Alone and poor, she fights fiercely to give her son the very best. Gary chronicles his childhood with her in Russia, Poland, and on the French Riviera. And he recounts his adventurous life as a young man fighting for France in the Second World War. But above all, he tells the story of the love for his mother that was his very life, their secret and private planet, their wonderland "born out of a mother's murmur into a child's ear, a promise whispered at dawn of future triumphs and greatness, of justice and love." A romantic, thrilling memoir that has become a French classic.

    The author recalls her life in Paris in the formative years of 1929 to 1944, telling of her relationship with Jean-Paul Sartre and of Parisian intellectual life of the 1930s and 1940s.

    Shattuck focuses on the careers of Alfred Jarry, Henri Rousseau, Erik Satie, and Guillaume Apollinaire, using the quartet as window into the era as he explores a culture whose influence is at the very foundation of modern art.

    Beauvoir recounts her difficult long-distance romance with novelist Nelson Algren and her involvement with Claude Lanzmann (the future director of Shoah). She also vividly describes her travels with Sartre to Brazil and Cuba, reveals her private sense of despair in reaction to French atrocities in Algeria, and confronts her own deepening depression. Simone de Beauvoir's outstanding achievement is to have left us an admirable record of her unceasing battle to become an independent woman and writer.Introduction by Toril Moi

    The full text of Val�ry's book on Degas, with a long essay on Corot, others on Berthe Morisot, Manet, and Daumier, a personal recollection of Renoir, and writings on sculpture, portraiture, Italian painting, and several minor arts.

    I. L. Sandomir: Opus ParaphysicumNicolaj N. Kamenev: Report on Some Concrete Historical ProblemsHis Late Magnificence, Dr. I. L. Sandomir: Epanorthosis the Moral ClinmnenHis Late Magnificence, Jean Mollet: Message to the Civilized or Uncivilized World

    Also includes excerpts from an interview with the author. First of two volumes.Plays included in this volume:- The Women at the Tomb- Barabbas- Three Actors and Their Drama- Pantagleize- The Blind Men- Chronicles of Hell- Lord Halewyn

    In The Killer, a three-act drama staged with great success in Paris and London, he creates a study of pure evil. Bérenger, a conscientious citizen, finds himself in a radiantly beautiful city marred only by the presence of a mysterious, irrational killer. Bérenger's determination to find the murderer in the face of official indifference, and his final defeat at the hands of an impersonal, pitiless cruelty are the elements of a parable which speak with the universality found in Kafka's The Trial. The Killer, says Pierre Marcabru in Arts, is "Ionesco's best play...Never has despair had such a tone, at first ironic and ultimately lugubrious. Here good will and hate clash in an implacable encounter where evil triumphs...Ionesco has transcended his own earlier dramatic limits. Beginning with a verbal revolt, he has reached a point of logical revolt."In Improvisation, or The Shepherd's Chameleon, Ionesco plays the part of himself facing three learned scholars who claim to know better than he what he should write and how he should set about it. Inspired by one of Moliere's farces, Improvisation is a wildly hilarious comedy that sets forth the playwright's own ideas of the theater. The last play, Maid to Marry, creates a comic frenzy out of the phony verbiage in a conversation between a man and a woman.