The first of Roussel's two major prose works, Impressions of Africa is not, as the title may suggest, a conventional travel account, but an adventure story put together in a highly individual fashion and with an unusual time sequence, whereby the reader is even made to choose whether to begin with the first or the tenth chapter.A veritable literary melting pot, Roussel's groundbreaking text makes ample use of wordplay and the surrealist techniques of automatic writing and private allusion.

    Iris Storm, femme fatale, races around London and Europe in her yellow Hispano-Suiza surrounded by romantic intrigue, but beneath the glamour she is destined to be a tragic heroine. A perfect synecdoche, in fact: as the hat is to the woman, so the words of the title are to an entire literary style. The success of the novel when it was first published in 1924 led to its adaptation for the screen, with Greta Garbo starring as Iris Storm.

    Andre Breton wrote Arcanum 17 during a trip to the Gaspe Peninsula in Quebec in the months after D-Day in 1944, when the Allied troops were liberating Occupied Europe. Using the huge Perce Rock--its impermanence, its slow-motion crumbling, its singular beauty--as his central metaphor, Breton considers issues of love and loss, aggression and war, pacifism, feminism and the occult, in a book that is part prose and part poetry, part reality and part dream.Translator Zack Rogow won the PEN-Book-of-the-Month Translation Prize for his co-translation of Breton's Earthlight.

    The work develops a theme that persistently inspired Bernanos: the existence of evil as a spiritual force and its dramatic role in human destiny. This haunting novel follows the fortunes of a young, gauche, and fervent Catholic priest who is a misfit in the world and in his church, creating scandal and disharmony wherever he turns. His insight into the inner lives of others and his perception of the workings of Satan in the everyday are gifts that fatefully come into play in the priest's chance encounter with a young murderess, whose life and emotions he can see with a dreadful clarity, and whose destiny inexorably becomes entangled with his own.

    Although known principally as a writer, he was closely associated with the tumultuous revolutionary period of his own country. Of all Gorky's novels, The Artamonov Business ('Decadence' in the USA edition) is the most impressive & dramatic. Here in concentrated form is the tragic failure of Russia's middle classes in the decades before the Revolution, seen in the small town microcosm of a family of textile manufacturers.

    Charles is a modern libertine, dedicated to vice and depravity, while his twin Robert is a priest so devout that he is nicknamed L'Abbé'. When the sexually wild Eponine intrudes upon their suffocating relationship, anguish, delirium, and death ensue.Other works by Georges Bataille published by Marion Boyars include Blue of Noon and My Mother Madame Edwarda and the Dead Man.

    As the straight-man narrator, observer, and regular butt of hundreds of hilarious trials and mishaps, Major Yeates never ceases to be surprised, is usually not amused, and can't stop himself from loving his Irish neighbors.-500 Great Books by Women.

    Lol Stein's comfortable married life is disrupted when she returns to her hometown and recalls how she was abandoned by a former fiance.

    As the nameless writer confronts his fears, he goes on with his life in one of the most original and provocative works from a contemporary writer.

    Nol, "the judge's son, ' is the person whose moral sentiments are being educated. But that education is acquired at the expense of an infinitely more valuable person, the young woman Nol loves, who has been exploited by men of weight and standing in their provincial community-all of them human, disgracefully human. Not tells the story from the time he was five years old, when, inspired by a rendition of one of Souza's marches in the garden where the brass band played, he danced with the conductor's daughter, taller and older than himself, before a bemused assemblage of adults. The web of incident and reflection in Nol's narration astonishes the reader with the texture of the lives it evokes, ending with Nol's small, crucial defection that precipitates tragedy. In The Garden Where the Brass Band Played, as with every real novel of the genre, it is the reader whose sentiments are educated, by the pain of it, and no doubt rather too late

    The aftermath of Armageddon, of course, is the world's glorious opportunity to embrace Russia's New Theology, guaranteed to cure or kill. - The American Mercury, December 1936. (http://www.unz.org/Pub/AmMercury-1936...)

    By virtue of the novel’s clever structure, the reader’s comprehension of events is limited so as to allow them a powerful experience: Johnson’s humorous yet deeply compassionate depiction of what it means to live life and grow old.

    Mary and her mother live in a one-room tenement flat that is home to the rituals of their bitter love. By day her mother cleans the houses of the Dublin rich, while Mary makes observations as she walks through the city. The imaginitive richness of her insight makes the city come alive as a place that is both strange and wonderful, remote yet friendly. It is this sense of discovery and the bittersweet richness it brings with it that makes this such an unusual but compelling Dublin novel."--Dr. Patricia McManus, 1001 Books You Must Read Before You Die

    When he fails, do like me: think about free elephant ride through Africa for hundreds and hundreds of wonderful animals that nothing could be built—either a wall or a fence of barbed wire—passing large open spaces and crush everything in its path, and destroying everything—while they live, nothing is able to stop them—what freedom and! And even when they are no longer alive, who knows, perhaps continue to race elsewhere still free. So you begin to torment your claustrophobia, barbed wire, reinforced concrete, complete materialism imagine herds of elephants of freedom, follow them with his eyes never left them on their run and will see you soon feel better ... "For the novel The Roots of Heaven, Gary received the Prix Goncourt for fiction. Translated and republished in many countries around the world, the novel was finally published in Bulgarian. A film version by John Huston starring Juliette Gréco, Errol Flynn, and Howard Trevard was released in 1958.

    Upon their return to England, Amy is ungratefully reluctant to maintain their friendship, but the skeins of their existence seem inextricably linked as grief gives way to resilience and again to tragedy. Reversals of fortune and a compelling cast of characters, including Ernie, ex-sailor turned housekeeper, and Amy's wonderfully precocious granddaughters, add spice to a novel that delights even as it unveils the most uncomfortable human emotions.