Best of
France

1913

Swann's Way


Marcel Proust - 1913
    But since its original prewar translation there has been no completely new version in English. Now, Penguin brings Proust's masterpiece to new audiences throughout the world, beginning with Lydia Davis's internationally acclaimed translation of the first volume, Swann's Way.Swann's Way is one of the preeminent novels of childhood: a sensitive boy's impressions of his family and neighbors, all brought dazzlingly back to life years later by the taste of a madeleine. It also enfolds the short novel "Swann in Love," an incomparable study of sexual jealousy that becomes a crucial part of the vast, unfolding structure of In Search of Lost Time. The first volume of the work that established Proust as one of the finest voices of the modern age — satirical, skeptical, confiding, and endlessly varied in its response to the human condition — Swann's Way also stands on its own as a perfect rendering of a life in art, of the past re-created through memory.

Locus Solus


Raymond Roussel - 1913
    One by one he introduces, demonstrates and expounds the discoveries and inventions of his fertile, encyclopaedic mind. An African mud-sculpture representing a naked child; a road-mender's tool which, when activated by the weather, creates a mosaic of human teeth; a vast aquarium in which humans can breathe and in which a depilated cat is seen stimulating the partially decomposed head of Danton to fresh flights of oratory. By each item in Cantarel's exhibition there hangs a tale - a tale such as only that esteemed genius Roussel could tell. As the inventions become more elaborate, the richness and brilliance of the author's stories grow to match them; the flow of his imagination becomes a flood and the reader is swept along in a torrent of wonder and hilarity.

The Poems and Prose Poems of Charles Baudelaire


Charles Baudelaire - 1913
    You may find it for free on the web. Purchase of the Kindle edition includes wireless delivery.

Jean Barois


Roger Martin du Gard - 1913
    Jean Barois looks back at the “liberated” figures of bygone France and tries to find his own freedom, but when he chooses to give up his ideals for comfort, it results in his dramatic fall from grace.

The Death of Fantomas


Sheryl Curtis - 1913
    Petersburg to the Palaces of India, from the back alleys of Paris to the deck of the Titanic, this prodigious saga tells the story of the death of Fantômas, and of his arch-nemesis, Detective Juve. Defying the Tsar’s secret police, Russian anarchists, Thuggee from India and Parasian Apaches, Juve, ably assisted by the intrepid journalist Jerôme Fandor, his beloved fiancée, Hélène, the alleged daughter of Fantômas, crisscross the world to finally meet their fate aboard a doomed ship in the North Atlantic. The Death of Fantômas collects the final two volumes of the saga of the Lord of Terror, initially released in 1913 and never translated before. The book also includes an introduction, a timeline and a bibliography by Jean-Marc Lofficier.

The Life of Napoleon I, Volume 1 of 2


J. Holland Rose - 1913
    You may find it for free on the web. Purchase of the Kindle edition includes wireless delivery.