Set during the Hundred Years War (1337-1453), the narrative creates believable human beings from the great roll of historical figures. Here are the mad Charles VI, the brilliant Louis d'Orleans, Joan of Arc, Henry V, and, most importantly, Charles d'Orleans, whose loyalty to France brought him decades of captivity in England. A natural poet and scholar, his birth and rank thrust him into the center of intrigue and strife, and through his observant eyes readers enter fully into his colorful, dangerous times. First published in the Netherlands in 1949, this book has never been out of print there and has been reprinted 15 times. Hella S. Haasse has written 17 novels as well as poetry, plays and essays, and has received many honors and awards including the Netherlands State Award for Literature. Her books have been translated into English, French, German, Swedish, Italian, Hungarian, Serbo-Croatian and Welsh.

    Is the child really his? And does he want him?

    Elegaic, macabre, chimerical, Funeral Rites is a dark meditation on the mirror images of love and hate, sex and death.

    Writing in the intensely lyrical prose style that is his trademark, the man, Jean Cocteau, dubbed France's "Black Prince of Letters" here reconstructs his early adult years - time he spent as a petty criminal and vagabond, traveling through Spain and Antwerp, occasionally border hopping across to the rest of Europe, always trying to stay one step ahead of the authorities.

    This stirring saga is drawn from true stories left behind by the soldiers of the First Empire, a dramatic tale of triumph and defeat.

    In 1942 a young Frenchwoman living in Somerset with her three little girls answered a broadcast appeal for holiday photographs to be sent to the War Office. She was invited to London for an interview, and a startling proposition was put to her. Reluctantly she accepted it. In a few months she had been trained as a British agent and, under the name "Céline", infiltrated into Southern France. Her run there was short but lively. She worked with the Resistance Movement, organising sabotage and the reception of parachuted agents and supplies. After six months the Germans arrested her with her Commanding Officer, known as "Raoul". So began her long ordeal in prison and concentration-camp. The Gestapo put certain questions to her; she had nothing to say, even after they had pulled out all her toenails. But her replies on other matters were such as to draw suspicion from her Commanding Officer to herself. The Gestapo condemned her to death, but did not kill her. After a year in a Parisian prison she was moved to the infamous concentration-camp for women at Ravensbrück. There she was buried for three months in total darkness, and witnessed the mass execution of her fellow-prisoners in the spring of 1945. To save his skin, the Camp Commandant took her with him to meet the advancing Americans. So Odette Sanson lived to receive the George Cross, the highest British decoration for gallantry that can be awarded to a woman. She also holds the M.B.E. and the French Légion d'Honneur. In 1947 she became the wife of her 'chief', Captain Peter Churchill, D.S.O., M.C.Jerrard Tickell - the distinguished author of such widely popular novels as Appointment with Venus, Soldier from the Wars Returning and The Hero of Saint Roger - has told Odette's story with practised skill. His description of her last two years is particularly impressive for its attempt to suggest how a woman who had no hope to escape death could yet preserve her mind in peace. Odette has been filmed with Anna Neagle in the title-role.

    Together with Apollinaire, he brought cubism to French poetry. Anais Nin hailed him as one of France's best writers, and the Village Voice called him the Indiana Jones of French literature. Translated into English for the first time, Sky, the last of Cendrar's four autobiographical volumes, weaves together a dazzling collage of prose poetry, travel writing, reportage, detective story, and personal memoir. His life itself reads like the Arabian Nights Entertainment, writes Henry Miller. In Sky Cendrars recounts his adventures in Russia during the revolution of 1905, in the trenches of World War I (where he lost his right arm), in Brazil in the 1920s, and behind the lines during World War II. The two wars run throughout as a unifying thread. As the title announces, this is a memoir of the sky - of Cendrars's love of birds, levitation, and aviation. The opening of the book finds Cendrars, the great adventurer and traveler, sailing back from Brazil to Paris with 250 multi-colored birds, hoping to bring at least one of them alive to a child he loves. The second part moves back and forth between the author's recollections of life as a war correspondent in 1940 and an encyclopedic discourse on levitation he wrote in search of a patron saint of aviation (perhaps as compensation for the death of his young son, Remy, who was a pilot during the war). With unmatched exuberance, Cendrars writes on poetry, myths, existentialism, his life in Paris between the wars with the painter Delaunay and the Dadaists, and his exotic adventuresin Brazil. His anecdotes of Russia, where he was a jeweler's assistant, are compelling and funny. His fiercely imaginative stories, such as one about a Brazilian coffee plantation owner who, obsessed with his love for Sarah Bernhardt, retreats into the wilderness, are magical. Des

    Mina Curtiss especially chose them as apt illustrations of Proust's growing sensibility and intellectual power during the gestation of the novel.Indeed, many of the characters in the book are drawn from the men and women we meet here. The letters are also exciting as an unfolding panorama of the Belle Epoque and for their superb insights into literature, art and music.Published by Helen Marx Books and Books & Co.

    

    University of Illinois Professor David P. Boder travels with a relatively new tape recorder to interview and capture the stories of some displaced persons he encountered in post-war Europe. This is a collection of only eight of those interviews with displaced persons that Boder recorded and transcribed, giving first-hand experiences of eight individuals during the war and often their experiences in various concentration camps.