A literary ode to peace, presence, and fulfillment inspired by a walk taken with a most surprising creature. "The demon of speed is often associated with forgetting, with avoidance . . . and slowness with memory and confronting," observes Milan Kundera in his novel Slowness. With that purpose in mind-a search for slowness and tranquility, Andy Merrifield sets out on a journey of the soul with a friend's donkey, Gribouille, to walk amid the ruins and spectacular vistas of southern France's Haute-Auvergne. As Merrifield contemplates literature, science, truth, and beauty amid the French countryside, Gribouille surprises him with his subtle wisdom, reminding him time and again that enlightenment is all around us if we but seek it.

Transcending Boundaries: Writing for a Dual Audience of Children and Adults is a collection of essays on twentieth-century authors who cross the borders between adult and children's literature and appeal to both audiences. This collection of fourteen essays by scholars from eight countries constitutes the first book devoted to the art of crosswriting the child and adult in twentieth-century international literature. Sandra Beckett explores the multifaceted nature of crossover literature and the diverse ways in which writers cross the borders to address a dual readership of children and adults. It considers classics such as Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and Pinocchio, with particular emphasis on post-World War II literature. The essays in Transcending Boundaries clearly suggest that crossover literature is a major, widespread trend that appears to be sharply on the rise.

After giving us a fascinating reading of Cervantes' classic novel in Don Quixote: Fighting Melancholia, Françoise Davoine and Jean-Max Gaudillière co-author a second work, to reflect on the hero's battle against perversion. To do so, they retrace his adventures in the Cervantes' second Don Quixote, written ten years after the first. The authors follow in his footsteps as he embarks on this other extraordinary journey in which perversion is laid bare for all to see, creating not only a powerful social link, but even a form of government. Cervantes shows us how madness acts as a means to confront it: here again, the field of action presented to the reader is explored in rigorous detail. The reliability of this strategy derives from the power of the given word, which has to oppose lies, seduction, secrets, trickery and crime, in order to confer authenticity to what madness reveals.

In Crossover Fiction, Sandra L. Beckett explores the global trend of crossover literature and explains how it is transforming literary canons, concepts of readership, the status of authors, the publishing industry, and bookselling practices. This study will have significant relevance across disciplines, as scholars in literary studies, media and cultural studies, visual arts, education, psychology, and sociology examine the increasingly blurred borderlines between adults and young people in contemporary society, notably with regard to their consumption of popular culture.

In Love With Shakespeare, written in the form of a playwright's memoir, is a humorous, irreverent and highly provocative look at the way the plays of Shakespeare are abused in commercial theater, films, scholarly journals, and in the classroom.

French novels such as "Madame Bovary" and "The Stranger" are staples of high school and college literature courses. This work provides coverage of the French novel since its origins in the 16th century, with an emphasis on novels most commonly studied in high school and college courses in world literature and in French culture and civilization.