These three volumes, now available together for the first time in paperback, include all entries made from the time when Camus was still completely unknown in Europe, until he was killed in an automobile accident in 1960, at the height of his creative powers. In 1957 he had been awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. A spiritual and intellectual auto biography, Camus' Notebooks are invariably more concerned with what he felt than with what he did. It is intriguing for the reader to watch him seize and develop certain themes and ideas, discard others that at first seemed promising, and explore different types of experience.

    He is, indeed, the very symbol of what we now call “modern” literature; nearly a hundred years before the arrival of the “mind-expanding” drugs, Rimbaud understood that the borders of the writer’s consciousness must be extended and made the deliberate attempt to use hallucination as a creative method.Dr. Starkie, a lecturer in French literature at Oxford, has devoted many years of research to Rimbaud, revising her biography three times as new manuscript material and information about him has come to light.

    Sempe has created a world above and beyond specific cultural and political references, a world all of his own, one populated by long-faced, aquiline-nosed depressives - psychoanalysts, housewives, and concert pianists.

    One day, after reading a book about Paris, he decides to pack a lunch and head for the city. “Like many of us Henri wants to see Paris.In Paris, there are thousands of buses. In Reboul, where Henri lives, there is only one bus.In Paris there are many parks and rows and rows of trees. The park in Reboul has only five trees. In Paris there are many zoos full of animals for the people to see. So one fine day Henri packs up some lunch and starts off to see all the things he had read about.” Along the way, Henri gets tired and falls asleep under a tree. And this is when the story gets really charming. What Henri sees, we see, in a flowing panorama of pictures conceived by the eminent graphic designer Saul Bass.

    Using historical documents and translated by Regine Pernoud, Joan of Arc seeks to answer the questions asked by Joan's contemporaries as well as us: Who was she? Whence came she? What had been her life and exploits? First published in the United States in 1966 by Stein and Day, this book reveals the historical Joan, described in contemporary documents by her allies as well as her enemies.

    Essential to the understanding of the searching and remarkably informed spirit of this protean writer.

    The text is composed from a wide range of materials, including city names, road signs, advertising slogans, catalog listings, newspaper accounts of the 1893 World's Fair, Native American writings, and the history of the Freedomland theme park.Butor weaves bits and pieces from these diverse sources into a collage resembling an abstract painting (the book is dedicated to Jackson Pollock) or a patchwork quilt that by turns is both humorous and quite disturbing. This travelogue captures—in both a textual and visual way—the energy and contradictions of American life and history.

    The Word as Archipelago is the first complete translation into English of La Parole en archipel, an important book that René Char published in 1962, and a book whose title is an apt figure for the whole body of poetry that Char wrote over a period of fifty years. The author of this book is a lover, a visionary of the natural world, an elegist, a phenomenologist of encounter, a mystic of the night, a spirit of defiant freedom who in the Second World War had been a leader in the French Resistance. The book includes work in the different forms Char fluently moves among—the verse poem, the prose poem, and the aphoristic sequence—and displays his characteristic stylistic gifts: vivid concreteness, speculative incisiveness, archipelago-like scope. The word is an island belonging to a unity always partially hidden. Robert Baker’s resonant translation brings into English this language of intuitive crossings. A poet of pessimism and hope at once, perhaps the greatest French practitioner of the prose poem since Rimbaud, Char writes a beautifully open poetry of his avventura amorosa with life itself.

    The servant's replies - which are by turns comic, straightforward, angry, nostalgic, and disingenuous - hint at a variety of seedy events, including murder, orgies, tax fraud, and drug deals. Of course, the servant wasn't involved with any of these activities - if the reader chooses to believe him. In trying to convince the inquisitor of his innocence, the servant creates a web of half-truths, vague references, and glaring inconsistencies amid "forgotten" details, indicating that he may know more than he's letting on.

    Amidst the intellectual circles of the twenties and thirties, she develops relationships with her longtime partner H. D., and with Marianne Moore, Ernest Hemingway, Sigmund Freud, Gertrude Stein, Man Ray, and others. This compelling memoir reveals Bryher's exotic childhood, her impact on modernism, and her sense of social justice-helping over 100 people escape from the Nazis while fleeing the war herself.

    It is not surprising that the writing of the biography of this vivid, talented and entertaining figure should have provided the author with a genial and absorbing task.He came of extraordinary stock; the circumstances of his birth were remarkable; he was the lover of many celebrated women; he won the lifelong friendship of men of the stature of Voltaire; he aspired to a crown, and nearly became the Czar of Russia; his activities spanned a whole continent, from Paris to Dresden, from Dresden to Warsaw, from Warsaw to Moscow. Yet he was more, much more, than an energetic and flamboyant adventurer: he was acknowledged to be the outstanding general of his era, a military genius who linked the epoch of Marlborough with the epoch of Frederick the Great. He led great armies and won great victories.It is part of the purpose of this book to restore him to the pre-eminent place in social and military history to which his achievements entitle him. The study of his campaigns has proved no dutiful or dreary labour, for he was among the wittiest and most elegant military practitioners who have ever lived. There was a touch of diablerie about the manner in which he gained his spectacular triumphs that set him apart from the other great captains of his era.

    One in a five volume series on the history of Western civilization, this volume traces the history of western nations from the end of World War I to the present.

    

    Never has there been a period when "ladies" so commanded society, from a position so frequently horizontal - or when wit, so soon to be dulled, flowed faster than wine in the salons of the great hostesses, in the theatre, in the fashionable boulevard restaurants and nighclubs, and in the country chateaux of the beau monde. Never has amorous dalliance been conducted with more finesse - and success - nor duels flourished with greater ceremony and less danger to the participants. "The great business at hand was pleasure, conducted by a people who knew the seriousness of that business."

    

    The 30s.