"Barthes par Barthes is a genuinely post-modern autobiography, an innovation in the art of autobiography comparable in its theoretical implications for our understanding of autobiography to Sartre's The Words."--Hayden White, University of California

    Outsiders, even their parents, cannot tell them apart, and call them Jean-Paul. The mysterious bond between them excludes all others; they speak their own language; they are one perfectly harmonious unit; they are, in all innocence, lovers.For Paul, this unity is paradise, but as they grow up Jean rebels against it. He takes a mistress and deserts his brother, but Paul sets out to follow him in a pilgrimage that leads all around the world, through places that reflect their separation--the mirrored halls of Venice, the Zen gardens of Japan, the newly divided city of Berlin. The exquisite love story of Jean-Paul is set against the ugliness and pain of human existence. " Gemini" is a novel of extraordinary proportions, intricate images, and profound thought, in which Michel Tournier tells his fascinating story with an irresistible humor.

    Not the Paris of the guidebooks, but the City of Light's lurid backways and backwaters, the dens of vice where he could slough off the pale cast of American puritanism and embrace the hedonistic facts of life. The Parisian life of Miller was a turbulent quest for new sensations and avenues, a roisterous, slumming exploration of the soul. This world Miller shared with Brassai, one of the greatest photographers of our century. Miller and Brassai's friendship was a recognition of kindred spirits, born of mutual admiration for each other's tireless, restless fascination with Paris and its inhabitants. In Miller, Brassai found his most compelling subject. Using unpublished letters, recollected conversations, and references to Miller's work—and featuring sixteen unforgettable examples of Brassai's photography—"Henry Miller: The Paris Years" is an intimate account of a writer's self-discovery, seen through the unblinking eye of a master photographer. Brassai delves into Miller's relationships with Anais Nin and Lawrence Durrell, as well as his hopelessly tangled though wildly inspiring marriage to June. Brassai remembers Miller's favorite cafes and haunts, revives Miller's idols and anathemas, and evokes their shared passion for the street life of a Montparnasse and Montmartre captured, even during those depression years, in a dazzling moment of illumination.

    When Jacquest Fournier, Bishop of Pamiers, launched an elaborate Inquisition to stamp them out, the peasants & shepherds he interrogated revealed, along with their position on official Catholicism, many details of their everyday life. Basing his absorbing study on these vivid, carefully recorded statements of peasants who lived more than 600 years ago--Pierre Clergue, the powerful village priest & shameless womanizer is even heard explaining his techniques of seduction--eminent historian Le Roy Ladurie reconstructs the economy & social structure of the community & probes the most intimate aspects of medieval life: love & marriage, gestures & emotions, conversations & gossip, clans & factions, crime & violence, concepts of time & space, attitudes to the past, animals, magic & folklore, death & beliefs about the other world.

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    It is falling from a great height, a meteor, a massive, compact, oblong block of rock, like a giant egg with a pocked, uneven surface.""The opening sentence of "La Belle Captive" introduces a dreamworld where the conventions of the traditional novel have been overthrown. Objects move through space without regard to laws of nature, characters move through the text in a maddening complex of events.Published in 1975, Alain Robbe-Grillet's "nouveau roman" is illustrated with 77 paintings by Rene Magritte. Robbe-Grillet uses Magritte's paintings as pretexts for the novel, letting them generate themes for an imaginary discourse that parallels their imagery, glosses them, contradicts them. Simultaneously, he comments on Magritte's paintings while taking advantage of them to parade his own favorite themes: play, eroticism, subversion. Robbe-Grillet gives us a plot that frustrates expectations yet shares his pleasure with the mysterious and poetic in Magritte's art, and with the cultural myths that painter and novelist both parody.The book includes a critical essay by novelist and translator Ben Stoltzfus on the pictorial and linguistic affinities between Magritte and Robbe-Grillet. Stoltzfus explores the image of the beautiful captive not only in her mythical and erotic dimensions, but also as a metaphor for the artistic process.

    French, half-Jewish, born in Germany, Simone Signoret is not only an actress but also a political activist, a wife, and a mother. With amazing frankness, she highlights her roles in her celebrated films; her marriage to singer and actor Yves Montand; her trip to Russia and her meeting with Nitika Khruschev; her life in New York and Hollywood; and, above all, her friendships with famous people.

    Contents:The emergence of secularized history : Bossuet and Voltaire --Helvetius and the genealogy of passions --Helvetius and the heritage of Pascal --Positivism and its antecedents --The conflict between progress and political existence after Turgot --The apocalypse of man : Comte --The religion of humanity and the French Revolution --Revolutionary existence : Bakunin --Bakunin : the anarchist --Marx : inverted dialectics --Marx : the genesis of gnostic socialism.

    

    

    THE ENEMY is made of 144 sections. Each section seems to have a life of its own. The characters (the master, the servant, the curator, the child victim, the secretary) appear through all of them but at different periods of time, in different guises and with differing relationships to one another. The master is writing his memoirs. A secretary helps him to organize them then departs. Another replaces him who must deal with: Fragments of totally unrelated reports, resolutely contradictory statements. The master questions the secretary. "Well then, still in the shit? .you've attached too much importance to some statements that were no more valid than others." The master struggles with an adversary who may be his double. He searches for a presence.