Book picks similar to
Bluebirds by Catulle Mendès


snuggly-books
fiction
fantasy
anthologies-and-short-stories

Sapho


Alphonse Daudet - 1884
    Quality assurance was conducted on each of these books in an attempt to remove books with imperfections introduced by the digitization process. Though we have made best efforts - the books may have occasional errors that do not impede the reading experience. We believe this work is culturally important and have elected to bring the book back into print as part of our continuing commitment to the preservation of printed works worldwide.

Chaos and Night


Henry de Montherlant - 1963
    An anarchist who has been in exile from his native Spain for more than twenty years, he lives with his daughter in Paris, but in his mind he is still fighting the Spanish Civil War. He fulminates against the daily papers; he brags about his past exploits. He has become bigoted, self-important, and obsessed; a bully to his fellow exiles and a tyrant to his daughter, Pascualita. Then a family member dies in Madrid and there is an inheritance to sort out. Pascualita wants to go to Spain, which is supposedly opening up in response to the 1960s, and Don Celestino feels he has no choice but to follow. He is full of dread and desire, foreseeing a heroic last confrontation with his enemies, but what he encounters instead is a new commercialized Spain that has no time for the past, much less for him. Or so it seems. Because the last act of Don Celestino’s dizzying personal drama will prove that though “there is nothing serious . . . , there is tragedy.” An astonishing modern take on Don Quixote, Chaos and Night untangles the ties between politics and paranoia, self-loathing and self-pity, rage and remorse. It is the darkly funny final flowering of the art of Henry de Montherlant, a solitary and scarifying modern master whose work, admired by Graham Greene and Albert Camus, is sure to appeal to contemporary readers of Thomas Bernhard and Roberto Bolaño.

Paris Peasant


Louis Aragon - 1926
    publication of Simon Watson Taylor's authoritative translation, completed after consultations with the author. Unconventional in form--Aragon consciously avoided recognizable narration or character development--Paris Peasant is, in the author's words, -a mythology of the modern.- The book uses the city of Paris as a stage, or framework, and Aragon interweaves his text with images of related ephemera: cafe menus, maps, inscriptions on monuments and newspaper clippings. A detailed description of a Parisian arcade (nineteenth-century precursor to the mini-mall) and another of the Buttes-Chaumont park, are among the great set pieces within Aragon's swirling prose of philosophy, dream and satire. Andre Breton wrote of this work: -no one could have been a more astute detector of the unwonted in all its forms; no one else could have been carried away by such intoxicating reveries about a sort of secret life of the city. . . .-

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.

The Barber of Seville / The Marriage of Figaro / The Guilty Mother


Pierre-Augustin Caron de Beaumarchais - 1775
    But who was Figaro? He was quickly appropriated by Mozart and Rossini who tamed the original impertinent, bustling servant for their own purposes. On the eve of the French Revolution Figaro was seen as a threat to the establishment and Louis XIV even banned The Marriage of Figaro.Was the barber of Seville really a threat to aristocratic heads, or a bourgeois individualist like his creator? The three plays in which he plots and schemes chronicle the slide of the ancien r�gime into revolution but they also chart the growth of Beaumarchais' humanitarianism. They are exuberant theatrical entertainments, masterpieces of skill, invention, and social satire which helped shape the direction of French theater for a hundred years. This lively new translation catches all the zest and energy of the most famous valet in French literature.

The Attack on the Mill and Other Stories


Émile Zola - 1877
    They cover a period of more than 30 years, and were originally published in French periodicals and in Russia. Zola's racy tone is faithfully rendered by Parmee whose translations have been highly acclaimed.

Ice Mermaid


M.C. Frank - 2019
    Darius. Thank you.”Of all the humans drowning around her, she had to be stuck with the one who bothered to mind his manners as he was dying. She bit back a laugh. “Well, good to know. Stay alive, Darius.”“Death feels so warm,” he whispered, those brown eyes hooded as they looked into hers. “Didn’t know there were mermaids in heaven. Ice mermaids…So beautiful. Jewels for eyes, pearls for hair.”Behind them, the great ship that had the words "Titanic" painted on its bow was cracking as it tilted into the freezing waters of the ocean.Lorelei gave a frustrated sigh and tightened her hold on him. ...Ice Mermaid is a Salt for Air novella about a mermaid who witnesses the sinking of the Titanic. It's not necessary to read it before Salt for Air in order to understand the series, but it definitely adds to it.

The Beauty and the Beast


Gabrielle-Suzanne Barbot de Villeneuve - 1740
    Now, the classic fairy tale is brought to life in this spectacular illustrated edition as originally envisioned by Gabrielle-Suzanne Barbot de Villeneuve in 1740.

The Wandering Jew


Eugène Sue - 1844
    Originally serialized in a French newspaper, the novel created an instant controversy with it

A Dark Stranger


Julien Gracq - 1945
    The other guests soon become obsessed with the man, the equivocal unsettling Allan. One by one they realise who he is-that Death has come to spend the summer with them. Amid the ceaseless thunder of the waves, the wild and often surreal Breton landscape, the group that gravitates around Allan-an uncannily contemporary figure-gradually disintegrates. His death seems to symbolize the end of a generation, the approach of war.That Gracq wrote this oblique, prescient novel in a remote German prisoner-of-war camp makes its carefree jazz age setting particularly poignant.

Camera


Jean-Philippe Toussaint - 1989
    What happens? He takes driving lessons, goes grocery shopping, spends endless hours with an adorable employee of the driving school he attends. And though he is aloof, though caught up in his own actions and in the movement of his own thoughts--he somehow emerges as surprisingly insightful and also very funny. In Toussaint's touching novel, we come to know this character intimately and yet know almost nothing about him. These two extremes, existing together, are at the heart of Toussaint's remarkable style.

How I Wrote Certain of My Books


Raymond Roussel - 1935
    His unearthly style based on elaborate linguistic riddles and puns fascinated the Surrealists and famously influenced the composition of Marcel Duchamp's -Large Glass, - but also affected writers as diverse as Gide, Robbe-Grillet and Foucault (author of a book-length study of Roussel). The title essay of this collection is the key to Roussel's method, and it is accompanied by selections from all his major works of fiction, drama and poetry, translated by his New York School admirers John Ashbery, Kenneth Koch and Harry Mathews, and the painter and author Trevor Winkfield. Ashbery writes that Roussel's work is -like the perfectly preserved temple of a cult which has disappeared without a trace... we can still admire its inhuman beauty, and be stirred by a language that seems always on the point of revealing its secret.-

Lamiel


Stendhal - 1889
    Find more at www.forgottenbooks.comThis book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.

Miranda


Jane Holland - 2015
    Under the spell of the island, Lawrence hopes to rebuild the magic he and Juliet once felt for each other. But everything changes when the child Miranda goes missing. Who is to blame for the girl's mysterious disappearance? And why? - A gripping and evocative novel set on the Isle of Man by Jane Holland, author of multiple novels under numerous pseudonyms, including LOCK THE DOOR and Kindle #1 Bestseller GIRL NUMBER ONE. She is also an award-winning poet.

Hammerklavier


Yasmina Reza - 1997
    Her latest work, Hammerklavier, is a bittersweet collection of autobiographical sketches that have love, loss, and the relentless passage of time as their themes. Convinced that one's deepest thoughts can be said simply, Reza does so with unequaled humor and perceptiveness. She contemplates evanescence and death in her young daughter's toothless smile, secretly mourning that it will inevitably change. In the title story, the sometimes adversarial but very loving relationship Reza shared with her father is examined in terms of their love of music.