Ex.: 2nd print.

The prize-winning author “entices lucky readers with a dissenting, potentially heretical, refreshingly fascinating interpretation” of Jesus’s life (Shelf Awareness). The Francophone Belgian author Amélie Nothomb has won high praise for her provocative and philosophical novels, including Fear and Trembling, which won the prestigious Prix du Roman. Now Nothomb presents a highly original reexamination of an all-too-familiar story. In a first-person voice as wry as it is wise, Nothomb narrates Jesus’s final days, from his trial to his crucifixion to the resurrection. Amid asides about his relationships with his mother and Judas, his love for Mary Magdalene, and his many miracles, we find a man struggling with his humanity and his exceptional nature, straddling the line between human and deity, the son of a formless, omnipotent creator in the fallible form of a man.

Exceptionally gifted to his own detriment, Prince Cecil had always found life effortlessly mundane. One ordinary day, his life took an unexpected turn when he became engaged to Miss Bertia, the Chancellor's daughter. This engagement, however, was anything but typical. "Prince Cecil! I must confess - I am the villain of this story!" Bertia's declaration was startling. She claimed to have memories of her former life, where she had been the antagonist in a "Otome game". Her lofty ambition was to excel as a villainess and thus have her engagement annulled. However, despite her plans for various misdeeds, her attempts have always been unsuccessful. Is his fiancée, who aspires to master villainous finesse, simply misguided in her endeavours?

A fictional correspondence with a desperate American soldier leads to a strange new reality in this surreal novel of trauma, healing, and war. One morning, the heroine of this book—a famous Belgian author named Amélie Nothomb—receives an unusual fan letter. Melvin Mapple, an American soldier stationed in Iraq, tells her of the horrors around him. And of his only comfort, eating. He eats and eats until his ever-growing bulk starts to suffocate him. Disgusted with himself, but unable to stop, he labels his excess self Scheherazade as a way to cope. Repulsed yet fascinated by Mapple’s story, Nothomb begins exchanging letters with him. She opens up about her artistic process and the challenges of being in the spotlight. Their far-reaching conversation delves into universal questions about humanity and relationships. But their epistolary friendship takes a surprising turn when the novelist discovers bizarre facts lurking behind Mapple’s complex personal story.

What does it mean to write “I” in postmodern society, in a world in which technological advances and increased globalization have complicated notions of authenticity, origins, and selfhood? Under what circumstances and to what extent do authors lend their scriptural authority to fictional counterparts? What role does naming, or, conversely, anonymity play vis-à-vis the writing and written “I”? What aspects of identity are subject to (auto)fictional manipulations? And how do these complicated and multilayered narrating selves problematize the reader’s engagement with the text? Seeking answers to these questions, Protean Selves brings together essays which explore the intricate relations between language, self, identity, otherness, and the world through the analysis of the forms and uses of the first-person voice. Written by specialists of a variety of approaches and authors from across the world, the studies in this volume follow up a number of critical inquiries on the thorny problematic of self-representation and the representation of the self in contemporary French and francophone literatures, and extend the theoretical analysis to narratives and authors who have gained increasing commercial and academic visibility in the twenty-first century.

The Franco-Japanese coproduction Hiroshima mon amour (1959) is one of the most important films for global art cinema and for the French New Wave. In Through a Nuclear Lens, Hannah Holtzman examines this film and the transnational cycle it has inspired, as well as its legacy after the 2011 nuclear disaster at Fukushima Daiichi. In a study that includes formal and theoretical analysis, archival research, and interviews, Holtzman shows the emergence of a new kind of nuclear film, one that attends to the everyday effects of nuclear disaster and its impact on our experience of space and time. The focus on Franco-Japanese exchange in cinema since the postwar period reveals a reorientation of the primarily aesthetic preoccupations in the tradition of Japonisme to center around technological and environmental concerns. The book demonstrates how French filmmakers, ever since Hiroshima mon amour, have looked to Japan in part to better understand nuclear uncertainty in France.

It’s been a week since Aurora was offered a place at The Tower where she can dedicate each day to her embroidery without interruption. That has always been Aurora’s dream, so why is she hesitating when given that exact opportunity? Felix, on the other hand, isn’t quite as divided on the issue, and he’s pulling out all the stops to convince her to stay with him instead. One night, after an unexpected encounter, Aurora finally sorts out her conflicting feelings, but can she tell Felix before her resolve fades?

Exploring the multiple aesthetic and cultural links between French and Japanese cinema, The Cinematic Influence is packed with vivid examples and case studies of films by Akira Kurosawa, Jean-Luc Godard, Hirokazu Kore-eda, Claire Denis, Naomi Kawase, Michel Gondry and many others. It illustrates the vast array of cinematic connections that mark a long history of mutual influence and reverence between filmmakers in France and Japan. The book provides new insights into the ways that national cinemas resist Hollywood to maintain and strengthen their own cultural practices and how these national cinemas perform the task of informing and enlightening other cultures about what it means to be French or Japanese. This book also deepens our understandings of film's role as a viable cultural and economic player in individual nations. Importantly, the reader will see that film operates as a form of cultural exchange between France and Japan, and more broadly, Europe and Asia. This is the first major book to investigate the crossover between these two diverse national cinemas by tracking their history of shared narrative and stylistic techniques.

Went looking for magic but found love instead... Filimena via Adina, daughter of nobility, awakens one day with the realization that she had actually been reborn into a world of sorcery and given a second chance at life. In her new country full of heroes, she expects this means she's a chosen one, yet her lot is not as she dreamed-instead, her path crosses with the improbably powerful stepson of a wizard, and as a young noble lady, her place is at his side...as his fiancée! But perhaps a quest for love is exactly the adventure she was looking for...