Mistral is a portrait of Provence seen through its legendary wind. Photographer Rachel Cobb illustrates the effects of this relentless wind that funnels down the Rhône Valley, periodically gusting to 120 km per hour--hurricane strength on the Beaufort wind force scale. The region has, accordingly, adjusted to accommodate the mistral's impact. Some houses are built the traditional way, with few or no windows on the windward side and the main entrance on the sheltered side. Heavy stones hold down terra-cotta roof tiles. Rows of trees lining fields create windbreaks to shield crops. Cobb spent years chasing this capricious wind, challenging herself to photograph the invisible. As she became sensitive to its rhythms and effects, Cobb realized the mistral was not just a weather phenomenon; it was an integral part of the fabric of Provençal life. It was everywhere, yet always unseen. Mistral captures this invisible force of nature through its effects: a leaf caught in flight, a bride tangled in her veil, spider webs oriented to withstand the wind and grapes lashed by powerful gusts ("You can taste the wine better when the mistral blows," a Châteauneuf-du-Pape winemaker says). Writers have also tried their hand at conjuring this ungraspable phenomenon. Excerpts from writings by Paul Auster, Lawrence Durrell, Jean Giono and Frédéric Mistral are included in this volume, a luminous evocation of nature's unseen power.

An in-depth look at the hidden power of the mistral wind and its effect on modern French history. Every year, the chilly mistral wind blows through the Rhône valley of southern France, across the Camargue wetlands, and into the Mediterranean Sea. Most forceful when winter turns to spring, the wind knocks over trees, sweeps trains off their tracks, and destroys crops. Yet the mistral turns the sky clear and blue, as it often appears in depictions of Provence. The legendary wind is central to the area’s regional identity and has inspired artists and writers near and far for centuries. This force of nature is the focus of Catherine Dunlop’s The Mistral, a wonderfully written examination of the power of the mistral wind, and in particular, the ways it challenged central tenets of nineteenth-century European society: order, mastery, and predictability. As Dunlop shows, while the modernizing state sought liberation from environmental realities through scientific advances, land modification, and other technological solutions, the wind blew on, literally crushing attempts at control, and becoming increasingly integral to regional feelings of place and community.

They were three generations of magnificent red-haired beauties born to scandal, bred to success, bound to a single extraordinary man—Julien Mistral, the painter, the genius, the lover whose passions had seared them all. Maggy: Flamboyant mistress of Mistral’s youth, the toast of Paris in the‘20s. Her luminous flesh was immortalized in the paintings that made Mistral legendary. Teddy: Maggy’s daughter, the incomparable cover girl who lived fast and left as her legacy Mistral’s dazzling love child. Fauve: Mistral's daughter, the headstrong, fearless glory girl whose one dark secret drove her to rule the world of high fashion and to risk everything in a feverish search for love. From the ‘20s Paris of Chanel, Colette, Picasso and Matisse to New York’s sizzling new modeling agencies of the ‘50s, to the model ward of the‘70s, Mistral's Daughter captures the explosive glamour of life at the top of the worlds of art and high fashion. Judith Krantz has given us a glittering international tale as spellbinding as her other celebrated bestsellers, Scruples, Princess Daisy, I'll Take Manhattan, Till We Meet Again, Scruples Two, Dazzle, and Lovers.

A schoolteacher whose poetry catapulted her to early fame in her native Chile and an international diplomat whose boundary-defying sexuality still challenges scholars, Gabriela Mistral (1889–1957) is one of the most important and enigmatic figures in Latin American literature of the last century. The Locas mujeres poems collected here are among Mistral’s most complex and compelling, exploring facets of the self in extremis—poems marked by the wound of blazing catastrophe and its aftermath of mourning. From disquieting humor to balladlike lyricism to folkloric wisdom, these pieces enact a tragic sense of life, depicting “madwomen” who are anything but mad. Strong and intensely human, Mistral’s poetic women confront impossible situations to which no sane response exists. This groundbreaking collection presents poems from Mistral’s final published volume as well as new editions of posthumous work, featuring the first English-language appearance of many essential poems. Madwomen promises to reveal a profound poet to a new generation of Anglophone readers while reacquainting Spanish readers with a stranger, more complicated “madwoman” than most have ever known.

Vilified for his successful corruption investigations into his colleagues, Capitaine Roger Blanc is relocated to the south of France and tackles a murder case involving a reviled outsider whose demise is linked to the dark undercurrents of Provence.

Something or someone is causing the land on Faraway Island to be spoiled. Trees are being cut down and the Diamond River is dirty, making Ziel, the Asrai River Fairy Princess, very sick. Can the golden flowers of the Mistral trees help save the land?