The Bigouden region in south-west Brittany may appear to be extremely 'traditional', but over the centuries it has witnessed much social and economic change, with the introduction of commercial fishing and a canning industry in the 1880s and, more recently, the development of tourism and restructuring of agriculture. Following a community of Breton peasants over fifteen generations, Martine Segalen traces the effects of these economic changes on family life and analyses the strategies of marriage alliance and inheritance which were used to shore up social hierarchies. She thus reveals the...

The French gave us the term bourgeois, and then argued endlessly about what it meant. "Of or pertaining to the French middle classes," according to the Oxford English Dictionary. But it is not a simple matter of social class. To be bourgeois one must master a system of words, gestures and objects that define a way of life, a particular culture. It requires the exercise of self-control, and the ritualization of daily routines. This witty, observant ethnography decodes the culture that dominates France.

Why do we find it necessary to slaughter living animals in order to enjoy their flesh? And why does this act offend our sensibilities, without necessarily making us into vegetarians? In her study of abattoirs in southwest France, Noelie Vialles brings to light a complex system of avoidances. Her analysis reveals that beyond the specific denial of the work of the abattoirs lies a whole system of symbolic representations of blood, human beings and animals, a symbolic code that determines the way in which we prepare domestic animals for the table.

A provocative novel by the most influential living French writer, Recollections of the Golden Triangle is a tour de force: a literary thriller constructed of wildly diverse elementsfantasy and dream, erotic invention, and the stuff of popular fiction and movies taken to its farthest limits.
A secret door that is opened slightly by an electronic device, a beautiful hanged factory girl, a pale young aristocrat whose blood apparently nourishes his vampiric lover, the evil Dr. Morgan who conducts his experiments in tertiary dream behavior, the beautiful and sinister women from the world of...