Here is what Eloise does in Paris: everything. The effect is rawther extraordinaire. If you come to Paris with Eloise you will always be glad you did.

    A superb autobiography by one of the great literary figures of the twentieth century, Simone de Beauvoir's Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter offers an intimate picture of growing up in a bourgeois French family, rebelling as an adolescent against the conventional expectations of her class, and striking out on her own with an intellectual and existential ambition exceedingly rare in a young woman in the 1920s.She vividly evokes her friendships, love interests, mentors, and the early days of the most important relationship of her life, with fellow student Jean-Paul Sartre, against the backdrop of a turbulent time in France politically.

    of the one hundred stories gathered here, thirty-one appear for the first time in English and another twenty-nine have been newly translated for this volume.

    And the Marne river flowing silent and slow beyond them all ...They would merge together in a gold-green summer of discovery, until the fruit rotted on the trees and cold seeped into their bones ...

    At the time of his arrest by French paratroopers during the Battle of Algiers in June of 1957, Henri Alleg was a French journalist who supported Algerian independence. He was interrogated for one month. During this imprisonment, Alleg was questioned under torture, with unbelievable brutality and sadism. The Question is Alleg's profoundly moving account of that month and of his triumph over his torturers. Jean-Paul Sartre’s preface remains a relevant commentary on the moral and political effects of torture on both the victim and perpetrator.This Bison Books edition marks the first time since 1958 that The Question has been published in the United States. For this edition Ellen Ray provides a foreword. James D. Le Sueur offers an introduction.

    Recounting Pierre-Auguste's extraordinary career, beginning as a painter of fans and porcelain, recording the rules of thumb by which he worked, and capturing his unpretentious and wonderfully engaging talk and personality, Jean Renoir's book is both a wonderful double portrait of father and son, and in the words of the distinguished art historian John Golding, it "remains the best account of Renoir, and, furthermore, among the most beautiful and moving biographies we have." Includes 12 pages of color plates and 18 pages of black and white images.

    One reinforced-concrete blockhouse in the heart of the forest is manned, this winter of 1939/40, by Lieutenant Grange with three men, who live in a chalet built over it. Cut off from the rest of the world, their senses heightened to capture the sounds and smells of the forest, the men create their own security as autumn turns to winter. Later, though, when winter turns to spring, when the sap rises and the panzer divisions attack, Lieutenant Grange meets the fate he has never believed he would escape. But if this is a story of soldiers, it is not about fighting. It is about solitude, about watching and waiting - and about love, the young Lieutenant's devotion to Mona, the child-widow discovered like a sprite in the forest one rainy night, who, in this surreal period of suspense, becomes his lover.

    Here is France for the traveler, the chef, and the connoisseur of fine prose. Maps and b & w line drawings throughout.

    One day, when tidying Lady Dant's wardrobe, she comes across the most beautiful thing she has ever seen in her life - a Dior dress. In all the years of her drab and humble existence, she's never seen anything as magical as the dress before her and she's never wanted anything as much before. Determined to make her dream come true, Mrs Harris scrimps, saves and slaves away until one day, after three long, uncomplaining years, she finally has enough money to go to Paris. When she arrives at the House of Dior, Mrs Harris has little idea of how her life is about to be turned upside down and how many other lives she will transform forever. Always kind, always cheery and always winsome, the indomitable Mrs Harris takes Paris by storm and learns one of life's greatest lessons along the way. This treasure from the 1950s introduces the irrepressible Mrs Harris, part charlady, part fairy-godmother, whose adventures take her from her humble London roots to the heights of glamour.

    The slender thread of factual record informs a live, at times repellent, portrait of the man he calls Claude Morel, but where Morel's story departs from Rimbaud's is not evident to the reader. Born in the Ardennes of northern France, his childhood dominated by a strange mother and his need to escape her, Claude finally reaches Paris- there to become a drifter, and in a second return, a depraved waster, involved with another poet- Maurice Druard (recognizably Paul Verlaine), but writing, ceaselessly, brilliantly, with a decadence then virtually unknown. Their relationship ends with a shooting- and from then on Claude becomes even more of a wanderer, up and down the length of France, then briefly as a soldier of the Dutch in Asia, a deserter, a hunter, trader, perhaps a slaver, a pilgrim. Finally a teacher at the court of the Lion of Judah, Menelik, he returned to France to die in Marseilles. A haunting tale with an obsessive fascination, it is a tragic book, symbolic of waste, frustration, lost genius. Ullman has used Rimbaud's own work as an integral part of his text.

    a father of light', said Ezra Pound in 1918 of Jules Laforgue. Among the most innovative of poets in the French language, Laforgue was an important influence on the young T S Eliot. Part-symbolist and part-impressionist, his associative method, speech-rhythms and boldly heterogenous diction make him not only one of the most individual of French poets but also among the most entertaining. Notable also for his early protests for the liberation of women, Laforgue died in Paris in 1887 aged just 27. In this revised edition of his verse translation, Peter Dale (described by Donald Davie as an `exceptionally thoughtful and enterprising translator') captures the energy and panache of Laforgue's poetry in translations which are by turns as playful, wild, clear, obscure and impossible as the French poems. Peter Dale was born in Addleston, Surrey, and worked as a secondary school teacher before becoming a freelance writer in 1993. He was co-editor of the poetry journal Agenda for many years. Well known for his translations of Dante's Divine Comedy and the poems of François Villon, he is also an accomplished poet in his own right. His selected poems, Edge to Edge, was published in 1997.

    Christopher Herold vigorously tells the story of the fierce Madame de Stael, revealing her courageous opposition to Napoleon, her whirlwind affairs with the great intellectuals of her day, and her idealistic rebellion against all that was cynical, tyrannical, and passionless. Germaine de Stael's father was Jacques Necker, the finance minister to Louis XVI, and her mother ran an influential literary-political salon in Paris. Always precocious, at nineteen Germaine married the Swedish ambassador to France, Eric Magnus Baron de Stael-Holstein, and in 1785 took over her mother's salon with great success. Germaine and de Stael lived most of their married life apart. She had many brilliant lovers. Talleyrand was the first, Narbonne, the minister of war, another; Benjamin Constant was her most significant and long-lasting one. She published several political and literary essays, including "A Treatise on the Influence of the Passions upon the Happiness of Individuals and of Nations," which became one of the most important documents of European Romanticism. Her bold philosophical ideas, particularly those in "On Literature," caused feverish commotion in France and were quickly noticed by Napoleon, who saw her salon as a rallying point for the opposition. He eventually exiled her from France. This winner of the 1959 National Book Award is "excellent ... detailed, full of color, movement, great names, and lively incident" -- The New York Times "Mr. Herold's full-bodied biography is clear-eyed, intelligent, and written with abundant wit and zest." -- The Atlantic Monthly