Three of his dragoons, involved with him in different capacities, remember him and help the reader piece together the realities behind the man and his death.One was a distant relative, one his orderly, and the third who had been a jockey in his stable before the war, had also been his wife's secret lover.

    Adélaïde grows up without showing any outward signs of damage. As a teen and then as an outwardly cheerful young woman, she suffers in silence, battling her demons alone. Twenty-three years later, Adélaïde receives a call from the juvenile squad. An investigator has reopened the classified case of “the electrician” and DNA analysis points to a man known to the police as a serial burglar. He is subsequently charged with assaulting 72 minors between 1983 and 2003, and it is suspected that he has hurt hundreds of others who never filed complaints. In the spring of 2016, at the Paris city court, along with 18 other women, Adélaïde confronts the rapist who destroyed her life. In precise and delicate prose, with poise and passion, Adélaïde Bon tells a story that is both terrifying and all too common. This French bestseller is critical reading for all.

    The play depicts an authoritarian regime and the play's central character, the young Antigone, mirrored the predicament of the French people in the grips of tyranny. One of the masterpieces of the modern French stage.

    They are offered here both in their original texts and in superb English translations by Louise Varèse. Mrs. Varèse first published her versions of Rimbaud’s Illuminations in 1946. Since then she has revised her work and has included two poems which in the interim have been reclassified as part of Illuminations. This edition also contains two other series of prose poems, which include two poems only recently discovered in France, together with an introduction in which Miss Varèse discusses the complicated ins and outs of Rimbaldien scholarship and the special qualities of Rimbaud’s writing. Rimbaud was indeed the most astonishing of French geniuses. Fired in childhood with an ambition to write, he gave up poetry before he was twenty-one. Yet he had already produced some of the finest examples of French verse. He is best known for A Season in Hell, but his other prose poems are no less remarkable. While he was working on them he spoke of his interest in hallucinations––"des vertiges, des silences, des nuits." These perceptions were caught by the poet in a beam of pellucid, and strangely active language which still lights up––now here, now there––unexplored aspects of experience and thought.

    But a man like Monsieur?" -- from THE DIARY OF A CHAMBERMAIDThe famous anarchist and art critic Octave Mirbeau (1848-1917) inspired three film versions (Jean Renoir, Bunuel and Benoit Jacquot) with his often forgotten classic THE DIARY OF A CHAMBERMAID. Telling the story of Celestine R., an amoral fisherman's daughter whose motto is live and let live (if you can survive), Mirbeau reveals that "when one tears away the veils and shows them naked, people's souls give off such a pungent smell of decay."Badly subtitled by the publisher as part of "The Naughty French Novel Series," it is not erotic fiction at all, but rather a literary accomplishment. Series editor John Baxter, the author of WE'LL ALWAYS HAVE PARIS, contributed a thoughtful introduction.

    Music.This is the one and only novel by the 20th century provocateur of French pop music and film - the legendary Serge Gainsbourg. Evguenie Sokolov is a novel about an artist who uses his intestinal gases as the medium for his scandalous artwork. Gainsbourg is both the best and the worst, yin and yang, white and black. This Jewish little Prince from Russia whose dreams were probably fueled by Anderssen, Perrault and Grimm, became, when confronted by the tragic reality of life, a moving or repugnant Quasimodo, depending on his and your state of mind. Hidden deep within this fragile, shy and aggressive man lies the soul of a poet craving tenderness, truth and integrity. -- Brigitte Bardot. Serge Gainsbourg is one of the world's great eccentrics. His kinky obsessions, smothering fashion with tastelessness, have catapulted him into super-stardom in France. - John Zorn. Translated by John and Doreen Weightman.

    Together they embark upon a riotously Bohemian life, full of gaiety, color and bustle. And then there is Kate, the enigmatic German girl with the mysterious smile.Capricious, untamed and curiously innocent, Kate steals their hearts in turn, and so begins the moving and tender story of three people in love, with each other and with life. Francois Truffaut, whose film of the novel is one of cinema's greatest achievments, has called Jules et Jim "a perfect hymn to love."Henri-Pierre Roch devoted his life to the arts, numbering Duchamp, Brancusi, Braque, Satie and Picasso amongst his closest friends. Jules et Jim, an autobiographical novel, was originally published in France in 1953 and was followed by Deux Anglaises et le Continent, which Truffaut also made into a film."A delightful account of people sharing and unsharing each other."?Times Literary Supplement

    The Sand Child tells the story of a Moroccan father's effort to thwart the consequences of Islam's inheritance laws regarding female offspring. Already the father of seven daughters, Hajji Ahmed determines that his eighth child will be a male. Accordingly, the infant, a girl, is named Mohammed Ahmed and raised as a young man with all the privileges granted exclusively to men in traditional Arab-Islamic societies. As she matures, however, Ahmed's desire to have children marks the beginning of her sexual evolution, and as a woman named Zahra, Ahmed begins to explore her true sexual identity. Drawing on the rich Arabic oral tradition, Ben Jelloun relates the extraordinary events of Ahmed's life through a professional storyteller and the listeners who have gathered in a Marrakesh market square in the 1950s to hear his tale. A poetic vision of power, colonialism, and gender in North Africa, The Sand Child has been justifiably celebrated around the world as a daring and significant work of international fiction.

    Made into a movie starring Patrick Swayze, this is the inspiring story of an American doctor who experienced a spiritual rebirth in an impoverished section of Calcutta.

    First performed in Paris in 1947, its action was inspired by a real-life scandal, the murder by two maids, sisters Christine and Léa Papin, of their mistress and her daughter. Genet's maids - Solange and Claire - occupy themselves, whenever their Madame is out of doors, by acting out ritualised fantasies of revenging their downtrodden status. But when the game goes beyond their control the maids are compelled to try to make their fantasy a reality.'The most extraordinary example of the whirligigs of being and appearance, of the imaginary and the real, is to be found in [Genet's] The Maids. It is the element of fake, of sham, of artificiality, that attracts Genet in the theatre.' Jean-Paul Sartre

    Dumas's subtle and moving portrait of a woman in love is based on his own love affair with one of the most desirable courtesans in Paris. This is a completely new translation commissioned for the World's Classics.

    A twenty-five-year-old Aramaic scholar, Antoine has had it with being brilliant and deeply self-aware in today's culture. So tortured is he by the depth of his perception and understanding of himself and the world around him that he vows to denounce his intelligence by any means necessary in order to become stupid enough to be a happy, functioning member of society. What follows is a dark and hilarious odyssey as Antoine tries everything from alcoholism to stock-trading in order to lighten the burden of his brain on his soul.

    One is a young photographer documenting a a series of catastrophic forest fires that swept Northern Ontario early in the century; she’s on the trail of the recently deceased Ted Boychuck, a survivor of the blaze. And then the elderly aunt of the one of the pot growers appears, fleeing one of the psychiatric institutions that have been her home since she was sixteen. She joins the men in the woods and begins a new life as Marie-Desneige. With the photographer’s help, they find Ted’s series of paintings about the fire, and begin to decipher the dead man’s history.A haunting meditation on aging and self-determination, And the Birds Rained Down, originally published in French as Il pleuvait des oiseaux, was the winner of the Prix des Cinq Continents de la Francophonie, the first Canadian title to win this honour. It was winner of the Prix des lecteurs Radio-Canada, the Prix des collégiens du Québec, the Prix Ringuet 2012 and a finalist for the Grand Prix de la ville de Montréal.

    Jacobs Theater, New York City, in March 2009.

    I cross the Seine, I walk with men and women who are anonymous and yet who are my reflection. We make up a single heart, a single cell. We are alive...'In All Men Naturally Want to Know the author traces her blissful childhood in Algeria, a sun-soaked paradise, recalling long trips across the desert with her mother and sister and hazy summer afternoons spent on the beach with her friend Ali. But Nina's mother is French - moving to Algeria for love at a time when most Europeans were desperate to leave - and as civil war approaches, their sunny idyll gives way to increasingly hostile and violent outbreaks. When something unspeakable happens to her mother, the family flee to Paris.In Paris, Nina lives alone. She is eighteen years old. It's the 1980s. Four nights a week she walks across Paris to a legendary women-only nightclub, the Katmandou. She sits alone at the bar, afraid of her own desires, of her sudden and intoxicating freedom. There she meets the glamorous, deeply troubled Ely, her volatile friends Lizz and Laurence, and the beautiful Julia, with whom she falls desperately in love. And, most importantly, she starts to write.