Jean Cocteau delighted in shocking the world. In pubic, at least, the image he presented was one of great daring -- a man eager to defy, willing to experiment, ready to challenge. Cocteau's achievements in almost every artistic medium -- including poetry, film, illustration, criticism, and ballet -- rightfully earned him a reputation for radical versatility. He assumed Oscar Wilde's role as "world's most dazzling talker" and Thomas DeQuincey's as "world's most conspicuous opium addict"; he drew depictions of his bouts in the all-male brothels of Toulon; he created the actor Jean Marais and...
Jean Cocteau delighted in shocking the world. In pubic, at least, the image he presented was one of great daring -- a man eager to defy, willing to ex...
One of the most original and memorable photographers of the twentieth century, Brassai was also a journalist, sculptor, and writer. He took great pride in his writing, and he loved literature and language-French most of all. When he arrived in Paris in 1924, Brassai began teaching himself French by reading Proust. Captured by the sensuality and visual strategies of Proust's writing, Brassai soon became convinced that he had discovered a kindred spirit. Brassai wrote: "In his battle against Time, that enemy of our precarious existence, ever on the offensive though never openly so, it was in...
One of the most original and memorable photographers of the twentieth century, Brassai was also a journalist, sculptor, and writer. He took great prid...
"Not only one of the frankest of autobiographies, but also a brilliantly written book, Leiris' "Manhood" mingles memories, philosophic reflections, sexual revelation, meditations on bullfighting, and the life-long progress of self-discovery." "Washington Post Book World " "Leiris writes to appall, and thereby to receive from his readers the gift of a strong emotion the emotion needed to defend himself against the indignation and disgust he expects to arouse in his readers." Susan Sontag, "New York Review of Books " "
"Not only one of the frankest of autobiographies, but also a brilliantly written book, Leiris' "Manhood" mingles memories, philosophic reflections, se...
With four elegant and beautifully crafted novels Julien Gracq has established himself as one of France's premier postwar novelists. A mysterious and retiring figure, Gracq characteristically refused the Goncourt, France's most distinguished literary prize, when it was awarded to him in 1951 for this book. As the latest work in the Twentieth-Century Continental Fiction Series, Gracq'a masterpiece is now available for the first time in English. Set in a fictitious Mediterranean port city, The Opposing Shore is the first-person account of a young aristocrat sent to observe the...
With four elegant and beautifully crafted novels Julien Gracq has established himself as one of France's premier postwar novelists. A mysterious and r...
When The Paris Diary exploded on the scene in 1966 there had never been a book in English quite like it: Its intimate combination of personal, literary, and social insights was unprecedented. Rorem's self-portrait of the artist as a young man, written between 1951 and 1955, was also a mirror of the times, depicting the now vanished milieu of Cocteau, Eluard, Gide, Landowska, Boulez, the Vicomtesse de Noailles, and others whose paths crossed with Rorem's in such settings as Paris, Morocco, and Italy. The New York Diary, published the following year, pictured the period between...
When The Paris Diary exploded on the scene in 1966 there had never been a book in English quite like it: Its intimate combination of personal, ...
The Rustle of Language is a collection of forty-five essays, written between 1967 and 1980, on language, literature, and teaching--the pleasure of the text--in an authoritative translation by Richard Howard.
The Rustle of Language is a collection of forty-five essays, written between 1967 and 1980, on language, literature, and teaching--the pleasure...
In his consideration of the language of the fashion magazine--the structural analysis of descriptions of women's clothing by writers about fashion--Barthes gives us a brief history of semiology. At the same time, he identifies economics as the underlying reason for the luxuriant prose of the fashion magazine: "Calculating, industrial society is obliged to form consumers who don't calculate; if clothing's producers and consumers had the same consciousness, clothing would be bought (and produced) only at the very slow rate of its dilapidation."
In his consideration of the language of the fashion magazine--the structural analysis of descriptions of women's clothing by writers about fashion--Ba...
In his first novel, A Happy Death, written when he was in his early twenties and retrieved from his private papers following his death in I960, Albert Camus laid the foundation for The Stranger, focusing in both works on an Algerian clerk who kills a man in cold blood. But he also revealed himself to an extent that he never would in his later fiction. For if A Happy Death is the study of a rule-bound being shattering the fetters of his existence, it is also a remarkably candid portrait of its author as a young man. As the novel follows the protagonist, Patrice Mersault, to his victim's...
In his first novel, A Happy Death, written when he was in his early twenties and retrieved from his private papers following his death in I960, Albert...
The Best American Poetry 1995 once again highlights the dazzling spectrum of style and subject matter to be found in the art today. Guest editor Richard Howard's accent is on discovery and surprise, and he has gleaned the most inventive and searching writing from a wide variety of literary journals. The themes and imagery here are indisputably "American," as our best poets continue to mine personal as well as communal experience for their work. Now in its eighth year, this series has established itself as a rich and vibrant source of new poetry -- celebrated in bookstores and on...
The Best American Poetry 1995 once again highlights the dazzling spectrum of style and subject matter to be found in the art today. Guest edito...
On May 31, 1889, a young Belgian lawyer from a wealthy bourgeois family in Ghent published a book of 33 poems in 155 copies. Maurice Maeterlinck's legal career was floundering but his road to literary greatness had begun. Long overshadowed by the plays that later won him the Nobel Prize, Serres chaudes (Hothouses) nonetheless came to be widely regarded as one of the cornerstones of literary Modernism after Baudelaire. While Max Nordau soon seized upon Maeterlinck's--tumult of images--as symptomatic of a pervasive social malaise, decades later Antonin Artaud pronounced,...
On May 31, 1889, a young Belgian lawyer from a wealthy bourgeois family in Ghent published a book of 33 poems in 155 copies. Maurice Maeterlinck's ...