...

The life of Rilke's work is in its words, and this book attends closely to the life unfolding in Rilke's words over the course of his career. What is a poem, and how does it act upon us as we read? What does reading involve? These are questions of the...

The heritage of literature in the French language is rich, varied, and extensive in time and space; appealing both to its immediate public, readers of French, and also to a global audience reached through translations and film adaptations. The first...

A beautiful new clothbound edition of Alexandre Dumas' classic novel of wrongful imprisonment, adventure and revenge. Thrown in prison for a crime he has not committed, Edmond Dantes is confined to the grim fortress of the Chateau d'If. There he learns...

'She was the golden beast, an unconscious force, the very scent of her could bring the world to ruin.' Nana, daughter of a drunk and a laundress, is the Helen of Troy of Paris. A sexually magnetic high-class prostitute and actress, she becomes a...

A superb autobiography by one of the great literary figures of the twentieth century, Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter offers an intimate picture of growing up in a bourgeois French family, rebelling as an adolescent against the conventional expectations of...

All of Valery's major meditations on the theory and practice of poetry are included in this volume. T.S. Eliot writes in his introduction that Valery "invented, and was to impose on his age ...a new conception of the poet." In Valery's own words, the...

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...

Set at the height of the "tulipomania" that gripped Holland in 17th century, this is the story of Cornelius van Baerle, a humble grower whose sole desire is to grow the perfect specimen of the tulip negra. When his godfather is murdered, Cornelius finds...

'It is possible for man to snatch the world from the darkness of absurdity'How should we think and act in the world? These writings on the human condition by one of the twentieth century's great philosophers explore the absurdity of our notions of good...

Robert Darnton introduces us to the shadowy world of pirate publishers, garret scribblers, under-the-cloak book peddlers, smugglers, and police spies that composed the literary underground of the Enlightenment.Here are the ambitious writers who crowded...

This book presents the radically new theory of subjectivity found in the work of Jacques Lacan. Against the tide of post-structuralist thinkers who announce "the death of the subject," Bruce Fink explores what it means to come into being as a subject...

Apologies but we at Booksplease don't have a full description for this book.Book InformationISBN 9780307472328Author Patrick AlexanderFormat PaperbackPage Count 400Imprint Vintage BooksPublisher Random House USA IncWeight(grams) 335gDimensions(mm) 203mm...

In Balzac's vast Human Comedy, a body of ninety-one completed novels and stories, he endeavoured to create a complete picture of contemporary French society and manners. Within this work is a loving ode to Paris and an incomparable introduction to the...

A reader's journey along the French Riviera, from Hyeres and Saint-Tropez to the Italian border, introducing the lives and work of writers who passed this way. The sunlight and calm of the French Riviera have been a magnet for writers since the...

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INTRODUCING guide to the father of existentialism and one of 20th century philosophy's most famous characters. Jean-Paul Sartre was once described as being, next to Charles de Gaulle, the most famous Frenchman of the 20th century. Between the ending of...

In these seventeen essays (and one short story) the 2011 Man Booker Prize winner examines British, French and American writers who have meant most to him, as well as the cross-currents and overlappings of their different cultures. From the deceptiveness...

The Second World War and the German Occupation remain a major focal point in French culture and society, with new and sometimes controversial titles published every year - Irene Nemirovsky's Suite francaise and Jonathan Littell's Les Bienveillantes, both...

Proust's A la recherche du temps perdu (In Search of Lost Time, 1913-27) changed the course of modern narrative fiction. This Introduction provides an account of Proust's life, the socio-historical and cultural contexts of his work and an assessment of...

'Who possesses me will possess all things, But his life will belong to me...' Raphael de Valentin, a young aristocrat, has lost all his money in the gaming parlours of the Palais Royal in Paris, and contemplates ending his life by throwing himself...

'Our virtues are, most often, only vices in disguise.' Deceptively brief and insidiously easy to read, La Rochefoucauld's shrewd, unflattering analyses of human behaviour have influenced writers, thinkers, and public figures as various as Voltaire,...

A LIFETIME'S READING OF PROUST'S MASTERPIECE "A work buzzing with appetite and curiosity."-Andrew Marr, author and broadcaster "Living and Dying with Marcel Proust is a feast."-Lydia Davis, winner of the Man Booker International Prize One of the...

Apologies but we at Booksplease don't have a full description for this book.Book InformationISBN 9780231063579Author Paul NizanFormat PaperbackPage Count 159Imprint Columbia University PressPublisher Columbia University Press

Did possessing and killing amount to the same thing deep within the dark recesses of the human beast? La Bete humaine (1890), is one of Zola's most violent and explicit works. On one level a tale of murder, passion and possession, it is also a...

From the troubadours of the Middle Ages to the titans of modern poetry, from Rabelais and Ronsard to Jacques Reda and Yves Bonnefoy, French Poetry offers English-speaking readers a one-volume introduction to a rich and varied tradition. Here are today's...

Take a literary stroll through the streets of Paris, visit its world-famous monuments, delve into its history and wander amongst its poets and artists.Countless author and poets have found home on the streets of Paris. In Paris: A Literary Anthology,...

Yves Bonnefoy's book of poems, Beginning and End of the Snow followed by Where the Arrow Falls, combines two meditations in which the poet's thoughts and a landscape reflect each other. In the first, the wintry New England landscape he encountered while...

Apologies but we at Booksplease don't have a full description for this book.Book InformationISBN 9781900565950Author Georges BatailleFormat HardbackPage Count 480Imprint Atlas PressPublisher Atlas PressDimensions(mm) 228mm * 170mm * 30mm

The inspiring letters of philosopher, mystic, and freedom fighter Simone Weil to her family, presented for the first time in English.Now in the pantheon of great thinkers, Simone Weil (1909–1943) lived largely in the shadows, searching for her spiritual...

Apologies but we at Booksplease don't have a full description for this book.Book InformationISBN 9780062048318Author Marilyn YalomFormat PaperbackPage Count 416Imprint HarperCollins PublishersPublisher HarperCollins Publishers IncWeight(grams)...

Apologies but we at Booksplease don't have a full description for this book.Book InformationISBN 9780140446890Author Christine de PizanFormat PaperbackPage Count 336Imprint Penguin ClassicsPublisher Penguin Putnam IncWeight(grams) 249gDimensions(mm)...

In his Nobel Prize acceptance speech, Albert Camus declared that a writer's duty is twofold: "the refusal to lie about what one knows and the resistance against oppression." These twin obsessions help explain something of Camus' remarkable character,...

It was to correct common misconceptions about his thought that Jean-Paul Sartre, the most dominent European intellectual of the post-World War II decades, accepted an invitation to speak on October 29, 1945, at the Club Maintenant in Paris. The unstated...