His wife, the Countess, is beautiful and pure, and loves her husband more than anything in the world. But from the moment the d'Orgels meet and befriend the clever young François de Séryeuse backstage at the circus, all three of these supremely civilized and witty people are caught up in an ever more intricate and seductive dance of deception and self-deception. At Count d'Orgel's masquerade ball, the real disguises are those of the human heart.Completed just before Raymond Radiguet's death at the age of twenty, Count d'Orgel's Ball is a love story that is as disturbing as it is delicious.

    Emotionally charged, sparsely written, and vicariously compelling, Marguerite Duras's novel centers on the desire of a young man for another man he has only glimpsed once, but with whom he falls desperately in love.

    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.

    But the real mystery at the heart of Albert Cossery's wry black comedy is not the cause of this death but the paradoxical richness to be found in even the most materially impoverished life. Chief among Cossery's proud beggars is Gohar, a former professor turned whorehouse accountant, hashish aficionado, and street philosopher. Such is his native charm that he has accumulated a small coterie that includes Yeghen, a rhapsodic poet and drug dealer, and El Kordi, an ineffectual clerk and would-be revolutionary who dreams of rescuing a consumptive prostitute. The police investigator Nour El Dine, harboring a dark secret of his own, suspects all three of the murder but finds himself captivated by their warm good humor. How is it that they live amid degrading poverty, yet possess a joie de vivre that even the most assiduous forces of state cannot suppress? Do they, despite their rejection of social norms and all ambition, hold the secret of contentment? And so this short novel, considered one of Cossery's masterpieces, is at once biting social commentary, police procedural, and a mischievous delight in its own right.

    Dujardin’s charming tale, told with insight and irony, recounts what goes on in the mind of a young man-about-town in love with a Parisian actress. Mallarmé described the poetry of the telling as "the instant seized by the throat." Originally published in France in 1887, the first English translation (by Joyce scholar Stuart Gilbert) was published by New Directions in 1938. In 1957 Leon Edel’s perceptive historical essay reintroduced the book as "the rare and beautiful case of a minor work which launched a major movement."

    He turns out to be a bird who discusses maths with anyone who will listen. So when Mr Ruche learns of his friend's mysterious death in the rainforests of Brazil he decides that with the parrot's help he will use these books to teach Max and his twin brother and sister the mysteries and wonders of numbers and shapes.But soon it becomes clear that Mr Ruche has inherited the library for reasons other than pure enlightenment, and before he knows it the household are caught up in a race to prevent the vital theorems falling into the wrong hands.Charming, fresh, with a narrative which races along, the novel takes the reader on a delightful journey through the history of mathematics.

    As well as providing an absorbing of nineteenth-century drug use, Hashish, Wine, Opium captures the spirit of French Romanticism, in its struggle to free the mind from the shackles of the humdrum and the conventional, and serves as a fascinating prologue to the psychedelic literature of the following centuries.

    But with only a butler and a dog for company, Xavier de Maistre managed to fill his time by embarking on a journey around his bedroom, later writing an account of what he had seen. Whether venturing from his bed to his sofa, or even to his mirror, he wears his "traveling outfit"--his favorite pink and blue pajamas. Out of his forced reclusion comes a captivating fantasy--a novel take on travel literature that would inspire many later writers, including Marcel Proust. This edition also contains de Maistre's "A Nocturnal Expedition around My Room." Xavier de Maistre was a military man, who supplemented his army career with short works of fiction.

    Based on the story of the third-century saint who lived on an isolated mountaintop in the Egyptian desert, it is a fantastical rendering of one night during which Anthony is besieged by carnal temptations and philosophical doubt.

    His epigrammatic and, above all, discomforting monologue gradually saps, then undermines, the reader's own complacency.

    Filled with slang and obscenities and written in raw, colloquial language, Journey to the End of the Night is a literary symphony of violence, cruelty and obscene nihilism. This book shocked most critics when it was first published in France in 1932, but quickly became a success with the reading public in Europe, and later in America where it was first published by New Directions in 1952. The story of the improbable yet convincingly described travels of the petit-bourgeois (and largely autobiographical) antihero, Bardamu, from the trenches of World War I, to the African jungle, to New York and Detroit, and finally to life as a failed doctor in Paris, takes the readers by the scruff and hurtles them toward the novel's inevitable, sad conclusion.

    However, this anecdote is told ninety-nine more times, each in a radically different style, as a sonnet, an opera, in slang, and with many more permutations. This virtuoso set of variations is a linguistic rust-remover, and a guide to literary forms.

    Underlying this libertine fantasy is a profound meditation on contemporary life: about the secret bond between slowness and memory, about the connection between our era's desire to forget and the way we have given ourselves over to the demon of speed. And about "dancers" possessed by the passion to be seen, for whom life is just merely a perpetual show emptied of every intimacy and every joy.

    The first-person narrative is supplemented by forty-four photographs which form an integral part of the work -- pictures of various surreal people, places, and objects which the author visits or is haunted by in naja's presence and which inspire him to mediate on their reality or lack of it. The Nadja of the book is a girl, but, like Bertrand Russell's definition of electricity as not so much a thing as a way things happen, Nadja is not so much a person as the way she makes people behave. She has been described as a state of mind, a feeling about reality, k a kind of vision, and the reader sometimes wonders whether she exists at all. yet it is Nadja who gives form and structure to the novel.

    A novel mingling mysticism, madness, sadistic cruelty and nascent sexuality, it gives a scathing insight into the effects of forced vocations and the unnatural life of the convent. A succès de scandale at the end of the eighteenth century, it has attracted and unsettled readers ever since. For Diderot's novel is not simply a story of a young girl with a bad habit; it is also a powerfully emblematic fable about oppression and intolerance.This new translation includes Diderot's all-important prefatory material, which he placed, disconcertingly, at the end of the novel, and which turns what otherwise seems like an exercise in realism into what is now regarded as a masterpiece of proto-modernist fiction.