Perec's spellbinding puzzle begins in an apartment block in the XVIIth arrondissement of Paris where, chapter by chapter, room by room, like an onion being peeled, an extraordinary rich cast of characters is revealed in a series of tales that are bizarre, unlikely, moving, funny, or (sometimes) quite ordinary. From the confessions of a racing cyclist to the plans of an avenging murderer, from a young ethnographer obsessed with a Sumatran tribe to the death of a trapeze artist, from the fears of an ex-croupier to the dreams of a sex-change pop star to an eccentric English millionaire who has devised the ultimate pastime, Life is a manual of human irony, portraying the mixed marriages of fortunes, passions and despairs, betrayals and bereavements, of hundreds of lives in Paris and around the world.But the novel is more than an extraordinary range of fictions; it is a closely observed account of life and experience. The apartment block's one hundred rooms are arranged in a magic square, and the book as a whole is peppered with a staggering range of literary puzzles and allusions, acrostics, problems of chess and logic, crosswords, and mathematical formulae. All are there for the reader to solve in the best tradition of the detective novel.

    The driver who gives you a lift isn’t going anywhere but off the road. Snow settles on your car in summer and the sequins found between the pages of a borrowed novel will make your fortune. Pagano’s stories weave together the mad, the mysterious and the dispossessed of a rural French community with honesty and humour. A superb, cumulative collection from a unique French voice.Why Peirene chose to publish this book:This is a spellbinding web of stories about people on the periphery. Pagano makes rural France her subject matter. She invokes the closeness of a local community and the links between the inhabitants’ lives. But then she reminds us how little we know of each other.This volume contains a selection of stories from Un renard à mains nues.

    Thought-provoking stories capture the turbulent history of Cuba and the Cuban people, from the discovery of the beautiful island through the last year before Castro's revolution.

    Writing from the perspective of an older man, the narrator relives a key period in his life through his relationships with several enigmatic women—Geneviève, Martine, Madeleine, a certain Madame Huberson—in the process unearthing his troubled relationship with his parents, his unorthodox childhood, and the unsettled years of his youth that helped form the celebrated writer he would become. This isclassic Modiano, utilizing his signature mix of autobiography and invention to create his most intriguing and intimate book yet.

    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.

    Published anonymously in bits and pieces between 1911 and 1920, Corydon first appeared in a signed, commercial edition in France in 1924 and in the United States in 1950, the year before Gide's death. The present edition features the impeccable translation of the Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Richard Howard. In spirited dialogue with his bigoted, boorish interviewer, Corydon marshals evidence from naturalists, historians, poets, and philosophers to support his contention that homosexuality pervaded the most culturally and artistically advanced civilizations, from Greece in the age of Pericles to Renaissance Italy and England in the age of Shakespeare. Although obscured by later critics, literature and art from Homer to Titian proclaim the true nature of relationships between such lovers as Achilles and Patrocles—not to mention Virgil's mythical Corydon and his shepherd, Alexis, constructed union, while the more fundamental, natural relation is the homosexual one. "My friends insist that this little book is of the kind which will do me the greatest harm," Gide wrote of his Corydon. In these pages, contemporary readers will find a prescient and courageous treatment of a topic that has scarcely become less controversial.

    It's the tale of Bobby Pickens, assistant manager of Sonny Boy Bargain Store, who gains a new lease on life, though he almost comes to regret it. Bobby's handsome half brother F.X.-ex-con, ex-actor, and ex-husband three times over-moves in, and things go awry all over town. Mistaken identities; entangled romances with Burma, Toinette, and Donna Lee; assault and battery; charges of degeneracy; a nervous breakdown-it all comes to a head at a Christmas Eve party in a cabin on a poisoned swamp. This is sly, madcap romp that offers readers the gift of abundant laughter.

    Charles Wright’s translation, Jonathan Galassi’s introduction, and, as afterword, Montale’s thoughtful essay on Campana, identify the heart of this poet’s achievement.

    Within these notebooks, Roethke allowed his mind to rove freely, moment by moment, moving from the practical to the transcendental, from the halting to the sublime.Fellow poet and colleague David Wagoner distilled these notebooks—twelve linear feet of bookshelf—into an energetic, wise, and rollicking collection that shows Roethke to be one of the truly phenomenal creative sources in American poetry.From “A Psychic Janitor”: I’m sick of fumbling, furtive, disorganized minds like bad lawyers trying to make too many points that this is an age of criticism: and these, mind you, tin-eared punks who couldn’t tell a poem from an old boot if a gun were put to their heads . . .Cover art by United States Poet Laureate Ted Kooser.

    With the exception of the title poem, which concludes the volume - a thirteen-part poem of exceptional grace and brilliance - the fifty-eight poems in this collection are mostly short; in their relative brevity they display all the valiant wit and rich lyric intensity which readers know from Ashbery's expansive longer work. The critic Harold Bloom has observed: "And the Stars Were Shining is one of John Ashbery's strongest collections, the title poem his most beautiful long poem yet. He helps to redeem a bad time when many among us have joined in a guilty flight away from the aesthetic."

    Read together, they give us an extraordinary depiction of sexual mores. When the apparently angelic Thérèse commits murder, she offers sexual favors to a petty clerk if he will dispose of the body; the pregnant Flavie manipulates a neighbor’s interest in her dowry to arrange a shotgun wedding; and churchgoing women find their hunger for Christianity unsatisfied by a vapid priest. These are beautiful and poignant stories unified by the powerful themes of deception and discontent.

    Set in the Baltic provinces in the aftermath of World War I, Coup de Grace tells the story of an intimacy that grows between three young people hemmed in by civil war: Erick, a Prussian fighting with the White Russians against the Bolsheviks; Conrad, his best friend from childhood; and Sophie, whose unrequited love for Erik becomes an unbearable burden.

    Ludo’s quiet existence changes the day he meets Lila, a girl from the aristocratic Polish family who own the estate next door. In a single glance, Ludo instantly falls in love forever; Lila, on the other hand, remains elusive. Thus begins Ludo’s adventure of longing, passion, and steadfast love for Lila, who begins to reciprocate his feelings just as Europe descends into war. After Germany invades Poland, Lila and her family disappear, and Ludo’s journey to save her from the Nazis becomes a journey to save his loved ones, his country, and ultimately himself.Filled with unforgettable characters—an indomitable chef who believes Michelin stars are more enduring than military conquests; a Jewish brothel Madam who reinvents everything about herself during the war; a piano virtuoso turned RAF pilot—The Kites is Romain Gary’s poetic call for resistance in whatever form it takes.

    Together they commit the sexual perfidies and blasphemous acts of which they had been forced to accuse one another before a tribunal.

    Credited with influencing the likes of Chekhov, Maugham, Babel, and O. Henry, Maupassant had, at the time of his death at the age of forty-two, written six novels and some three hundred short stories. Yet in English, Maupassant has, curiously, remained unappreciated by modern readers due to outdated translations that render his prose in an archaic, literal style.In this bold new translation, Sandra Smith—the celebrated translator of Irene Nemirovsky's Suite Francaise—brings us twenty-eight of Maupassant's essential stories and two novellas in lyrical yet accessible language that brings Maupassant into vibrant English. In addition to her sparkling translation, Smith also imposes a structure that captures the full range of Maupassant's work. Dividing the collection into three sections that reflect his predominant themes—nineteenth-century French society, the Franco-Prussian War of 1870–71, and the supernatural—Smith creates "an arrangement suggesting a culture of relation, of structure, of completion" (Richard Howard).In "Tales of French Life," we see Maupassant explore the broad swath of French society, not just examining the lives of the affluent as was customary for writers in his day. In the title story of the collection, "The Necklace," Maupassant crafts a devastating portrait of misplaced ambition and ruin in the emerging middle class.The stories in "Tales of War" emerge from Maupassant’s own experiences in the devastating Franco-Prussian War and create a portrait of that disastrous conflict that few modern readers have ever encountered. This section features Maupassant's most famous novella, "Boule de Suif."The last section, "Tales of the Supernatural," delves into the occult and the bizarre. While certain critics may attribute some of these stories and morbid fascination as the product of the author's fevered mind and possible hallucinations induced by late-stage syphilis, they echo the gothic horror of Poe as well as anticipate the eerie fiction of H. P. Lovecraft.The result takes readers from marriage, family, and the quotidian details of life to the disasters of war and nationalism, then to the gothic and beyond, allowing us to appreciate Maupassant in an idiom that matches our own times. The Necklace and Other Stories enables us to appreciate Maupassant as the progenitor of the modern short story and as a writer vastly ahead of his time.