The location is a small town in Northern France, near V., in the dead of the freezing winter. The war is still being fought in the trenches, within sight and sound of the town, but the men of the town have been spared the slaughter because they are needed in the local factory. One morning a beautiful ten year old girl, one of the three daughters of the innkeeper, is found strangled and dumped in the canal. Suspicion falls on two deserters who are picked up near the town. Their interrogation and sentencing is brutal and swift. Twenty years later, the narrator, a local policeman, puts together what actually happened. On the night the deserters were arrested and interrogated, he was sitting by the bedside of his dying wife. He believes that justice was not done and wants to set the record straight. But the death of the child was not the only crime committed in the town during those weeks. More than one record has to be set straight. Beautiful, like a fairy story almost, frozen in time, this novel has an hypnotic quality.

    Following an unexpected inheritence, they decide to give up their jobs and explore the world of ideas.

    This remarkable volume portrays one such story of resistance in Romania during the reign of Ceausescu: that of Constantin Noica, one of the country's foremost intellectuals.The Paltinis Diary is a wonderful homage to an intellectual master and to the power of intellect and freedom. The book will be of interest to philosophers, non-philosophers alike, and to anyone who seeks to grasp the true meaning of survival under totalitarian conditions.

    He was also a lawyer, a public official, a senator, a painter, an authority on Russian literature and a member of the French Academy. As a public official, M rim e travelled through France and Europe, from which he drew inspiration for his stories and novels. His first popular novella, "Colomba," was published in 1840. It is set in Corsica, and tells the story of the della Rebbia family, whose father has been murdered in an ambush, believed by his daughter to have been perpetrated by the town's mayor, Lawyer Barricini. She implores her brother, Lieutenant Orso della Rebbia, to avenge their father's death, but Orso does not share her passionate ancestral pride. His heart is torn between personal vendetta and a propensity to abide by the law.

    The creator of the Arthurian romance as a genre, Chrétien is revealed in this work as a witty, versatile writer who mastered both the soaring flight of emotion and the devastating aside and was as skillful a debater of the finer points of love as he was a describer of battles.

    They knew their friendship was going to be complicated, but love—and the City of Lights—just might find a way.On the big screen, Mia plays a woman in love. But in real life, she’s an actress in need of a break from her real-life philandering husband—the megastar who plays her romantic interest in the movies. So she heads across the English Channel to hide in Paris behind a new haircut, fake eyeglasses, and a waitressing job at her best friend’s restaurant.Paul is an American author hoping to recapture the fame of his first novel. When his best friend surreptitiously sets him up with Mia through a dating website, Paul and Mia’s relationship status is “complicated.”Even though everything about Paris seems to be nudging them together, the two lonely ex-pats resist, concocting increasingly far-fetched strategies to stay “just friends.” A feat easier said than done, as fate has other plans in store. Is true love waiting for them in a postscript?

    It also contains reminiscences of some of Cocteau's closet friends, including Nijinsky and Marcel Proust, and provides revealing insights into the creation of such masterpieces as Orphee and Les Enfants Terribles.

    In it, you will meet Scarbo the vampire dwarf, Ondine, the faerie princess of the waters, and an unforgettable assortment of lepers, alchemists, beggars, swordsmen and ghosts. Gaspard de la Nuit inspired Baudelaire, Rimbaud, Mallarmi, the Surrealist Movement and composer Maurice Ravel, who wrote a suite of virtuoso piano pieces patterned after it. This new edition has been entirely retranslated by renowned poet and literary historian Donald Sidney-Fryer, the author of Songs and Sonnets Atlantean who has edited four collections of prose and poetry by Clark Ashton Smith. In his extensive introduction and afterword, Sidney-Fryer retraces the steps in Bertrand's life, casts a new light on his works and follows the elusive Gaspard from the Three Kings of Bethlehem to Casper the Friendly Ghost. This collection features a foreword by T.E.D. Klein and is illustrated by drawings from Bertand himself.

    To purchase the entire book, please order ISBN 1417901306.

    This IS NOT an OCR'd book with strange characters, introduced typographical errors, and jumbled words. This book may have occasional imperfections such as missing or blurred pages, poor pictures, errant marks, etc. that were either part of the original artifact, or were introduced by the scanning process. We believe this work is culturally important, and despite the imperfections, have elected to bring it back into print as part of our continuing commitment to the preservation of printed works worldwide. We appreciate your understanding of the imperfections in the preservation process, and hope you enjoy this valuable book.

    M. G. Le ClézioThe French writer and Nobel Literature laureate J. M. G. Le Clézio has harbored a keen interest in Korea that not only prompted him to learn and master the Korean language on his own but also inspired his new novel. Bitna: Under the Sky of Seoul is Le Clézio’s portrait of Seoul—its people and its places—rendered with an intimate familiarity and attention to detail that few non-Korean writers, not to mention non-natives of the Seoul, could replicate. It is a story of life in the city as it is being lived today.Five stories tied together in a frame narrative on a single themeA drama about lives and connections that traverse reality and fantasyThe eponymous main character, Bitna, is a nineteen-year-old in her first year at university, and a recent transplant to Seoul from Jeolla-do, where her parents work in the fish market. As it was for Le Clézio, the city is for Bitna an unfamiliar, crowded, and lonely place. By chance, Bitna gets a part-time job telling stories to Salome, a woman with an incurable illness who now spends her days at home, waiting to die. Bitna’s stories open up a world of adventure for both Bitna and Salome.Bitna tells Salome five stories in all: the story of Mr. Cho, a retiree who raises pigeons and imagines the home he left behind in North Korea during the war as a baby on his mother’s back; the story of the mysterious traveler Kitty and the messages she delivers to bring once-distant neighbors together in community and friendship; the story of Naomi, abandoned as a baby, and Hana, the woman who raises her, and their encounter with life and death; the story of the singer Nabi, who rises to stardom but falls victim to the greed and lies of the people around her; and Bitna’s own story, about her life in the city and the fear she comes to experience as a result of a faceless stalker. Each story is layered with diverse themes that have attracted the author’s interest over the years, including Korea’s traditions, religions, history, and cuisine, as well as intergenerational conflict, inter-Korean issues, and sociopolitical issues.Through these stories, Le Clézio takes the reader on an extensive journey through Seoul, from the back alleys around Sinchon and Hongdae to landmarks like Gyeongbokgung Palace, Cheonggyecheon Stream, Bukhansan Mountain, and the Hangang River. Bitna is in fact a personal account of sorts, interwoven with the writer’s own memories of the neighborhoods he has gotten to know, the people he has met along the way, and the stories they have shared with him.At a certain point, the reader will discover that the stories in Bitna are intertwined, and that they resonate in real ways, whether their substance is true or imagined, fact or fiction. They are stories that reflect the intersecting experiences of all who live, like Bitna, under the Seoul sky.Experiences of life, death, despair and hope in the vast city of SeoulBitna is a picture of life in Seoul as it is experienced by various different kinds of people, with different parts of the city as backdrops. Le Clézio masterfully ties the individual stories together into a stirring and lyrical portrayal of the profound human capacity for warmth and compassion. And yet, as is true of the writer’s past works, the characters in Bitna are no strangers to sadness. Their lives are plain, unembellished accounts of the feelings of despair, sorrow, estrangement, and frustration that pervade the city and settle into its crevices like layers of dust.At the same time, the character Salome, who, at the end of her life, yearns only to be told another story, and the stories of Bitna, meditations in their own right on life and death, are a testament to not only the preciousness of life but also the possibility of a courage that treasures life and refuses to give up on it. Life, the author seems to say, is something that must be lived to its end, in cries and fits and shudders and a fierce, constant struggle, until the soul takes its leave. The life that has been thwarted by defeat and disappointment is more luminous, and the future that awaits it brighter.

    Covering ground form young adulthood to the height of Camus's career, these notebooks contain sketches for future works, excerpts from favorite books, and reflections on death, loneliness, and art.

    Summer Rain traces the struggle of a large, marginalised, and uneducated immigrant family, as its members, feeling cast off, yet bound together by a powerful intimacy, try to survive in the indifferent society of suburban Paris.

    Precocious, passionate, talented, the free-spirited Chrysis rebels against a society and an art world in which men have all the privilege and women none. By day, a serious student at the prestigious l'Ecole des Beaux-Arts, at night Chrysis loses herself to the sensual pleasures of the Montparnasse nightlife, where all seems permissible. There, she and the American cowboy will live the love of a lifetime."

    As legend has it, God blessed the only survivor of this medieval pogrom, Rabbi Yom Tov Levy, as one of the Lamed-Vov, the thirty-six Just Men of Jewish tradition, a blessing which extended to one Levy of each succeeding generation. This terrifying and remarkable legacy is traced over eight centuries, from the Spanish Inquisition, to expulsions from England, France, Portugal, Germany, and Russia, and to the small Polish village of Zemyock, where the Levys settle for two centuries in relative peace. It is in the twentieth century that Ernie Levy emerges, The Last of the Just, in 1920s Germany, as Hitler’s sinister star is on the rise and the agonies of Auschwitz loom on the horizon. This classic work, long unavailable in a trade edition, is one of those few novels that, once read, is never forgotten.