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Paris by Julian Green


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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.

The Road


Jack London - 1907
    Each story details an aspect of the hobo's life - from catching a train to cadging a meal. The wealth of experiences and the necessity of having to lie for a living brought depth London's subsequent stories.

Blue Highways


William Least Heat-Moon - 1982
    Hailed as a masterpiece of American travel writing, Blue Highways is an unforgettable journey along our nation's backroads.William Least Heat-Moon set out with little more than the need to put home behind him and a sense of curiosity about "those little towns that get on the map-if they get on at all-only because some cartographer has a blank space to fill: Remote, Oregon; Simplicity, Virginia; New Freedom, Pennsylvania; New Hope, Tennessee; Why, Arizona; Whynot, Mississippi."His adventures, his discoveries, and his recollections of the extraordinary people he encountered along the way amount to a revelation of the true American experience.

زندگی و آثار میکل آنژ


Romain Rolland - 1907
    He lived during the Italian Renaissance, a period known for its creative activity. Civilization made huge strides in science and invention, in literature, and in politics. In art, the age's great achievement, Michelangelo led all others.A short, wide-shouldered man with a face made homely by a broken nose, Michelangelo had a remarkable ability to concentrate his thoughts and energy on the task in hand. Often while working he would eat only a little bread, would sleep on the floor or on a cot beside his unfinished painting or statue, and would continue to wear the same clothes until his work was finished.

Paris On Air


Oliver Gee - 2020
    Join award-winning podcaster Oliver Gee on this laugh-out-loud journey through the streets of Paris.He tells of how five years in France have taught him how to order cheese, make a Parisian person smile, and convince anyone you can fake French (even if, like Oliver, you speak the language like an Australian cow).A fresh voice on the Paris scene, he shares the soaring highs and crushing lows that come with following your dreams to the French capital.He also befriends the city's too-cool-for-school basketballers, chases runaway crocodiles, and goes on a mammoth honeymoon trip around France on his little red scooter.

The Red Tenda of Bologna


John Berger - 2007
    Here are authors ranging from Kathy Acker to James Baldwin, Truman Capote to Stanislaw Lem and George Orwell to Shirley Jackson; essays radical and inspiring; poems moving and disturbing; stories surreal and fabulous; taking us from the deep South to modern Japan, New York's underground scene to the farthest reaches of outer space.

How to Live: A Life of Montaigne in One Question and Twenty Attempts at an Answer


Sarah Bakewell - 2010
    They are all versions of a bigger question: how do you live? How do you do the good or honourable thing, while flourishing and feeling happy? This question obsessed Renaissance writers, none more than Michel Eyquem de Montaigne (1533-92), perhaps the first truly modern individual. A nobleman, public official, and wine-grower, he wrote free-roaming explorations of his thought and experience, unlike anything written before. He called them 'essays', meaning 'attempts' or 'tries'. Into them he put whatever was in his head: his tastes in wine and food, his childhood memories, the way his dog's ears twitched when dreaming, as well as the appalling events of the religious civil wars raging around him. The Essays was an instant bestseller, and more than four hundred years later, Montaigne's honesty and charm still draw people to him. Readers come to him in search of companionship, wisdom and entertainment--and in search of themselves. This book, a spirited and singular biography (and the first full life of Montaigne in English for nearly fifty years), relates the story of his life by way of the questions he posed and the answers he explored. It traces his bizarre upbringing (made to speak only Latin), youthful career and sexual adventures, travels, and friendships with the scholar and poet Etienne de La Boétie and with his adopted 'daughter', Marie de Gournay. And as we read, we also meet his readers--who for centuries have found in Montaigne an inexhaustible source of answers to the haunting question, 'how to live?'

The Letters of Abélard and Héloïse


Pierre Abélard
    It is told through the letters of Peter Abélard, a French philosopher and one of the greatest logicians of the twelfth century, and of his gifted pupil Héloïse. Through their impassioned writings unfolds the story of a romance, from its reckless, ecstatic beginnings through to public scandal, an enforced secret marriage and its devastating consequences. These eloquent and intimate letters express a vast range of emotions from adoration and devotion to reproach, indignation and grief, and offer a fascinating insight into religious life in the Middle Ages.This is the revised edition of Betty Radice's highly regarded translation, in which Michael Clanchy, the biographer of Abélard, updates the scholarship on the letters and the lovers. This volume includes Abélard's remarkable autobiography and his spiritual advice to Héloïse and her nuns, as well as a selection of the 'lost love letters' of Abélard and Héloïse, letters between Héloïse and Peter the Venerable, two of Abélard's hymns, a chronology, notes and maps.

The Worst Journey in the World


Apsley Cherry-Garrard - 1922
    Apsley Cherry-Garrard, the youngest member of Scott's team and one of three men to make and survive the notorious Winter Journey, draws on his firsthand experiences as well as the diaries of his compatriots to create a stirring and detailed account of Scott's legendary expedition. Cherry himself would be among the search party that discovered the corpses of Scott and his men, who had long since perished from starvation and brutal cold. It is through Cherry's insightful narrative and keen descriptions that Scott and the other members of the expedition are fully memorialized.

Abundance


Sena Jeter Naslund - 2006
    From the lush gardens of Versailles to the lights and gaiety of Paris, the verdant countryside of France, and finally the stark and terrifying isolation of a prison cell, the young queen's life is joyful, poignant, and harrowing by turns. As her world of unprecedented royal splendor crumbles, the charming Marie Antoinette matures into a heroine of inspiring stature, one whose nobility arises not from the circumstance of her birth but from her courageous spirit.Marie Antoinette was a child of fourteen when her mother, the Empress of Austria, arranged for her to leave her family and her country to become the wife of the fifteen-year-old Dauphin, the future King of France. Coming of age in the most public of arenas, the young queen embraces her new family and the French people, and she is embraced in return. Eager to be a good wife and strong queen, she shows her new husband nothing but love and encouragement, though he repeatedly fails to consummate their marriage and in doing so, fails to give her the thing she—and the people of France—desires most: a child and an heir to the throne.Deeply disappointed and isolated in her own intimate circle apart from the social life of the court, the queen allows herself to remain ignorant of the country's growing economic and political crises. She entrusts her soul to her women friends, her music teacher, her hairdresser, the ambassador from Austria, and a certain Swedish count so handsome that admirers label him "the Picture." When her innocent and well-chaperoned pilgrimage to watch the sun rise is viciously misrepresented in satiric pamphlets as a drunken orgy, the people begin to turn against her. Poor harvests, bitter winters, war debts, and poverty precipitate rebellion and revenge as the royal family and many nobles are caught up in a murderous time known as "the Terror."With penetrant insight into new historical scholarship and with wondrous narrative skill, Naslund offers an intimate, fresh, and dramatic re-creation of this compelling woman that goes beyond popular myth. Abundance reveals a compassionate and spontaneous Marie Antoinette who rejected the formality and rigid protocol of the court; an enchanting and tenderhearted outsider who was loved by her adopted homeland and people until she became the target of revolutionary cruelty and violence; a dethroned queen whose depth of character sustained her in even the worst of times.Once again, Sena Jeter Naslund has shed new light on an important moment of historical change and made that time as real to us as the one we are living now. Exquisitely detailed, beautifully written, heartbreaking and powerful, Abundance is a novel that is impossible to put down.

French Milk


Lucy Knisley - 2007
    The museums, the cafs, the parks. An artist like Lucy can really enjoy Paris in January. If only she can stop griping at her mother. This comic journal details a mother and daughters month-long stay in a small apartment in the fifth arrondissement. Lucy is grappling with the onslaught of adulthood. Her mother faces fifty. They are both dealing with their shifting relationship. All the while, they navigate Paris with halting French and dog-eared guidebooks.

Every Frenchman Has One


Olivia de Havilland - 1962
    She married a Frenchman, took on all his compatriots, and has been the heroine of a love affair ever since. Her skirmishes with French traffic, French maids, French salesladies, French holidays, French law, French doctors, above all, the French language, are here set forth in a delightful and amusing record. Paraphrasing Caesar, Miss de Havilland says, "I came, I saw, I was conquered."

Selected Writings


Guillaume Apollinaire - 1971
    He had led migration of Bohemian Paris across the city from Montmartre to Montparnasse, he had helped formulate the principles of 'Cubism', having written one of the first books on the subject, and coined the word 'Surrealist'; and he had demonstrated in his own work those innovations we have come to associate with the most vital investigations of the avente - garde.

Oh Mexico! Love and Adventure in Mexico City


Lucy Neville - 2011
    Her to-do list is simple enough: get a job, find a place to live, then master the language. Lucy promptly finds work as an English teacher and scores a room in a sunny apartment. Her new flatmate, the well-connected Octavio, is unnervingly attractive. So begins a comic tsunami of challenges as Lucy negotiates Mexico City's stratified worlds, meeting everyone from street-hawkers to crazy gringos, academics and socialites. She marvels at how cheerfully they cope in a town held together by corruption, where kidnapping is a constant threat and decapitations by narcotics gangs are a staple of the daily news.As Lucy struggles with her Spanish verbs, the two men she accidentally falls in love with discover each other's existence. In the midst of the turmoil that follows, her extrovert family arrive for a visit.Oh Mexico! is a classic travel memoir lit up by great warmth, wit and wisdom. With a curious mind and a knowing eye, Lucy's account of life in the riotous third-world metropolis that is Mexico City is utterly irresistible.

A Traveller in Italy


H.V. Morton - 1964
    V. Morton, "is embroidered everywhere by human living, and there is scarcely a hill, a stream, a grove of trees, without its story of God, of love or death." Morton's stories and observations of Tuscany, Lombardy, Emilia, and Veneto, whether relating to the fantastic reconstruction of the La Scala opera house or the superstitious lovers at Juliet's Tomb, make his style as engaging as the landscape and people he evokes.