The years 1880-1900 saw an extraordinary, hothouse flowering of talent, that produced some of the most exotic, stylized, and cerebral literature in the French language. While 'Decadence' was a European movement, its epicentre was the French capital. On the eve of Freud's early discoveries, writers such as Gourmont, Lorrain, Maupassant, Mirbeau, Richepin, Schwob, and Villiers engaged in a species of wild analysis of their own, perfecting the art of short fiction as they did so. Death and Eros haunt these pages, and a polymorphous perversity by turns hilarious and horrifying. Their stories teem with addicts, maniacs, and murderers as they strive to outdo each other. This newly translated selection brings together the very best writing of the period, from lesser known figures as well as famous names. Provocative and unsettling, these extraordinary, corrosive little tales continue to cast a cold eye on the modern world.CONTENTSJULES BARBEY D'AUREVILLYDon Juan's Crowning Love AffairLÉON BLOYA Dentist Terribly PunishedThe Last BakeThe Lucky SixpenceGUSTAVE GEFFROYThe StatueRÉMY DE GOURMONTDanaetteDon Juan's SecretThe FaunOn the ThresholdJULES LAFORGUEPerseus and AndromedaJEAN LORRAINAn Unidentified CrimeThe Man with the BraceletThe Student's TaleThe Man Who Loved ConsumptivesPIERRE LOUYSA Case without PrecedentGUY DE MAUPASSANTAt the Death-BedThe NightA WalkThe TressesCATULLE MENDÈSWhat the Shadow DemandsOCTAVE MIRBEAUThe BathThe First EmotionThe Little Summer-HouseOn a CureJEAN RICHEPINConstant GuignardDeshoulièresPft! Pft!GEORGES RODENBACHThe TimeMARCEL SCHWOBThe BrothelThe Sans-Gueule52 and 53 OrfilaLucretius, PoetPaolo Uccello, PainterVILLIERS DE L'ISLE ADAMSentimentalismThe PresentimentThe Desire to be a Man

    It has nothing performative, only secretive. […] It is all of an incredible sensitivity/finesse.’ Olivia de Lamberterie, Elle ‘It is an album of destinies. They each have their décor. They talk of first frosts, of the wood that must be entered, of the huge rubbish tips of life, of the disorder of houses. Of beds that are no longer made because they are too often occupied. Of the warmth of being at home and of finding oneself. This essential truth of what we are. Emmanuelle Pagano sends every reader back to familiar territory. Her book is full of discreet and recognisable emotion.’ Xavier Houssin, Le Monde ‘Under her pen which is an eye, Pagano exalts the wastage of time, its grand affair. Time and its ‘arbitrary wing’ as Lord Byron said. In this little game of references, it’s the sharp eye of Duras, that of La Vie materielle, that must be evoked, or of Violette Leduc and the essential fantasy of Emily Dickinson. Emmanuelle Pagano: remember her name!’ Thierry Clermont, Le Figaro ‘Prosaic but never vulgar, Emmannuelle Pagano dissects lovers’ promiscuity, interrogates the cartography of our emotional lives.’ Clémentine Goldszal, Les Inrockuptibles ‘Seizing reality at that troubling junction between the quotidian and the extraordinary, the banal and the poetic, this literary package/machine with no equivalent unknots the internal ‘ball of string’ where hides the points of departure or arrival, of love in a life or a night, of a daily rhythm or a sudden surprise.’ Alexandre Gefen, Le magazine littéraire

    Who would keep the flame burning through dark years of occupation? At what cost?Olivier Wieviorka presents a comprehensive history of the French Resistance, synthesizing its social, political, and military aspects to offer fresh insights into its operation. Detailing the Resistance from the inside out, he reveals not one organization but many interlocking groups often at odds over goals, methods, and leadership. He debunks lingering myths, including the idea that the Resistance sprang up in response to the exhortations of de Gaulle's Free French government-in-exile. The Resistance was homegrown, arising from the soil of French civil society. Resisters had to improvise in the fight against the Nazis and the collaborationist Vichy regime. They had no blueprint to follow, but resisters from all walks of life and across the political spectrum formed networks, organizing activities from printing newspapers to rescuing downed airmen to sabotage. Although the Resistance was never strong enough to fight the Germans openly, it provided the Allies invaluable intelligence, sowed havoc behind enemy lines on D-Day, and played a key role in Paris's liberation.Wieviorka shatters the conventional image of a united resistance with no interest in political power. But setting the record straight does not tarnish the legacy of its fighters, who braved Nazism without blinking.

    A prolific writer, critic, and translator, Bonnefoy continues to compose groundbreaking new work sixty years later, constantly offering his readers what Paul Auster has called “the highest level of artistic excellence.” In The Present Hour, Bonnefoy’s latest collection, a personal narrative surfaces in splinters and shards. Every word from Bonnefoy is multifaceted, like the fragmented figures seen from different angles in cubist painting—as befits a poet who has written extensively about artists such as Goya, Picasso, Braque, and Gris. Throughout this moving collection, Bonnefoy’s poems echo each other, returning to and elaborating upon key images, thoughts, feelings, and people. Intriguing and enigmatic, this mixture of sonnet sequences and prose poems—or, as Bonnefoy sees them, “dream texts”—move from his meditations on friendship and friends like Jorge Luis Borges to a long, discursive work in free verse that is a self-reflection on his thought and process. These poems are the ultimate condensation of Bonnefoy’s ninety years of life and writing and they will be a valuable addition to the canon of his writings available in English.“Beverley Bie Brahic does a splendid job of translating the latest work of Yves Bonnefoy. She catches his unique combination of human detail and a groping for the beyond. . . . Brahic does full justice to the profoundly moving text—with its frequent shifts between the personal and the searchingly philosophical.”—Joseph Frank, author of Responses to Modernity: Essays in the Politics of Culture

    Laborers seized direct control over their city, expelling their government and capitalist rulers. These revolutionary men and women declared Paris an independent municipality and commune where they would collectively manage their society through new institutions of their own creation, providing for their own welfare and defense. The Commune was annihilated 71 days later in one of the deadliest campaigns in French military history, La Semaine Sanglante, "The Bloody Week," during which over 30,000 men, women, and children were murdered for their revolutionary aspirations.Despite the brutality of its destruction, the Paris Commune uprising inspired revolutionaries the world over. In the near century-and-a-half that has passed since the Commune's destruction, anarchists and libertarian-socialists across the generations have looked to the 1871 Paris Commune, seeking to learn from its example--both its strengths and its limitations.The Commune: Paris, 1871, is a new collection of writings and critical reflections on the Paris Commune by classic anarchist and libertarian-socialist authors like Louise Michel, William Morris, Mikhail Bakunin, Peter Kropotkin, Voltairine de Cleyre, Alexander Berkman and Maurice Brinton.

    1930. Salazar is an English detective haunted by his experiences of the Great War, who wiles away the days playing chess and taking on as little work as possible. When the alluring Marie Poncelet hires him to find a missing man he quickly realises it's a case he wishes he'd refused. Finding a missing man isn't anything like finding a man who doesn't want to be found and Gustave Marty has covered his tracks with a smokescreen that will push Salazar beyond the limits of physical endurance and to the edge of insanity. As he's drawn deeper into the shadowy underbelly of the City of Light, Salazar's closed, structured world is blown apart by the arrival of a friend from his pre-war youth, the beautiful Megan Fitzwilliam, whose tenderness and love of life is a stark contrast to the brutal violence that lies within him. When that violence threatens to engulf them both, Salazar must seek redemption or lose the very thing that has finally made his life worth living. PRAISE FOR CITIZEN OF NOWHERE “Salazar is richly cinematic and completely enthralling with a great sense of time and place, as well as a great deal of wry humour.” “Knowing well the parts of France where the story unfolds, I realize that this book has been meticulously researched, and the pictures painted and the setting of the characters are perfectly described and richly amplified. Lynch has created a lead character in Salazar that is up there with the Colombos and the Wallanders of this genre, and I look forward impatiently to the second book, in what I'm sure will be a long-lived series.” “Fans of Highsmith's Ripley or Chandler's Marlow will love this book as much as just about anybody simply looking for an absorbing holiday read.” “A real page turner. Salazar is so much more than a crime novel and a real insight into the minds and lives in those post war Paris years, accompanied by knowledgeable descriptive detail of people and places.” “An enjoyable read that takes you on a trip back to 1930 Paris. Salazar is on a mission to find more than just a man but his new identity in a turbulent time and place.”

    Now, this is the first reading guide to Foucault's dense and sometimes confusing text. Mark Kelly systematically unpacks the intricacies of Foucault's dense and sometimes confusing exposition, in a straightforward way, putting it in its historical and theoretical context. He looks at the book, its structure and philosophical significance, and corrects several key mistranslations in the only available English version of the 'Will to Knowledge'.

    

    In Corneille's Cinna (1640), absolute power is explored in ancient Rome, while Molière's The Misanthrope (1666), the only comedy in this collection, sees its anti-hero outcast for his refusal to conform to social conventions. Here also are two key plays by Racine: Andromache (1667), recounting the tragedy of Hector's widow after the Trojan War, and Phaedre (1677), showing a mother crossing the bounds of love with her son.John Edmunds' translation of Phaedra was originally broadcast on Radio Three with a cast including Prunella Scales and Timothy West, and was subsequently praised by Harold Pinter. This is the first time it has been published.Often hailed as the father of French tragedy, PIERRE CORNEILLE made his name with the tragicomedy Le Cid in 1637. His best-known works include the tragedies Horace (1640) and Cinna (1641). MOLIÈRE founded the 'Illustre Théâtre' troupe and wrote numerous comedies, including Tartuffe (1664), which was banned, Le Misanthrope (1666) and L'Avare (1668). JEAN RACINE became known as one of the period's leading playwrights, with such tragedies as Andromaque (1667), Britannicus (1669) and Phèdre (1677).After a varied career as an actor, teacher, and BBC TV national newsreader, JOHN EDMUNDS became the founder-director of Aberystwyth university's department of Theatre, Film and Television Studies.JOSEPH HARRIS is Senior Lecturer at Royal Holloway, University of London and author of Hidden Agendas: Cross-Dressing in Seventeenth-Century France (2005).

    The ear-splitting explosions were replaced by the shrill sound of hundreds of whistles being blown. At that moment, tens of thousands of British soldiers climbed out from the trenches on their part of the Western Front, and began to make their way steadily towards the German lines opposite. It was the first day of the Battle of the Somme.By the end of the day, a number of the regiments involved had met with some degree of success; others had suffered heavy losses for no gain, whilst a few quite literally ceased to exist. That day, the old infantry tactics of the British Army clashed head-on with the reality of modern warfare. On what is generally accepted as the worst day in the British Army s history, there were more than 60,000 casualties a third of them fatal.In this publication, the authors have drawn together, for the first time ever, all the War Diary entries for 171 British Regiments that went over the top that day a day that even now still touches so many families both in the United Kingdom and around the world. The result will be a vital work of reference to the events of 1 July 1916, a valuable information source for not only for those interested in military history, but genealogists and historians alike."

    Viewed as an ensemble, they illustrate the range and development of Boutet's early work, and provide representative samples of its later evolution. Although several stories by Boutet were translated into English in the 1920s, especially in America, they were selected from his later works, when he was writing sentimental stories and crime fiction for popular magazines; no examples of his early work, most of which consisted of offbeat supernatural fiction, have previously been rendered into English. Included in this first collection are thirteen examples of the work of a highly distinctive writer of weird and baroque fiction, among them: "The Last Adventure," "The Idol," "The Clement Shades," "The Valley Named Solitude," "Journey to the City of the Dead," and "The Antisocial Man." Great reading by a newly-discovered horror writer!

    The Jullien name is not new to histories of the French Revolution. Rosalie's son, Marc-Antoine, known in the family as Jules, wasclosely connected to the Committee of Public Safety during the Reign of Terror. However, despite being the wife and mother of revolutionary elites, Rosalie led a private life. Connected to the Revolution in very personal ways, she was also distanced from the lime light because of her gender and herproclivity for modesty. Her correspondence allows readers to enter her private world and see the intellectual, emotional, and familial life of a revolutionary in all of its complexity.The prevailing thesis in the field holds that the revolutionary elite constructed the New Regime against women, effectively excluding them from the political sphere, although nearly every existing study of women has approached the subject through oblique sources and mostly male voices. RosalieJullien's long missives to her husband and son, however, document her relationship to politics as she explained it. Despite never seeking a public role, Rosalie developed a political identity that included a revolutionized understanding of womanhood. Writing the Revolution builds on the innovativescholarship on the history of the family during the Revolution and demonstrates how the family sphere was revolutionized even in cases where the wife maintained a traditional family role.Jullien's correspondence boasts many values as an artifact of the Revolutionary experience, of women's lives, and of epistolary culture. Rosalie demonstrates the individual's experience within the evolving structures of a modernizing state, family, and gender identity. The period covered spans from1775 to 1810. A portrayal of Rosalie's early married life, and the decade she spent with her husband and children in a small town north of Grenoble, begins the book, and is followed by a chapter on the couple's reading practices and their views toward religion prior to the Revolution. The heart ofthe research focuses on Rosalie's life and experiences in Revolutionary Paris and her decision, in the aftermath of the Terror, to emphasize private, domestic life over politics.

    The quality of Racine's poetry has been described as possibly his most important contribution to French literature and his use of the alexandrine poetic line is one of the best examples of such use noted for its harmony, simplicity and elegance. While critics over the centuries have debated the worth of Jean Racine, at present, he is widely considered a literary genius of revolutionary proportions. Collected in this volume is a complete collection of Racine's dramatic works. Written between 1664 and 1691 Racine's plays draw their subject matter from historical events, mythology and the Bible. Presented in this volume are translations by Robert Bruce Boswell of the following works: "The Thebaid", "Alexander the Great", "Andromache", "The Litigants", "Britannicus", "Berenice", "Bajazet", "Mithridates", "Iphigenia", "Phaedra", "Esther", and "Athaliah".

    Henry Berthoud (1804-1891) was a writer of considerable ability, remembered today mostly for his often reprinted collections of folkloric legends from Northern France. Yet, he was a writer who came close to inventing science fiction as early as the 1840s.This unique collection assembled, translated and introduced by Brian Stableford, gathers 32 of Berthoud's best works, displaying his often pioneering surges of imagination. It includes samples of his remarkable supernatural stories, his eccentric scientific fantasies, featuring real or imaginary scientists, his ground-breaking visions of the prehistoric past of Paris, and his futuristic novella about the Year 2865. "Berthoud's work would have been just as difficult for contemporary readers to assess as for modern ones, but its esotericism should not be allowed to detract from his achievement, which is as remarkable for its fervor as for its uniqueness." Brian Stableford.