While their travels are fraught with complications and intrigue, Mercier and Camier at least “did not remove from home, they had that good fortune.”

    This poem was the first to introduce Lancelot as an important figure in the King Arthur legend.

    Edith Wharton and Henry James wrote about the American girl abroad, but it was Elaine Dundy’s Sally Jay Gorce who told us what she was really thinking. Charming, sexy, and hilarious, The Dud Avocado gained instant cult status when it was first published and it remains a timeless portrait of a woman hell-bent on living.“I had to tell someone how much I enjoyed The Dud Avocado. It made me laugh, scream, and guffaw (which, incidentally, is a great name for a law firm).” –Groucho Marx[The Dud Avocado] is one of the best novels about growing up fast..." -The Guardian“A cheerfully uninhibited...variation on the theme of the Innocents Abroad...Miss Dundy comes up with fresh and spirited comedy....Her novel is enormous fun—sparklingly written, genuinely youthful in spirit.” —The Atlantic

    The story is set on Crete just after the War, as an odd assortment of English travellers come ashore from a cruise ship to explore the island and in particular to examine a dangerous local labyrinth. They include an extrovert painter, a spiritualist, a Protestant spinster with a fox terrier, an antiquarian peer and minor poet, a soldier with guilty memories of the Cretan resistance, a pretty convalescent and an eccentric married couple. To some extent the book is a roman à clef and Durrell's characters talk with great reality about their experiences, themselves and a certain psychological unease that has led most of them to embark on their journey. The climax is a disastrous visit to the labyrinth, with its reported minotaur. The novel is a gripping piece of story-telling, full of atmosphere and the vivid first-hand writing about Mediterranean landscape and people of which Durrell was a master.[ Cefalu (1947; republished as The Dark Labyrinth in 1958) ]

    It's about his father, an exquisitely common man whose very ordinariness is a source of grave embarrassment for the boy. It's also the story told to him by his uncle, who shared a family secret with the child in the flickering black and white images of a Sunday matinee.Years before, in the bitter years of World War II, during the Nazi occupation of France, two brothers found themselves at the mercy of a German guard following an explosive act of resistance. Thrown into a deep pit with a small group of terrified prisoners, the men are told that one of them will die by dawn to serve as an example for the others. It's up to the prisoners to propose who will be sacrificed. But in the middle of the night, the guard returns with an extraordinary proposition of his own.A novel of revelation, innocence and ignorance, of the power of language and the strength and complexity of family, In Our Strange Gardens is a fable of nuance and power, a mesmerizing addition to the literature of war.

    Is Seth planning to leave the world's most powerful empire to Ramses, and not his corrupt brother, Shaanar? Before he knows it, the younger prince is surrounded by enemies and turning to his friends: Moses, the brilliant young Hebrew; Setau, the snake charmer and mage; Ahmeni; the frail scholar; and Set and Nefertari, the two beautiful women Ramses loves.And so begins the journey of the hero the world has yet to know... Let the saga begin.The first in Christian Jacque's bestselling Ramses series, recounting the thrilling story of Ramses, the legendary king who ruled Egypt for more than 60 years. Ramses sets into motion a tapestry of royal intrigue, treacherous plots, and romantic adventures that will keep readers spellbound and hungry for more.

    On Saturn he befriends the local secretary of the Academy of Sciences—a comparative dwarf, being only two kilometers high—and the two decide to travel to earth together, where they will make startling discoveries about human nature.

    After attempts at careers in medicine, law, drawing, English and piano, he became one of the first Romantic writers, with his first collection of poems, Contes d'Espagne et d'Italie (Tales of Spain and Italy) (1829). He was the librarian of the French Ministry of the Interior under the July Monarchy. The tale of his celebrated love affair with George Sand, which lasted from 1833 to 1835, is told from his point of view in his autobiographical novel, La Confession d'un Enfant du Siècle (The Confession of a Child of the Century) made into a film, Children of the Century. Musset's Nuits (Nights) (1835-1837) trace his emotional upheaval of his love for George Sand, from early despair to final resignation. He was dismissed from his post as librarian after the revolution of 1848, but he was appointed librarian of the Ministry of Public Instruction during the Second Empire. He received the Légion d'honneur in 1845, at the same time as Balzac, and was elected to the Académie française in 1852.

    Or so he believes.Food begins to go missing. Perturbed by this threat to his orderly life, Shimura sets up a webcam to monitor his home. But though eager to identify his intruder, is Shimura really prepared for what the camera will reveal?Based on real-life events, this prize‐winning novel is a moving tale of alienation in the modern world.

    Together they embark upon a riotously Bohemian life, full of gaiety, color and bustle. And then there is Kate, the enigmatic German girl with the mysterious smile.Capricious, untamed and curiously innocent, Kate steals their hearts in turn, and so begins the moving and tender story of three people in love, with each other and with life. Francois Truffaut, whose film of the novel is one of cinema's greatest achievments, has called Jules et Jim "a perfect hymn to love."Henri-Pierre Roch devoted his life to the arts, numbering Duchamp, Brancusi, Braque, Satie and Picasso amongst his closest friends. Jules et Jim, an autobiographical novel, was originally published in France in 1953 and was followed by Deux Anglaises et le Continent, which Truffaut also made into a film."A delightful account of people sharing and unsharing each other."?Times Literary Supplement

    After two years at the Russian front, Ernst Graeber finally receives three weeks’ leave. But since leaves have been canceled before, he decides not to write his parents, fearing he would just raise their hopes. Then, when Graeber arrives home, he finds his house bombed to ruin and his parents nowhere in sight. Nobody knows if they are dead or alive. As his leave draws to a close, Graeber reaches out to Elisabeth, a childhood friend. Like him, she is imprisoned in a world she did not create. But in a time of war, love seems a world away. And sometimes, temporary comfort can lead to something unexpected and redeeming. “The world has a great writer in Erich Maria Remarque. He is a craftsman of unquestionably first rank, a man who can bend language to his will. Whether he writes of men or of inanimate nature, his touch is sensitive, firm, and sure.”—The New York Times Book Review

    To find the bird, Mytyl and Tyltyl quest through the Land of Memory to the Palace of Night. The children get help from the good fairy Bérylune.

    I hate money--the word and the thing itself. If I am not rich, I am yet rich enough to give to my friend, and it is my joy to give all I can for him. Would not you do the same? And if I needed it, would you not be the first to give me all your fortune? But that shall never be! I have sound fists and a sound head, and I shall always be able to earn the bread that I eat. Till Sunday!

    Rulers such as Prince Basil of Onessa, who founded the Empire but whose treacherous ways made him a byword for infamy, and the romantic Alexis the Bastard, who dallied in the fleshpots of Egypt, studied Taoism and Buddhism, returned to save the Empire from civil war, and then retired “to learn how to die,” come alive in The Glory of the Empire, along with generals, politicians, prophets, scoundrels, and others. D’Ormesson also goes into the daily life of the Empire, its popular customs, and its contribution to the arts and the sciences, which, as he demonstrates, exercised an influence on the world as a whole, from East to West, and whose repercussions are still felt today. But it is all fiction, a thought experiment worthy of Jorge Luis Borges, and in the end The Glory of the Empire emerges as a great shimmering mirage, filling us with wonder even as it makes us wonder at the fugitive nature of power and the meaning of history itself.

    but before the police come to take them, Sarah locks her younger brother, Michel, in their favorite hiding place, a cupboard in the family's apartment. She keeps the key, thinking that she will be back within a few hours.Paris, May 2002: On Vel' d'Hiv's sixtieth anniversary, Julia Jarmond, an American journalist, is asked by her Paris-based American magazine to write an article about this black day in France's past. Julia has lived in Paris for nearly twenty-five years, married a Frenchman, and she is shocked both by her ignorance about the event and the silence that still surrounds it. In the course of her investigation, she stumbles onto a trail of long-hidden family secrets that connects her to Sarah. Julia finds herself compelled to retrace the girl's ordeal, from the terrible days spent shut in at the Vel' d'Hiv' to the camps and beyond. As she probes into Sarah's past, she begins to question her own place in France and to reevaluate her marriage and her life.Writing about the fate of her country with a pitiless clarity, Tatiana de Rosnay offers us a brilliantly subtle, compelling portrait of France under occupation and reveals the taboos and denial surrounding this painful episode in French history.(front flap)