In Paris, Montreal, Seville, Berlin and towns large and small, Diane Meur has dreamt and she has remembered her dreams. In this small volume the author shares her dreams of the years 2008 10, a time of global upheaval that happened to coincide with upheavals in her own life. As she writes in the preface, They are not my life, they are not my writing, they are just the dreams I had, remembered, and noted down: all of them, and every part of them, without censure or omission. Some dreams are humorous: peeling a scorpion like a shrimp and finding it isn t half bad; some are poignant: a tiny...

London between the wars was a place of anxiety and uncertainty. After the postwar boom of the 1920s, the aftereffects of the stock market crash hit London and, even as the fortunes of the aristocracy went into decline, there was hunger and a rising tide of virulent fascism. It is in this setting that Max, a French journalist looking for his next story, and Lena, an American singer, find themselves in Hedi Kaddour's Little Grey Lies. Once lovers, but now friends, Max and Lena travel with Lena's new man, Thibault, and with Max's barely masked jealousy. Then they meet the striking Colonel...

Selected from the pages of "Le Monde," the interviews conducted by Florence Noiville are unequaled in literary journalism. In" Literary Miniatures," Noiville captures the words and views of some of the best known writers of the twentieth century, engaging luminaries like Saul Bellow, Nadine Gordimer, Aharon Appelfeld, and A. S. Byatt in revealing dialogue. In this collection, Noiville converses with Don DeLillo, reasons with Adolfo Bioy Casares, passes the time with Milan Kundera, and gently interrogates John Le Carre.
Fluent in many languages, Noiville conducted a number of these...

From the outset of Napoleon s career, the charismatic Corsican was compared to mythic heroes of antiquity like Achilles, and even today he remains the apotheosis of French glory, a value deeply embedded in the country s history. From this angle, the Napoleonic era can be viewed as the final chapter in the battle of the Ancients and Moderns. In this book, Robert Morrissey presents a literary and cultural history of glory and its development in France and explores the economy of glory Napoleon sought to implement in an attempt to heal the divide between the Old Regime and the...

At the close of the 1970s, the two-domain classification scheme long used by most biologists--prokaryotes versus eukaryotes--was upended by the discovery of an entirely new group of organisms: archaea. Initially thought to be bacteria, these single-celled microbes--many of which were first found in seemingly unlivable habitats like the volcanic hot springs of Yellowstone National Park--were in fact so different at molecular and genetic levels as to constitute a separate, third domain beside bacteria and eukaryotes. Their discovery sparked a conceptual revolution in our understanding of the...

When Anna discovers a long letter that her mother Marie wrote, Marie has been dead for some time, and Anna is shocked to learn that her mother disappeared with a secret. The letter is addressed to Marie s first great love, a much older teacher who she describes as a great dinosaur. In this gripping novel by Florence Noiville, we follow along with Anna as she tries to unravel the mystery of her deceased mother s past. She takes her questions to her family and to her mother s friends: Did Marie send the letter? Was it received? Who was this man, and is he still alive? In a desperate search, she...

We are well aware of the rise of the 1% as the rapid growth of economic inequality has put the majority of the world's wealth in the pockets of fewer and fewer. One much-discussed solution to this imbalance is to significantly increase the rate at which we tax the wealthy. But with an enormous amount of the world's wealth hidden in tax havens--in countries like Switzerland, Luxembourg, and the Cayman Islands--this wealth cannot be fully accounted for and taxed fairly. No one, from economists to bankers to politicians, has been able to quantify exactly how much of the world's assets are...

Located northeast of Damascus, in an oasis surrounded by palms and two mountain ranges, the ancient city of Palmyra has the aura of myth. According to the Bible, the city was built by Solomon. Regardless of its actual origins, it was an influential city, serving for centuries as a caravan stop for those crossing the Syrian Desert. It became a Roman province under Tiberius and served as the most powerful commercial center in the Middle East between the first and the third centuries CE. But when the citizens of Palmyra tried to break away from Rome, they were defeated, marking the end of the...

London between the wars was a place of anxiety and uncertainty. After the postwar boom of the 1920s, the aftereffects of the stock market crash hit London, and, even as the fortunes of the aristocracy went into decline, there was hunger and a rising tide of virulent fascism. It is in this setting that Max, a French journalist looking for his next story, and Lena, an American singer, find themselves in Hedi Kaddour's Little Grey Lies. Once lovers, but now friends, Max and Lena travel with Lena's new man, Thibault, and with Max's barely masked jealousy. Then they meet the striking...