Book picks similar to
Sky: Memoirs by Blaise Cendrars
france
modernism
classics
french-literature
House of Fear
Leonora Carrington - 1938
Leonora Carrington, an artist of the Surrealist Movement, here joins fiction with autobiography in a collection of work including accounts of her life before and after she met Max Ernst as well as short stories, a novella and original artwork.
33 Days: A Memoir
Léon Werth - 1992
In June of 1940, Leon Werth and his wife fled Paris before the advancing Nazis Army. 33 Days is his eyewitness account of that experience, one of the largest civilian dispacements in history. Encouraged to write 33 Days by his dear friend, Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, author of The Little Prince, Werth finished the manuscript while in hiding in the Jura mountains. Saint-Exupéry smuggled the manuscript out of Nazi-occupied France, wrote an introduction to the work and arranged for its publication in the United States by Brentanos. But the publication never came to pass, and Werth’s manuscript would disappear for more than fifty years until the first French edition, in 1992. It has since become required reading in French schools. This, the first-ever English language translation of 33 Days, includes Saint-Exupéry’s original introduction for the book, long thought to be lost. It is presented it here for the first time in any language. After more than seventy years, 33 Days appears—complete and as it was fully intended.
Paris
Julien Green - 1983
From haunted visions of Notre Dame to memories of the old Trocadero, Green lovingly describes these strange and often little known locations. This special bilingual edition is illustrated with the Green's own photographs."Exquisitely literary in a traditional French manner."-"New York Review of Books"Julian Green was a member both of the the AcadA(c)mie FranAaise and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
When in French: Love in a Second Language
Lauren Collins - 2016
Lauren Collins discovered this firsthand when, in her early thirties, she moved to London and fell for a Frenchman named Olivier—a surprising turn of events for someone who didn’t have a passport until she was in college. But what does it mean to love someone in a second language? Collins wonders, as her relationship with Olivier continues to grow entirely in English. Are there things she doesn’t understand about Olivier, having never spoken to him in his native tongue? Does “I love you” even mean the same thing as “Je t’aime”? When the couple, newly married, relocates to Francophone Geneva, Collins—fearful of one day becoming "a Borat of a mother" who doesn’t understand her own kids—decides to answer her questions for herself by learning French. When in French is a laugh-out-loud funny and surprising memoir about the lengths we go to for love, as well as an exploration across culture and history into how we learn languages—and what they say about who we are. Collins grapples with the complexities of the French language, enduring excruciating role-playing games with her classmates at a Swiss language school and accidentally telling her mother-in-law that she’s given birth to a coffee machine. In learning French, Collins must wrestle with the very nature of French identity and society—which, it turns out, is a far cry from life back home in North Carolina. Plumbing the mysterious depths of humanity’s many forms of language, Collins describes with great style and wicked humor the frustrations, embarrassments, surprises, and, finally, joys of learning—and living in—French.
The Autobiography of a Brown Buffalo
Oscar Zeta Acosta - 1972
Thompson's "Dr. Gonzo," a fat, pugnacious attorney with a gargantuan appetite for food, drugs, and life on the edge.Written with uninhibited candor and manic energy, this book is Acosta's own account of coming of age as a Chicano in the psychedelic sixties, of taking on impossible cases while breaking all tile rules of courtroom conduct, and of scrambling headlong in search of a personal and cultural identity. It is a landmark of contemporary Hispanic-American literature, at once ribald, surreal, and unmistakably authentic.
Behind The White Ball
Jimmy White - 1998
Aged 16, White was the youngest player to win the English Amateur Championship. At 18, he won the World Amateur title. By 1984, he's a professional success, married but not at all settled. He's the kind of man who goes out for a packet of cigarettes and comes home two weeks later. Gambling, women, marathon binges with showbiz friends like Ron Wood of the Rolling Stones, have threatened the stability of his marriage. But somehow White has survived, to tell in candid detail, a most unusual, often outrageous story of a very sporting life.
The Words to Say It
Marie Cardinal - 1975
It reveals her truamatic childhood and institutionalization, followed by her escape to the quiet cul-de-sac where her psychoanalysist lived. There, for many years, she made the journey towards recovery through Freudian analysis.
The Story of the Trapp Family Singers
Maria Augusta von Trapp - 1949
But much about the real-life woman and her family was left untold.Here, Baroness Maria Augusta Trapp tells in her own beautiful, simple words the extraordinary story of her romance with the baron, their escape from Nazi-occupied Austria, and their life in America.Now with photographs from the original edition.
Paris in Love
Eloisa James - 2012
Paris in Love: A Memoir chronicles her joyful year in one of the most beautiful cities in the world. With no classes to teach, no committee meetings to attend, no lawn to mow or cars to park, Eloisa revels in the ordinary pleasures of life—discovering corner museums that tourists overlook, chronicling Frenchwomen’s sartorial triumphs, walking from one end of Paris to another. She copes with her Italian husband’s notions of quality time; her two hilarious children, ages eleven and fifteen, as they navigate schools—not to mention puberty—in a foreign language; and her mother-in-law Marina’s raised eyebrow in the kitchen (even as Marina overfeeds Milo, the family dog). Paris in Love invites the reader into the life of a most enchanting family, framed by la ville de l’amour.
Selected Letters, 1940-1956
Jack Kerouac - 1995
The first volume of his selected letters, edited by renowned biographer and Beat scholar Ann Charters, was widely regarded as a vital and momentous contribution to Kerouac scholarship. In Jack Kerouac: Selected Letters 1957-1969, the second and final volume of his correspondence, Charters highlights letters written to his closest friends and colleagues that paint a heart-wrenching portrait of this broken American genius.The first volume of Kerouac's letters documented the writer's discovery of his "spontaneous prose" method and the inspired composition of 11 books between 1951 and 1956. "The second volume," writes Charters, "demonstrates that the publication of his books and the attendant publicity and hostile critical response literally destroyed him." The book opens with letters written prior to the publication of On The Road, an event that would make Kerouac famous overnight and permanently alter the landscape of American literature, and concludes only days before his death in St. Petersburg, Florida, at age 47.Charters provides indispensable commentary between the letters to give the biographical background of what was happening in Kerouac's life, while allowing the writer to comment on his own work as much as possible. Charters also includes some letters from his friends, such as Gary Snyder's reaction to being the fictional hero of The Dharma Bums, and Lawrence Ferlinghetti's letter to Time magazine defending Kerouac from malicious attacks by critics on his books and lifestyle. Occasionally Kerouac responded to fan mail and queries from academics, and some of these replies have also been included. The few letters from his mother and from his third wife, Stella, show just how dependent the writer was on his family.Kerouac is often thought of as being very much like the rugged, wandering, Zen-loony characters that populate his books. But by the late '60s, while pals Snyder, Allen Ginsberg, and Peter Orlovsky were on pilgrimage in Nepal, he was living with his mother, getting rejected on credit card applications. A severe alcoholic, Kerouac suffered rapidly declining health, and he grew increasingly bitter and paranoid. Each book by Kerouac that was published in hardcover after The Dharma Bums was quickly remaindered, yet despite this, Kerouac kept writing right up to the day he died.Unfortunately, his greatest successes came too late for him to enjoy. At least eight works of Kerouac's fiction, poetry, and Buddhist writings have been published posthumously, not to mention the countless studies and biographies that fill the shelves of bookstores each year. In 1999, Jack Kerouac and the Beats are a business unto themselves.Soon after completing her own doctorate work in American literature at Columbia in 1966, Ann Charters had the crazy idea that the Beats needed a scholar like herself to secure a place for them in our nation's history. Thirty years later it is quite clear just how crucial a role she has played in the literary afterlife of Jack Kerouac.—Cary Goldstein
The Human Race
Robert Antelme - 1947
Antelme's story of his experiences in Germany--his only book--indelibly marked an entire generation, "a work written without hatred, a work of boundless compassion such as that is to be found only in the great Russians."
Picnic in Provence: A Memoir with Recipes
Elizabeth Bard - 2015
Ten years ago, New Yorker Elizabeth Bard followed a handsome Frenchman up a spiral staircase to a love nest in the heart of Paris. Now, with a baby on the way and the world's flakiest croissant around the corner, Elizabeth is sure she's found her "forever place." But life has other plans. On a last romantic jaunt before the baby arrives, the couple take a trip to the tiny Provencal village of Céreste. A chance encounter leads them to the wartime home of a famous poet, a tale of a buried manuscript and a garden full of heirloom roses. Under the spell of the house and its unique history, in less time than it takes to flip a crepe, Elizabeth and Gwendal decide to move-lock, stock and Le Creuset-to the French countryside.When the couple and their newborn son arrive in Provence, they discover a land of blue skies, lavender fields and peaches that taste like sunshine. Seduced by the local ingredients, they begin a new adventure as culinary entrepreneurs, starting their own artisanal ice cream shop and experimenting with flavors like saffron, sheep's milk yogurt and fruity olive oil. Filled with enticing recipes for stuffed zucchini flowers, fig tart and honey & thyme ice cream, Picnic in Provence is the story of everything that happens after the happily ever after: an American learning the tricks of French motherhood, a family finding a new professional passion, and a cook's initiation into classic Provencal cuisine. With wit, humor and scoop of wild strawberry sorbet, Bard reminds us that life-in and out of the kitchen-is a rendez-vous with the unexpected.
Memory Cards
Michael K. Brantley - 2015
There is plenty to see, hear and smell, from the oppressive heat and pungent smell of row upon row of tobacco, to the mobile library that brought air conditioning and the aroma of paper, glue and binding each week of the summer. The author grew up in a functional family, but with different interests than his siblings, particularly ones that offered unknown prospects. As the road from the farm widens, readers encounter firebrand preachers, snake-handling churches, guns, baseball, Baptists, Coca-Cola, Elvis, suicides, mysterious deaths, PTSD, houses inhabited by haints, pork barbecue, tea cookies, cornbread, fishing, arrowheads, ice hockey and basketball.
L'Appart: The Delights and Disasters of Making My Paris Home
David Lebovitz - 2017
Includes dozens of new recipes.When David Lebovitz began the project of updating his apartment in his adopted home city, he never imagined he would encounter so much inexplicable red tape while contending with the famously inconsistent European work ethic and hours. Lebovitz maintains his distinctive sense of humor with the help of his partner Romain, peppering this renovation story with recipes from his Paris kitchen. In the midst of it all, he reveals the adventure that accompanies carving out a place for yourself in a foreign country--under baffling conditions--while never losing sight of the magic that inspired him to move to the City of Light many years ago, and to truly make his home there.