Fourteen of the most important French literati discussed from both the personal and artistic viewpoints. The list includes: Gide, Giradoux, Mauriac, MacOrlan, Larbaud, Morand, Colette, the surrealists, Concteau, Green, de Montherland, Drieu la Rochelle, Romains, and Malrauz.

"Originally published in French in 2016 by Seuil, France, as Historie de la violence"--Title page verso.

The Japanese believe that until the age of three, children, whether Japanese or not, are gods, each one an okosama, or "lord child." On their third birthday they fall from grace and join the rest of the human race. In Amelie Nothomb's new novel, The Character of Rain, we learn that divinity is a difficult thing from which to recover, particularly if, like the child in this story, you have spent the first tow and a half years of life in a nearly vegetative state. "I remember everything that happened to me after the age of two and one-half," the narrator tells us. She means this literally. Once jolted out of her plant-like , tube-like trance (to the ecstatic relief of her concerned parents), the child bursts into existence, absorbing everything that Japan, where her father works as a diplomat, has to offer. Life is an unfolding pageant of delight and danger, a ceaseless exploration of pleasure and the limits of power. Most wondrous of all is the discovery of water: oceans, seas, pools, puddles, streams, ponds, and, perhaps most of all, rain-one meaning of the Japanese character for her name. Hers is an amphibious life. The Character of Rain evokes the hilarity, terror, and sanctity of childhood. As she did in the award-winning, international bestesller Fear and Trembling, Nothomb grounds the novel in the outlines of her experiences in Japan, but the self-portrait that emerges from these pages is hauntingly universal. Amelie Nothomb's novels are unforgettable immersion experiences, leaving you both holding your breath with admiration, your lungs aching, and longing for more.

Marie de France, Mme. De Sävignä, and Mme. De Lafayette achieved international reputations during periods when women in other European countries were able to write only letters, translations, religious tracts, and miscellaneous fragments. There were obstacles, but French women writers were more or less sustained and empowered by the French culture. Often unconventional in their personal lives and occupied with careers besides writing?as educators, painters, actresses, preachers, salon hostesses, labor organizers?these women did not wait for Simone de Beauvoir to tell them to make existential choices and have "projects in the world." French Women Writers describes the lives and careers of fifty-two literary figures from the twelfth century to the late twentieth. All the contributors are recognized authorities. Some of their subjects, like Colette and George Sand, are celebrated, and others are just now gaining critical notice. From Christine de Pizan and Marguerite de Navarre to Rachilde and Häl_ne Cixous, from Louise Labe to Marguerite Duras?these women speak through the centuries to issues of gender, sexuality, and language. French Women Writers now becomes widely available in this Bison Book edition.

Although the great French novelists of the last two centuries are widely read in America, there is a widespread notion that little of importance has happened in French literature since the heyday of Sartre, Camus, and the nouveau roman. Curious American readers seeking new, up-to-date information and analyses will find in Paths to Contemporary French Literature a stimulating and much-needed guide to the major currents of one of the worldas great literatures. This critical panorama of contemporary French literature introduces English-language readers to over fifty important writers and poets. Emphasizing authors who are admired by their peers (as opposed to those with overnight reputations), John Taylor offers a compelling insideras view.

French writing and French thought have always been held in a certain glamorous esteem. For young, radical philosophers of the 1960s searching out intellectual enlightenment in Left Bank cafes and bookshops, for serious-minded semiologists wishing to deconstruct everything around them, and for fans of the formal novel, France has remained a source of stimulation and fresh ideas. John Sturrock has written for many years about French literature and thought, and here presents a wonderfully accessible guide to the major figures of the last fifty years. Reviewing the various movements that have dominated the French intellectual scene—existentialism, the nouveua roman, structuralism, the OuLiPo—he illustrates how their proponents inspire and excite. How Jean-Paul Sartre, originally an author of little-known fiction, fused politics and philosophy to become one of the best known public intellectuals of the century; how Jacques Lacan's flamboyantly expressed ideas made him a hero to professors of literature while offending many of his fellow psychoanalysts; and how Boris Vian, who trained as an engineer, celebrated in his writing much of what was enjoyable to the French about America: jazz music, a mysterious criminal underworld, an irrevocable youthfulness. Written with great elegance and expertise, the essays in The Word from Paris make for an illuminating journey through the intellectual and cultural terrain of twentieth-century France.

In this mega-bestseller from France and the follow-up to The Yellow Eyes of Crocodiles, a woman contends with divorce, family trouble, and even murder in her journey to discover who she really is. Fortysomething mother of two Joséphine Cortès is at a crossroads. She has just moved to a posh new apartment in Paris after the success of the historical novel she ghostwrote for her sister, Iris. Still struggling with her divorce—the result of her husband running off to Kenya to start a crocodile farm with his mistress—she is now entangled too in a messy lie orchestrated by her sister. And just when things seem they can't get any more complicated, people start turning up dead in her neighborhood. As Joséphine struggles to find her voice and her confidence amidst a messy web of relationships and a string of murders, she and those around her must learn to push on with determination, like headstrong little turtles learning to dance slowly in a world that's too violent and moving too fast.

metropolitan France as well as by francophone authors from Canada, the Caribbean, Africa, Belgium and Switzerland, One Hundred Great French Books offers a rich, varied, and multicultural panorama of one of the most beloved and inspiring literatures in the world." --Book Jacket.

The French Writers' War, 1940–1953, is a remarkably thorough account of French writers and literary institutions from the beginning of the German Occupation through France's passage of amnesty laws in the early 1950s. To understand how the Occupation affected French literary production as a whole, Gisèle Sapiro uses Pierre Bourdieu's notion of the "literary field." Sapiro surveyed the career trajectories and literary and political positions of 185 writers. She found that writers' stances in relation to the Vichy regime are best explained in terms of institutional and structural factors, rather than ideology. Examining four major French literary institutions, from the conservative French Academy to the Comité national des écrivains, a group formed in 1941 to resist the Occupation, she chronicles the institutions' histories before turning to the ways that they influenced writers' political positions. Sapiro shows how significant institutions and individuals within France's literary field exacerbated their loss of independence or found ways of resisting during the war and Occupation, as well as how they were perceived after Liberation.