Perfectly written and a remarkably suspenseful read ... an absorbing, intriguing, insightful book for all readers.--Library Journal (Starred review)
Cécile, a stylish forty-seven-year-old, has spent the weekend visiting her parents in a provincial town southeast of Paris. By early Monday morning, she's exhausted. These trips back home are always stressful and she settles into a train compartment with an empty seat beside her. But it's soon occupied by a man she instantly recognizes: Philippe Leduc, with whom she had a passionate affair that ended in her brutal humiliation thirty years ago. In the fraught hour and a half that ensues, their express train hurtles towards the French capital. Cécile and Philippe undertake their own face to face journey--In silence? What could they possibly say to one another?--with the reader gaining entrée to the most private of thoughts. This is a psychological thriller about past romance, with all its pain and promise.
Reading group guide is available from New Vessel Press.
Including translations by Richmond Lattimore, W. S. Merwin, Dudley Fitts, and Richard Wilbur, this anthology has stood the test of time in terms of its selection and scholarly apparatus. Now back in print after twenty years in a fresh new edition, the book features an introduction by Patti Smith that testifies to its epochal impact on her own career, as well as those of other influential latter-day poets, including Lou Reed and Jim Carroll. This rediscovered gem is sure to inspire a new generation.
Finalist for the 2015 Giller Prize
Finalist for the 2016 Best Translated Book Award
One of Quill & Quire's Books of the Year, 2015
A twenty-five-thousand-copy bestseller in Quebec, Arvida, with its stories of innocent young girls and wild beasts, attempted murder and ritual mutilation, haunted houses and road trips heading nowhere, is unforgettable. Like a Proust-obsessed Cormac McCarthy, Samuel Archibald's portrait of his hometown, a model town design by American industrialist Arthur Vining Davis, does for Quebec's North what William Faulkner did for the South, and heralds an important new voice in world literature.
Samuel Archibald teaches contemporary popular culture at the University of Quebec in Montreal, where he lectures on genre fiction, horror movies, and video games, among other subjects.
The Attraction of Things concerns the entirety of beauty and the possibility of grace, relayed via obsessions with rare early gramophone records, the theater, translation, dying parents: all these elements are relayed in a dizzying strange traffic of cultural artifacts, friendships, losses, discoveries, and love. Roger Lewinter believes that in the realm of art, "the distinction between life and death loses its relevance, the one taking place in the other."
Whereas Story of Love in Solitude is a group of small stories, The Attraction of Things is a continuous narrative (more or less) of a man seeking (or stumbling upon) enlightenment.
"The Attraction of Things," states Lewinter, "is the story of a being who lets himself go toward what attracts him, toward what he attracts--beings, works, things--and who, through successive encounters, finds the way out of the labyrinth, to the heart, where the bolt of illumination strikes. This is the story of a letting go toward the illumination."
The leading figure of absurdist theater and one of the great innovators of the modern stage, Eugène Ionesco (1909-94) did not write his first play, The Bald Soprano, until 1950. He went on to become an internationally renowned master of modern drama, famous for the comic proportions and bizarre effects that allow his work to be simultaneously hilarious, tragic, and profound. As Ionesco has said, "Theater is not literature. . . . It is simply what cannot be expressed by any other means."
A delicious (Dorie Greenspan), genial (Kirkus Reviews), very cool book about the intersections of food and history (Michael Pollan)--as featured in the New York Times
The complex political, historical, religious and social factors that shaped some of [France's] . . . most iconic dishes and culinary products are explored in a way that will make you rethink every sprinkling of fleur de sel.
--The New York Times Book Review
Acclaimed upon its hardcover publication as a culinary treat for Francophiles (Publishers Weekly), A Bite-Sized History of France is a thoroughly original book that explores the facts and legends of the most popular French foods and wines. Traversing the cuisines of France's most famous cities as well as its underexplored regions, the book is enriched by the authors' friendly accessibility that makes these stories so memorable (The New York Times Book Review). This innovative social history also explores the impact of war and imperialism, the age-old tension between tradition and innovation, and the enduring use of food to prop up social and political identities.
The origins of the most legendary French foods and wines--from Roquefort and cognac to croissants and Calvados, from absinthe and oysters to Camembert and champagne--also reveal the social and political trends that propelled France's rise upon the world stage. As told by a Franco-American couple (Stéphane is a cheesemonger, Jeni is an academic) this is an impressive book that intertwines stories of gastronomy, culture, war, and revolution. . . . It's a roller coaster ride, and when you're done you'll wish you could come back for more (The Christian Science Monitor).
"One of the greatest writers of the twentieth century . . . Simenon was unequaled at making us look inside, though the ability was masked by his brilliance at absorbing us obsessively in his stories." --The Guardian
Master novelist Georges Simenon's critically acclaimed tale of the destructive power of lust and guilt "He felt no resentment towards Andree for biting his lip. In the context of their lovemaking, it had its place." For Tony and Andree, there are no rules when they meet in the blue room at the Hotel des Voyageurs. Their adulterous affair is intoxicating, passionate--and dangerous. It soon turns into a nightmare from which there can be no escape. Heart-pounding and high-stakes, The Blue Room is a stylish and sensual psychological thriller that weaves a story of cruelty, reckless lust, and relentless guilt.