The Curtain is a seven-part essay by Milan Kundera, along with The Art of the Novel and Testaments Betrayed composing a type of trilogy of book-length essays on the European novel.

    For Marlaud, this involves carrying out a meager existence on rue Froidevaux in Paris, tending to his father’s grave in the cemetery across the street, and earning the ghost of a living through a part-time job at the funerary shop on the corner. It does not, however, take into account the amorous intentions of the obese concierge of his building, who has set her widowed sights on his diminutive frame, and whose aggressive overtures will set the wheels in motion for a burlesque and obscene tragedy. Originally published in 1979, The High Life introduces cult French author Jean-Pierre Martinet into English. It is a novella that perfectly outlines the dark fare of Martinet’s vision: the terrors of loneliness, the grotesque buffoonery of sexual relations, the essential humiliation of the human condition, and the ongoing trauma of twentieth-century history.

    For Foucault this was "by far the book I wrote most easily and with the greatest pleasure". Here, Foucault explores theory, criticism and psychology through the texts of Raymond Roussel, one of the fathers of experimental writing, whose work has been celebrated by the likes of Cocteau, Duchamp, Breton, Robbe Grillet, Gide and Giacometti.This revised edition includes an Introduction, Chronology and Bibliography to Foucault's work by James Faubion, an interview with Foucault, conducted only nine months before his death, and concludes with an essay on Roussel by the poet John Ashbery.

    This extraordinary trove, undiscovered until the 1940s and here translated for the first time into English, is the work of the mysterious Félix Fénéon. Dandy, anarchist, and critic of genius, the discoverer of Georges Seurat and the first French publisher of James Joyce, Fénéon carefully maintained his own anonymity, toiling for years as an obscure clerk in the French War Department. Novels in Three Lines is his secret chef-d’oeuvre, a work of strange and singular art that brings back the long-ago year of 1906 with the haunting immediacy of a photograph while looking forward to such disparate works as Walter Benjamin’s Arcades Project and the Death and Disaster series of Andy Warhol.

    At the heart of his ever-relevant inquiry is the inescapable conflict in the West between marriage and passion—the first associated with social and religious responsiblity and the second with anarchic, unappeasable love as celebrated by the troubadours of medieval Provence. These early poets, according to de Rougemont, spoke the words of an Eros-centered theology, and it was through this "heresy" that a European vocabulary of mysticism flourished and that Western literature took on a new direction.Bringing together historical, religious, philosophical, and cultural dimensions, the author traces the evolution of Western romantic love from its literary beginnings as an awe-inspiring secret to its commercialization in the cinema. He seeks to restore the myth of love to its original integrity and concludes with a philosophical perspective on modern marriage.

    The acclaimed aviator and adventurer wrote this letter while waiting in Portugal for a passage to the U.S., having just escaped the terrors of war-torn France, and dedicated it to the 40 million Frenchmen, hostages of the Germans. Saint-Exupéry's observations on the aimless existence of his fellow exiles in Lisbon filled with parties, gambling, and spies leads him to examine the nature of existence itself. The particularity of this moment, as the world seemed to be coming to an end, makes for a searing and timeless evocation of the nature of humanity.

    "This selection of writings - the first such comprehensive gathering to appear in English - provides an overview of Nerval's work as a poet, belletrist, short-story writer and autobiographer. In addition to 'Aurelia', the memoir of his madness, 'Sylvie' (considered a 'masterpiece' by Proust), and the hermetic sonnets of 'The Chimeras', this volume includes Nerval's Doppelganger tales and experimental fictions. Selections from his correspondence demonstrate a lucid awareness of the strategies by which nineteenth-century psychiatry consigned his visionary imagination to the purgatory of mental illness.

    It is one of the major early historical works on the French Revolution.See Wikipedia article at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Old_...

    Fussell illuminates a war that changed a generation and revolutionised the way we see the world. He explores the British experience on the western Front from 1914 to 1918, focusing on the various literary means by which it has been remembered, conventionalized and mythologized. It is also about the literary dimensions of the experience itself. Fussell supplies contexts, both actual and literary, for writers who have most effectively memorialized the Great War as an historical experience with conspicuous imaginative and artistic meaning. These writers include the classic memoirists Siegfried Sassoon, Robert Graves and Edmund Blunden, and poets David Jones, Isaac Rosenberg, and Wilfred Owen. In his new introduction Fussell discusses the critical responses to his work, the authors and works that inspired his own writing, and the elements which influence our understanding and memory of war. Fussell also shares the stirring experience of his research at the Imperial War Museum's Department of Documents. Fussell includes a new Suggested Further Reading List.Fussell's landmark study of World War I remains as original and gripping today as ever before: a literate, literary, and illuminating account of the Great War, the one that changed a generation, ushered in the modern era, and revolutionized how we see the world. 14 halftones.

    In this landmark work he depicts the Italian city-states of Florence, Venice and Rome as providing the seeds of a new form of society, and traces the rise of the creative individual, from Dante to Michelangelo. A fascinating description of an era of cultural transition, this nineteenth-century masterpiece was to become the most influential interpretation of the Italian Renaissance, and anticipated ideas such as Nietzsche's concept of the 'Ubermensch' in its portrayal of an age of genius.

    Written at a critical time in his life when his own love had been rejected, the book is a thinly disguised picture of the author's innermost feelings. Though it ranges over a wide variety of topics from courtly love to the emancipation of women, central to the book is Stendhal's account of love - an intense, romantic and generally unrequited love.

    They have transformed the way we see ourselves - and each other. They have inspired debate, dissent, war and revolution. They have enlightened, outraged, provoked and comforted. They have enriched lives - and destroyed them. Now Penguin brings you the works of the great thinkers, pioneers, radicals and visionaries whose ideas shook civilization, and helped make us who we are.Michel de Montaigne was the originator of the modern essay form; in these diverse pieces he expresses his views on relationships, contemplates the idea that man is no different from any animal, argues that all cultures should be respected, and attempts, by an exploration of himself, to understand the nature of humanity.

    On the front page of a Paris newspaper, the novelist published a terrific denunciation of French government officials, entitled “J’accuse…!” (“I Accuse…!”) It was written as an open letter to Félix Faure, President of the French Republic, and accused the government of anti-Semitism in the Dreyfus Affair. The brave letter had much to do with freeing Dreyfus in 1899.This Kindle edition, equivalent in length to a physical book of approximately 20 pages, includes the complete text, in English, of Zola’s open letter to the French President.Includes supplemental material:•About Alfred Dreyfus•About Émile ZolaAbout the Author:Émile Zola (1840-1902) was a French novelist and critic. Other works include “Nana,” “Germinal,” and “La Terre.”

    This inventory of lacks becomes an incantation: if only for an instant, it transmits a presence to these "units" that had previously been lost to the history of human creativity and thought.- A boarder for two years following a national funeral, Mirabeau is removed from the Pantheon and transferred to the cemetery of Clamart when his pornographic novels are discovered - A photograph taken by Hessling on Christmas night, 1943, of a young woman nailed alive to the village gate of Novimgorod; Hessling asks his friend Wolfgang Borchert to develop the film, look at the photograph, and destroy it - The Beautiful Gardener, a picture by Max Ernst, burned by the Nazis -- from "The Missing PiecesThe Missing Pieces" is an incantatory text, a catalog of what has been lost over time and what in some cases never existed. Through a lengthy chain of brief, laconic citations, Henri Lefebvre evokes the history of what is no more and what never was: the artworks, films, screenplays, negatives, poems, symphonies, buildings, letters, concepts, and lives that cannot be seen, heard, read, inhabited, or known about. It is a literary vanitas of sorts, but one that confers an almost mythical quality on the enigmatic creations it recounts -- rather than reminding us of the death that inhabits everything humans create.Lefebvre's list includes Marcel Duchamp's (accdidentally destroyed) film of Man Ray shaving off the Baroness Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven's pubic hair; the page written by Balzac on his deathbed (lost); "Spinoza's Treatise on the Rainbow" (thrown into a fire); the final seven meters of Kerouac's original typescript for "On the Road" (eaten by a dog); the chalk drawings of Francis Picabia (erased before an audience); and the one moment in Andre Malraux's life in which he exclaimed "I believe, for a minute, I was thinking nothing." "The Missing Pieces" offers a treasure trove of cultural and artistic detail and will entertain even those readers not enamored of the void."

    As such, the book does not require any commentary.From the preface by Marguerite Yourcenar.