This up-to-date account of the novel's composition, structure, and achievement provides readers with the literary and historical knowledge needed to make sense of the text. Professor Bellos explains how Balzac challenged prevailing nineteenth-century expectations of what novels should be like.
This up-to-date account of the novel's composition, structure, and achievement provides readers with the literary and historical knowledge needed to m...
Both a political history and a moral critique of the twentieth century, this is a personal and impassioned book from one of Europe's most outstanding intellectuals. Identifying totalitarianism as the major innovation of the twentieth century, Tzvetan Todorov examines the struggle between this system and democracy and its effects on human life and consciousness.
Totalitarianism managed to impose itself because, more than any other political system, it played on people's need for the absolute: it fed their hope to endow life with meaning by taking part in the construction of a...
Both a political history and a moral critique of the twentieth century, this is a personal and impassioned book from one of Europe's most outstandi...
Two trailblazing novels by Georges Perec, Things: Jerome and Sylvie, the young upwardly mobile couple, lust for the good life. They wanted life's enjoyment, but this equated to ownership. A Man Asleep: A nameless student attempts to purify himself entirely of material desires and ambitions.
Two trailblazing novels by Georges Perec, Things: Jerome and Sylvie, the young upwardly mobile couple, lust for the good life. They wanted life's enjo...
Combining fiction and autobiography in a quite unprecedented way, Georges Perec leads the reader inexorably towards the horror that lies at the origin of the post-World War Two world and at the crux of his own identity.
Combining fiction and autobiography in a quite unprecedented way, Georges Perec leads the reader inexorably towards the horror that lies at the origin...
A Frenchman of Russian origins, Jacques Tati worked as a picture-framer and a music-hall mime before being drawn into the world of the French cinema and making the films that rank him with the most popular comedy actor/directors in any country. He brought to his films"Jour de Fete, Monsieur Hulot's Holidays, Mon Oncle, Playtime" and othersa healthy openness to new technology in movie-making and a rigorous precision, the hallmark of many great clowns, in the execution of each scene. In this, the first complete, authoritative biography of the French icon, David Bellos has had the complete...
A Frenchman of Russian origins, Jacques Tati worked as a picture-framer and a music-hall mime before being drawn into the world of the French cinema a...
An NBCC Award and Los Angeles Times Book Award finalist A New York Times Notable Book for 2011 One of The Economist's 2011 Books of the Year
People speak different languages, and always have. The Ancient Greeks took no notice of anything unless it was said in Greek; the Romans made everyone speak Latin; and in India, people learned their neighbors' languages--as did many ordinary Europeans in times past (Christopher Columbus knew Italian, Portuguese, and Castilian Spanish as well as the classical languages). But today, we all use translation to cope with the...
An NBCC Award and Los Angeles Times Book Award finalist A New York Times Notable Book for 2011 One of The Economist's 2011 Boo...
A long-lost French novel in which three soldiers return home from an unpopular, unspeakable war
When On Leave was published in Paris in 1957, as France's engagement in Algeria became ever more bloody, it told people things they did not want to hear. It vividly described what it was like for soldiers to return home from an unpopular war in a faraway place. The book received a handful of reviews, it was never reprinted, it disappeared from view. With no outcome to the war in sight, its power to disturb was too much to bear. Through David Bellos's translation,...
A long-lost French novel in which three soldiers return home from an unpopular, unspeakable war
