Best of
France

1992

Paris Without End: The True Story of Hemingway's First Wife


Gioia Diliberto - 1992
    . . . A detailed, grittier portrait of the woman Hemingway loved and left.” — Newsday Hadley Richardson and Ernest Hemingway were the golden couple of Paris in the twenties, the center of an expatriate community boasting the likes of Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald, Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas, and James and Nora Joyce. In this haunting account of the young Hemingways, Gioia Diliberto explores their passionate courtship, their family life in Paris with baby Bumby, and their thrilling, adventurous relationship—a literary love story scarred by Hadley’s loss of the only copy of Hemingway’s first novel and ultimately destroyed by a devastating ménage à trois on the French Riviera.Compelling, illuminating, poignant, and deeply insightful, Paris Without End provides a rare, intimate glimpse of the writer who so fully captured the American imagination and the remarkable woman who inspired his passion and his art—the only woman Hemingway never stopped loving.

A Place of Greater Safety


Hilary Mantel - 1992
    Capturing the violence, tragedy, history, and drama of the French Revolution, this novel focuses on the families and loves of three men who led the Revolution--Danton, the charismatic leader and orator; Robespierre, the cold rationalist; and Desmoulins, the rabble-rouser.

Selected Poems


René Char - 1992
    In making their selections, the editors have chosen the voices of seventeen poets and translators (Paul Auster, Samuel Beckett, Cid Corman, Eugene Jolas, W.S. Merwin, William Carlos Williams, and James Wright, to name a few), in homage to a writer long held in highest esteem by the literary avant-garde.

Past Imperfect: French Intellectuals, 1944-1956


Tony Judt - 1992
    He analyzes this intellectual community's most divisive conflicts: how to respond to the promise and the betrayal of Communism and how to sustain a commitment to radical ideals when confronting the hypocrisy in Stalin's Soviet Union, in the new Eastern European Communist states, and in France itself. Judt shows why this was an all-consuming moral dilemma to a generation of French men and women, how their responses were conditioned by war and occupation, and how post-war political choices have come to sit uneasily on the conscience of later generations of French intellectuals.Judt's analysis extends beyond the writings of fashionable "Existentialist" personalities such as Jean-Paul Sartre, Albert Camus, and Simone de Beauvoir to include a wide intellectual community of Catholic philosophers, non-aligned journalists, literary critics and poets, Communist and non-Communist alike.Judt treats the intellectual dilemmas of the postwar years as an unfinished history. French intellectuals have not fully come to terms with the gnawing sense of what Judt calls the "moral irresponsibility" of those years. The result, he suggests, is a legacy of bad faith and confusion that has damaged France's cultural standing, notably in newly liberated Eastern Europe, and which reflects the nation's larger difficulty in confronting its own ambivalent past.

Forever Valley


Marie Redonnet - 1992
    Gradually she embarks upon a "personal project": she digs pits in the rectory garden and "looks for the dead." Her story, which has brevity and magical intensity of a fairy tale, is marked equally by tragedy and dark humor.Forever Valley is one of three novels that are the first works to appear in English by Marie Redonnet, one of France's most original new authors (the other novels are Hôtel Splendid and Rose Mellie Rose, both also available from the University of Nebraska Press). Translator Jordan Stump notes that these books "unmistakably fit together, although they have neither characters nor setting in common." In all three novels, Redonnet has said, "it is the women who fight, who seek, who create."

The Lost Upland: Stories of Southwestern France


W.S. Merwin - 1992
    S. Merwin vividly conveys his intimate knowledge of the people and the countryside in this ancient part of France (home of the Lascaux caves). In three narratives of small-town life, Merwin shows with matchless poetic and narrative power how the past is still palpably present.On its original publication in 1992 Jane Kramer wrote, "These stories are a gift from one of the great poets of the English language, a chronicle of the heartstopping seasons of one small corner of La France Profonde and of its stubborn and illusive characters. Merwin’s French peasants are a force of nature, like the blackberry brambles that used to choke his garden, and he cultivates them both with that attentive, exacting, and relentlessly patient genius that great poets and great gardeners share. This is, simply, the most beautiful writing about France I know."

Theory of Tables


Emmanuel Hocquard - 1992
    A 1992 book of poetry by Hocquard.

The Giraffe That Walked to Paris


Nancy Milton - 1992
    Retells the true story of how the first giraffe ever to come to Europe was sent by the Pasha of Egypt to the King of France in 1826, and the giraffe walked from the disembarkation point of Marseilles to Paris to see the King.

Robert Doisneau: A Photographer's Life


Peter Hamilton - 1992
    A biography of the French photographer, who spoke only French and never photographed outside France's borders, discussing his work with the Renault company as well as his freelance works.

Texaco


Patrick Chamoiseau - 1992
    The shantytown established by Marie-Sophie is menaced from without by hostile landowners and from within by the volatility of its own provisional state. Hers is a brilliant polyphonic rendering of individual stories informed by rhythmic orality and subversive humor that shape a collective experience.A joyous affirmation of literature that brings to mind Boccaccio, La Fontaine, Lewis Carroll, Montaigne, Rabelais, and Joyce, Texaco is a work of rare power and ambition, a masterpiece.

Princesse of Versaille


Charles Elliott - 1992
    Viewed from the perspective of Princesse Marie Adelaide, this book captures the events of the day and the political maneuvering of the times. Photographs.

A Matter of Blue


Jean-Michel Maulpoix - 1992
    . .”—Dawn CornelioA Matter of Blue is the most successful book by Maulpoix, author of over 25 French collections of poetry and the rightful heir to the 150-year tradition of French prose poetry.Jean-Michel Maulpoix (www.maulpoix.net) is director of a quarterly literary journal and professor of poetry at University Paris X-Nanterre.Dawn Cornelio wrote her PhD thesis on translating Maulpoix. She is assistant professor of French studies at University of Guelph, Ontario.

The Man Who Wasn't Maigret: A Portrait of Georges Simenon


Patrick Marnham - 1992
    "I doubt if there will be a better, or a better written, portrait of Simenon for a long time."--Julian Barnes

Eyewitness: Monet


Jude Welton - 1992
    These titles, and those to follow in future seasons, form an indispensable library for the whole family.Science Titles: These six volumes are part of DK's first set of U.S - published Eyewitness Books. Each volume focuses on a different field of science, and each features clear, expertly written text, color and black - and - white photos, charts, graphics, and 3 - D models -- all of which combine to make complex scientific concepts easy to understand.Art Titles: Each highly informative visual guide traces the life and work of a great artist, using superb full - color photography to bring the artist's work to life and to explore the conditions and motivations that inspired it.

A House in Flanders


Michael Jenkins - 1992
    So began for Michael Jenkins a formative experience which, when he came to write about it half a century later, reappeared to him ‘as in a dream, complete but surreal’. A House in Flanders, his account of those summer months spent on the edge of the Flanders Plain, does indeed have a hypnotic and dreamlike quality. The dignified old French country house with its unvarying routines; the extended family of elderly aunts, uncles and grown-up cousins (with one of whom he fell boyishly in love); and the summer warmth and wide Flemish skies were like an awakening to a young boy whose home in England was a ‘cold and empty place’ and whose parents, he felt, ‘preferred frigid intellectual exchanges to the more complicated and demanding world of personal relationships’. Yet all was not as golden as at first seemed. The German occupation had left its mark, and in 1951 memories of it were still raw and painful. Gradually, through his vivid portraits of the various members – in particular of the firm but kindly matriarch Tante Yvonne – Michael Jenkins teases out the history of the family and of the surrounding area and uncovers the secret at the heart of the book – the reason he has been sent there. ‘A radiant book’, wrote Dirk Bogarde in the Daily Telegraph, ‘a whole spectrum of colours and lights, of delights and elegances, of wistfulness and love’. The perfect summer read.

Realms of Memory: The Construction of the French Past, Volume 3 - Symbols


Pierre Nora - 1992
    It includes 13 essays on cultural icons from Joan of Arc to Descartes; the national motto of Liberty, Equality, Fraternity; the tricolour flag; and the French language itself. The closing essay on commemoration provides an overview of the series.

History of Structuralism: Volume 2: The Sign Sets, 1967-Present


François Dosse - 1992
    Francois Dosse tells the story of structuralism's beginnings in postwar Paris to its culmination as a movement that would reconfigure French intellectual life and reverberate throughout the Western world. This essential guide is a cogent map of the dizzying array of personalities and ideas involved in the movement.

Atget's Seven Albums


Molly Nesbit - 1992
    The albums were prototypes for books that were never published.

Light of the Moon


Elizabeth Buchan - 1992
    Set in resistance France, this is a grand and passionate story of forbidden love between an English Special Operations Executive and a German Abwehr officer.

The French Revolution (European History)


Owen Connelly - 1992
    Connelly and Hembree not only recapture the drama of the Revolution but provide a reasoned analysis of the causes, course, and legacy of this distinct turning point in history.

Letters of Gustave Courbet


Gustave Courbet - 1992
    A voluminous correspondent, Courbet himself, through his letters, offers a tantalizing avenue toward a keener assessment of his character and accomplishments. In her critical edition of over six hundred of the artist's letters, Petra ten-Doesschate Chu presents just such a look at the inner life of the artist; her unparalleled feat of gathering together all of Courbet's known letters, many heretofore unpublished and untranslated, is sure to change our evaluation of Courbet's creativity and of his place in nineteenth-century French life. Beginning when Courbet left his provincial home at eighteen and ending eight days before his death in exile in Switzerland, this correspondence enables readers to follow the artist's development from youth to mature artist of international repute. Addressed to correspondents such as the poet Charles Baudelaire, the painter Claude Monet, the writers Champfleury, Victor Hugo, and Théeophile Gautier, the political theorist Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, and the politician Jules Simon, the letters offer numerous insights into Courbet's life and art as well as the cultural and political activity of his day. In fascinating detail, they present the artist's relation to the contemporary media, his deliberate choice of subject matter for Salon paintings, his preoccupation with photography, and his participation in the Commune. Besides collecting, translating, and annotating the letters, Chu provides an introduction, a chronology, biographies of persons appearing frequently in the letters, and a list of paintings and sculptures mentioned in the letters. Her work is an essential resource of immediate use to historians of art and culture, political and social historians, and readers of biography. Petra ten-Doesschate Chu is professor and head of the Department of Art and Music at Seton Hall University.

France: A Culinary Journey


Alexandra Michell - 1992
    From Brittany to Provence, Normandy to Corsica, this breathtakingly beautiful book transports the reader into the finest kitchens and the most glorious markets in all of France. Describes cuisines, wines, history and each region's countryside. 250 color photos.

The Mirador: Dreamed Memories of Irene Nemirovsky by Her Daughter


Élisabeth Gille - 1992
    Her mother was a figure, a name, Irène Némirovsky, a once popular novelist, a Russian émigré from an immensely rich family, a Jew who didn’t consider herself one and who even contributed to collaborationist periodicals, and a woman who died in Auschwitz because she was a Jew. To her daughter she was a tragic enigma and a stranger. It was to come to terms with that stranger that Gille wrote, in The Mirador, her mother’s memoirs. The first part of the book, dated 1929, the year David Golder made Némirovsky famous, takes us back to her difficult childhood in Kiev and St. Petersburg. Her father is doting, her mother a beautiful monster, while Irene herself is bookish and self-absorbed. There are pogroms and riots, parties and excursions, then revolution, from which the family flees to France, a country of “moderation, freedom, and generosity,” where at last she is happy. Some thirteen years later Irène picks up her pen again. Everything has changed. Abandoned by friends and colleagues, she lives in the countryside and waits for the knock on the door. Written a decade before the publication of Suite Française made Irène Némirovsky famous once more (something Gille did not live to see), The Mirador is a haunted and a haunting book, an unflinching reckoning with the tragic past, and a triumph not only of the imagination but of love.

G Company's War: Two Personal Accounts of the Campaigns in Europe, 1944-1945


Bruce E. Egger - 1992
    Bruce Egger and Lt. Lee M. Otts, both of G Company, 328th Regiment, 26th infantry Division.   Bruce Egger arrived in France in October 1944, and Lee Otts arrived in November. Both fought for G Company through the remainder of the war. Otts was wounded seriously in March 1945 and experienced an extended hospitalization in England and the United States. Both men kept diaries during the time they were in the service, and both expanded the diaries into full-fledged journals shortly after the war.    These are the voices of ordinary soldiers—the men who did the fighting—not the generals and statesmen who viewed events from a distance. Most striking is how the two distinctly different personalities recorded the combat experience. For the serious-minded Egger, the war was a grim ordeal; for Otts, with his sunny disposition, the war was a once-in-a-lifetime experience, sometimes even fun. Each account is accurate in its own right, but the combination of the two into a single, interwoven story provides a broader understanding of war and the men caught up in it.   Historian Paul Roley has interspersed throughout the text helpful overviews and summaries that place G Company's activities in the larger context of overall military operations in Europe. In addition, Roley notes what happened to each soldier mentioned as wounded in action or otherwise removed from the company and provides an appendix summarizing the losses suffered by G Company. The total impact of the work is to describe the reality of war in a frontline infantry company.

Henri Gervex: 1852-1929


Jean-Cristophe Gourvennec - 1992
    Although highly successful during his lifetime, Gervex's contributions to art have been overshadowed by those of his more famous contemporaries. He is best known for the scandalous 1878 painting "Rolla" which is the cover of this volume. This book was published for a 1992 exhibition of the artist's work.

A Perilous Advantage: The Best of Natalie Clifford Barney


Natalie Clifford Barney - 1992
    Though best known for hosting the avant garde of Paris for thirty years, Colette, Renee Vivien, Marcel Proust and Gertrude Stein, to mention a few, she was also a writer who challenged the male-dominated literary establishment both in the content and the form of her work. Now we can discover her views on the people, places and events of that exciting and stimulating era for ourselves. Here is a spirited translation of Barney's thought-provoking work by one of Britain's most interesting writers.

Anglo-Norman Warfare: Studies in Late Anglo-Saxon and Anglo-Norman Military Organization and Warfare


M.J. Strickland - 1992
    Here in this book, gathered together for the first time, are fundamental articles on warfare in England and Normandy in the 11th and12th centuries, combining the work of some of the foremost scholars in the field.Redressing the tendency to study military institutions and obligations in isolation from the practice of war, equal emphasis is given both to organisation and composition of forces, and to strategy, tactics and conduct of war. The result is not only an in-depth analysis of the nature of war itself, but a study of warfare in a broader social, political and cultural context. The Themes dealt with largely span the period of the Conquest, offering an assessment of the extent to which the Norman invasion marked radical change or a degree of continuity in the composition of armies and in methods offighting.This important collection, with an introduction and select bibliography, will be is essential not simply for the student of medieval warfare, but for all studying Anglo-Norman society and its ruling warrior aristocracy whose raison d'�tre was war.Contributors: NICHOLAS HOOPER, MARJORIE CHIBNALL, J.C. HOLT, J.O. PRESTWICH, R. ALLEN BROWN, JOHN GILLINGHAM, JIM BRADBURY, MATTHEW STRICKLAND, MATTHEW BENNETT.

Money, Morals, and Manners: The Culture of the French and the American Upper-Middle Class


Michèle Lamont - 1992
    Her book is a subtle, textured description of how these men define the values and attitudes they consider essential in separating themselves—and their class—from everyone else.Money, Morals, and Manners is an ambitious and sophisticated attempt to illuminate the nature of social class in modern society. For all those who downplay the importance of unequal social groups, it will be a revelation. "A powerful, cogent study that will provide an elevated basis for debates in the sociology of culture for years to come."—David Gartman, American Journal of Sociology"A major accomplishment! Combining cultural analysis and comparative approach with a splendid literary style, this book significantly broadens the understanding of stratification and inequality. . . . This book will provoke debate, inspire research, and serve as a model for many years to come."—R. Granfield, Choice"This is an exceptionally fine piece of work, a splendid example of the sociologist's craft."—Lewis Coser, Boston College

A Walking Tour in Southern France: Ezra Pound Among the Troubadours


Ezra Pound - 1992
    Pound had been fascinated with the poetry of medieval Provence since his college days. His experiments with the complex lyric forms of Arnaut Daniel, Bertran de Born, and others were included in his earliest books of poems; his scholarly pursuits in the field found their way into The Spirit of Romance (1910); and the troubadour mystique was to become a resonant motif of the Cantos. In the course of transcribing and emending the text of "Walking Tour 1912," editor Richard Sieburth retraced Pound's footsteps along the roads to the troubadour castles. "What this peripatetic editing process...revealed," he writes, "was a remarkably readable account of a journey in search of the vanished voices of Provence that at the same time chronicled Pound's gradual discovery of himself as a modernist poet...."

Revolutionary Feminism: The Mind and Career of Mary Wollstonecraft


Gary Kelly - 1992
    Describing the growth of Wollstonecraft's mind and career, this acclaimed study scrutinises all her writings as experiments in revolutionising writing in terms of her revolutionary feminism.

Agatha / Savannah Bay


Marguerite Duras - 1992
    A young woman desperately desires to find out the truth about her mother. Her interrogation of an old woman (Madeleine) reveals secrets and sorrows that had been carefully stowed in the past... AGATHA An empty house, its walls bare, a window open on a winter sun, a deserted beach nearby, where no one will go. A brother and a sister, dressed in all variations of the color white, are tearing themselves off from the impossible, telling each other, over and over, the devastating violence of their incestuous love, remembering, remembering...