Book picks similar to
Fields of Glory by Jean Rouaud
fiction
french
france
french-literature
The Princesse de Clèves
Madame de La Fayette - 1678
This new translation of The Princesse de Clèves also includes two shorter works also attributed to Mme de Lafayette, The Princesse de Montpensier and The Comtesse de Tende.
Alabama Song
Gilles Leroy - 2007
The turbulent marriage of Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald from Zelda's perspective.
The Thief's Journal
Jean Genet - 1949
Writing in the intensely lyrical prose style that is his trademark, the man, Jean Cocteau, dubbed France's "Black Prince of Letters" here reconstructs his early adult years - time he spent as a petty criminal and vagabond, traveling through Spain and Antwerp, occasionally border hopping across to the rest of Europe, always trying to stay one step ahead of the authorities.
The End of Eddy
Édouard Louis - 2014
. . Today I’m really gonna be a tough guy.” Growing up in a poor village in northern France, all Eddy Bellegueule wanted was to be a man in the eyes of his family and neighbors. But from childhood, he was different—“girlish,” intellectually precocious, and attracted to other men.Already translated into twenty languages, The End of Eddy captures the violence and desperation of life in a French factory town. It is also a sensitive, universal portrait of boyhood and sexual awakening. Like Karl Ove Knausgaard or Edmund White, Édouard Louis writes from his own undisguised experience, but he writes with an openness and a compassionate intelligence that are all his own. The result—a critical and popular triumph—has made him the most celebrated French writer of his generation.
Queen Margot, or Marguerite de Valois
Alexandre Dumas - 1845
Massacres, conspiracies, clandestine trysts, secret alliances, daring escapes, sumptuous feasts, and duels of wit propel the action in this delightful story of French royalty during the 16th century. Advertising with movie.
Texaco
Patrick Chamoiseau - 1992
The shantytown established by Marie-Sophie is menaced from without by hostile landowners and from within by the volatility of its own provisional state. Hers is a brilliant polyphonic rendering of individual stories informed by rhythmic orality and subversive humor that shape a collective experience.A joyous affirmation of literature that brings to mind Boccaccio, La Fontaine, Lewis Carroll, Montaigne, Rabelais, and Joyce, Texaco is a work of rare power and ambition, a masterpiece.
Philosophy in the Boudoir
Marquis de Sade - 1795
Philosophy of the Boudoir follows three aristocrats as they indoctrinate the fifteen-year-old Eugénie de Mistival in “the principles of the most outrageous libertinism.” 200 years after de Sade’s death, readers will continue to find shock and delight in this most joyous of his erotic works, now with a new introduction by Francine du Plessix-Gray.
Heartsnatcher
Boris Vian - 1953
Heartsnatcher is Boris Vian's most playful and most serious work. The main character is Clementine, a mother who punishes her husband for causing her the excruciating pain of giving birth to three babies. As they age, she becomes increasingly obsessed with protecting them, going so far as to build an invisible wall around their property.
August 1914
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn - 1971
The sole voice of reason among the advisers to Tsar Nikolai II, Stolypin died at the hands of the anarchist Mordko Bogrov, and with him perished Russia's last hope for reform. Translated by H.T. Willetts."August 1914" is the first volume of Solzhenitsyn's epic, "The Red Wheel; "the second is "November 1916." Each of the subsequent volumes will concentrate on another critical moment or "knot," in the history of the Revolution. Translated by H.T. Willetts.
The Fall
Albert Camus - 1956
His epigrammatic and, above all, discomforting monologue gradually saps, then undermines, the reader's own complacency.
Ignorance
Milan Kundera - 2000
Will they manage to pick up the thread of their strange love story, interrupted almost as soon as it began and then lost in the tides of history? The truth is that after such a long absence "their memories no longer match." We always believe that our memories coincide with those of the person we loved, that we experienced the same thing. But this is just an illusion. Then again, what can we expect of our weak memory? It records only "an insignificant, minuscule particle" of the past, "and no one knows why it's this bit and not any other bit." We live our lives sunk in a vast forgetting, a fact we refuse to recognize. Only those who return after twenty years, like Odysseus returning to his native Ithaca, can be dazzled and astounded by observing the goddess of ignorance firsthand.Milan Kundera is the only author today who can take such dizzying concepts as absence, memory, forgetting, and ignorance, and transform them into material for a novel, masterfully orchestrating them into a polyphonic and moving work.Author Biography: The Franco-Czech novelist Milan Kundera was born in Brno and has lived in France, his second homeland, for more than twenty years. He is the author of the novels The Joke, Life Is Elsewhere, The Farewell Party, The Books of Laughter and Forgetting, The Unbearable Lightness of Being, and Immortality, and the short story collection Laughable Loves, all originally written in Czech. Like Slowness, his two earlier nonfiction works, The Art ofthe Novel and Testaments Betrayed, were originally written in French.
The Confidant
Hélène Grémillon - 2010
While sifting through condolence letters after her mother's death, Camille finds a long, handwritten missive that she assumes came by mistake. But every Tuesday brings another installment from a stranger named Louis, a man separated from his first love, Annie, in the years before World War II. In his tale, Annie falls victim to the merciless plot of a wealthy, barren couple just as German troops arrive in Paris. But also awaiting Camille's discovery is the other side of the story - one that calls into question Annie's innocence and reveals the devastating consequences of revenge. As Camille reads on, she realizes that her own life may be the next chapter in this tragic story.
The Erasers
Alain Robbe-Grillet - 1953
The Erasers, his first novel, reads like a detective story but is primarily concerned with weaving and then probing a complete mixture of fact and fantasy. The narrative spans the twenty-four-hour period following a series of eight murders in eight days, presumably the work of a terrorist group. After the ninth murder, the investigation is then turned over to a police agent, who may in fact be the assassin.Both an engrossing mystery and a sinister deconstruction of reality, The Erasers intrigues and unnerves with equal force as it pull us along to its ominous conclusion.
The Flanders Road
Claude Simon - 1960
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.