A concentration camp survivor confronts one of the most heated and vexed questions of the Holocaust: what price survival? In 1943, sixteen-year-old Paul Steinberg was arrested in Paris and deported to Auschwitz. A chemistry student, Steinberg was assigned to work in the camp's laboratory alongside Primo Levi, who would later immortalize his fellow inmate as "Henri," the ultimate survivor, the paradigm of the prisoner who clung to life at the cost of his own humanity. "One seems to glimpse a human soul," Levi wrote in If This Is a Man, "but then Henri's sad smile freezes in a cold...

Now a major motion picture starring Daniel Auteuil (Sade, Girl on the Bridge, Jean de Florette) directed by Nicole Garcia (Place Vendome)

Acclaimed master of psychological suspense, Emmanuel Carrere, whose fiction John Updike described as "stunning" (The New Yorker) explores the double life of a respectable doctor, eighteen years of lies, five murders, and the extremes to which ordinary people can go.

During the spring of 1994, in a tiny country called Rwanda, some 800,000 people were hacked to death, one by one, by their neighbors in a gruesome civil war. Several years later, journalist Jean Hatzfeld traveled to Rwanda to interview ten participants in the killings, eliciting extraordinary testimony from these men about the genocide they perpetrated. As Susan Sontag wrote in the preface, Machete Season is a document that "everyone should read . . . because making] the effort to understand what happened in Rwanda . . . is part of being a moral adult."

At the City Hall in a small town in the South of France, one man starts his campaign to correct the ills that have overtaken his proud nation by lecuring the town's inhabitants on the art of conversation. In the narrator's opinion, "coversation is a specialty that is most eminently French," an art that should be nurtured and practiced, and can help repair France's reputation. Not to mention being a good conversationalist is extremely useful for seducing women, which is how the narrator managed to attract Lucienne, his "superbly lumpish" wife who died two months before giving this lecture....

Patrick Chamoiseau first became known to the international literary world with "Texaco," the vast and demanding novel that won France s prestigious Goncourt Prize in 1992. Less well known is the fact that Chamoiseau has written a number of extraordinary books about his childhood in Martinique. One of these, "Creole Folktales," recreates in truly magical language the stories he heard as a child. Folktales with a twist, fairy tales with attitude, these stories are told in a language as savory as the spicy food so lovingly evoked within these pages.

The cheeky urchins, dowagers, ne...