This collection includes: How Wang-fo was Saved, Marko's Smile, The Milk of Death, The Last Love of Princess Genji, The Man Who Loved the Nereids, Our Lady of the Swallows, Aphrodissia; the Widow, Kali Beheaded, The End of Marko Kraljevic, The Sadness of Cornelius Berg, and a Postscript by the Author.

    Amin Maalouf's novel, The Rock of Tanios, begins with a recollection of the rock on which Tanios was last seen sitting and weaves together the strands of the fascinating legend of his disappearance. Tanios was the illegitimate son of a powerful Sheik whose every action brought chaos into his village. When Tanios's adopted father caused the death of a powerful political rival, he and his son together fled their homeland. In hiding, they became entangled with international spies and politicians; Tanios soon took on the roll of intermediary between dueling European and Middle Eastern powers.

    At 35 he quits the "rat-race" thanks to an unexpected inheritance and devotes himself to his secret passion: observing and meditating on the human condition. "It may well be" wrote the French critic François Nourissier in Le Point, "that in a few years we will come to realize that The Hermit is one of the essential works of our time, probing and detailing the illness of our century.

    The Devil in Love is an occult romance by Jacques Cazotte which tells of a demon, or devil, who falls in love with a young Spanish nobleman named Don Alvaro, an amateur human dabbler, and attempts, in the guise of a young woman, to win his affections.

    He was also a lawyer, a public official, a senator, a painter, an authority on Russian literature and a member of the French Academy. As a public official, M rim e travelled through France and Europe, from which he drew inspiration for his stories and novels. His first popular novella, "Colomba," was published in 1840. It is set in Corsica, and tells the story of the della Rebbia family, whose father has been murdered in an ambush, believed by his daughter to have been perpetrated by the town's mayor, Lawyer Barricini. She implores her brother, Lieutenant Orso della Rebbia, to avenge their father's death, but Orso does not share her passionate ancestral pride. His heart is torn between personal vendetta and a propensity to abide by the law.

    It follows their idyllic childhood together, their sexual awakening in adolescence, their separation during Virginia's education in France and the tragedy that prevents their reunion. Woven into the narrative is a sensuous evocation of an earthly paradise, together with a harmonious blend of the lyrical and the exotic that makes Paul and Virginia strikingly original.

    He becomes obsessed with a young dancer whom he believes is the double of his beloved wife, leading him to psychological torment and humiliation, culminating in a deranged murder. This 1892 work is a poet's novel, dense, visionary, and haunting. Bruges, the 'dead city', becomes a metaphor for Hugues' dead wife as he follows its mournful labyrinth of streets and canals in a cyclical promenade of reflection and allusion--the ultimate evocation of Rodenbach's lifelong love affair with the enduring mystery and mortuary atmosphere of Bruges.

    In this shocking tale of sexual deception, Gautier draws readers into the bedrooms and boudoirs of a French château in a compelling exploration of desire and sexual intrigue, and gives voice to a longing which is larger in scope, namely, the wish for completeness in oneself.

    Looking for him among the manuscripts of his rivals does not solve the mystery, so a detective is hired to find the runaway character.

    After attempts at careers in medicine, law, drawing, English and piano, he became one of the first Romantic writers, with his first collection of poems, Contes d'Espagne et d'Italie (Tales of Spain and Italy) (1829). He was the librarian of the French Ministry of the Interior under the July Monarchy. The tale of his celebrated love affair with George Sand, which lasted from 1833 to 1835, is told from his point of view in his autobiographical novel, La Confession d'un Enfant du Siècle (The Confession of a Child of the Century) made into a film, Children of the Century. Musset's Nuits (Nights) (1835-1837) trace his emotional upheaval of his love for George Sand, from early despair to final resignation. He was dismissed from his post as librarian after the revolution of 1848, but he was appointed librarian of the Ministry of Public Instruction during the Second Empire. He received the Légion d'honneur in 1845, at the same time as Balzac, and was elected to the Académie française in 1852.

    The Woman and the Puppet - which drew some of its inspiration from Bizet''s Carmen, as well as a particular episode in Casanova''s Memoirs - is a precise account of obsessive love, a distillation of the decadence of the turn of the century.

    Jean Barois looks back at the “liberated” figures of bygone France and tries to find his own freedom, but when he chooses to give up his ideals for comfort, it results in his dramatic fall from grace.

    Alone and against incredible odds, he almost succeeds. Then a mulatto named Friday appears and teaches Robinson that there are, after all, better things in life than civilization.

    Silas and his friend Ben-Godik spend a year traveling by horseback and encountering many strange individuals and harrowing adventures.

    Just thirty, with a well-paid job, depression and no love life, the narrator and anti-hero par excellence of this grim, funny, and clever novel smokes four packs of cigarettes a day and writes weird animal stories in his spare time.Houellebecq's debut novel is painfully realistic portrayal of the vanishing freedom of a world governed by science and by the empty rituals of daily life.