Download or read book The Trespasser written by Tana French and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2016 with total page 466 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: While Detective Antoinette Conway and her partner Stephen Moran work a seemingly routine investigation of a lovers' quarrel gone bad, they discover the case isn't as by-the-numbers as they thought.
Download or read book The Witch Elm written by Tana French and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2018-10-09 with total page 529 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A New York Times bestseller and a Best Book of 2018 by NPR, The New York Times Book Review, Amazon, The Boston Globe, LitHub, Vulture, Slate, Elle, Vox, and Electric Literature “Tana French’s best and most intricately nuanced novel yet.” —The New York Times An “extraordinary” (Stephen King) and “mesmerizing” (LA Times) standalone novel from the master of crime and suspense and author of the forthcoming novel The Hunter. From the writer who “inspires cultic devotion in readers” (The New Yorker) and has been called “incandescent” by Stephen King, “absolutely mesmerizing” by Gillian Flynn, and “unputdownable” (People) comes a gripping new novel that turns a crime story inside out. Toby is a happy-go-lucky charmer who’s dodged a scrape at work and is celebrating with friends when the night takes a turn that will change his life—he surprises two burglars who beat him and leave him for dead. Struggling to recover from his injuries, beginning to understand that he might never be the same man again, he takes refuge at his family’s ancestral home to care for his dying uncle Hugo. Then a skull is found in the trunk of an elm tree in the garden—and as detectives close in, Toby is forced to face the possibility that his past may not be what he has always believed. A spellbinding standalone from one of the best suspense writers working today, The Witch Elm asks what we become, and what we’re capable of, when we no longer know who we are.
Download or read book An Arab Melancholia written by Abdellah Taïa and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 2012-03-09 with total page 145 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An autobiographical portrait of a gay Arab man, living between cultures, seeking an identity through love and writing. I had to rediscover who I was. And that's why I left the apartment.... And there I was, right in the heart of the Arab world, a world that never tired of making the same mistakes over and over.... I had no more leniency when it came to the Arab world... None for the Arabs and none for myself. I suddenly saw things with merciless lucidity.... —An Arab Melancholia Salé, near Rabat. The mid 1980s. A lower-class teenager is running until he's out of breath. He's running after his dream, his dream to become a movie director. He's running after the Egyptian movie star, Souad Hosni, who's out there somewhere, miles away from this neighborhood—which is a place the teenager both loves and hates, the home at which he is not at home, an environment that will only allow him his identity through the cultural lens of shame and silence. Running is the only way he can stand up to the violence that is his Morocco. Irresistibly charming, angry, and wry, this autobiographical novel traces the emergence of Abdellah Taïa's identity as an openly gay Arab man living between cultures. The book spans twenty years, moving from Salé, to Paris, to Cairo. Part incantation, part polemic, and part love letter, this extraordinary novel creates a new world where the self is effaced by desire and love, and writing is always an act of discovery.
Download or read book 1000 Years of Annoying the French written by Stephen Clarke and published by Open Road Media. This book was released on 2012-03-20 with total page 764 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The author of A Year in the Merde and Talk to the Snail offers a highly biased and hilarious view of French history in this international bestseller. Things have been just a little awkward between Britain and France ever since the Norman invasion in 1066. Fortunately—after years of humorously chronicling the vast cultural gap between the two countries—author Stephen Clarke is perfectly positioned to investigate the historical origins of their occasionally hostile and perpetually entertaining pas de deux. Clarke sets the record straight, documenting how French braggarts and cheats have stolen credit rightfully due their neighbors across the Channel while blaming their own numerous gaffes and failures on those same innocent Brits for the past thousand years. Deeply researched and written with the same sly wit that made A Year in the Merde a comic hit, this lighthearted trip through the past millennium debunks the notion that the Battle of Hastings was a French victory (William the Conqueror was really a Norman who hated the French) and pooh-poohs French outrage over Britain’s murder of Joan of Arc (it was the French who executed her for wearing trousers). He also takes the air out of overblown Gallic claims, challenging the provenance of everything from champagne to the guillotine to prove that the French would be nowhere without British ingenuity. Brits and Anglophiles of every national origin will devour Clarke’s decidedly biased accounts of British triumph and French ignominy. But 1000 Years of Annoying the French will also draw chuckles from good-humored Francophiles as well as “anyone who’s ever encountered a snooty Parisian waiter or found themselves driving on the Boulevard Périphérique during August” (The Daily Mail). A bestseller in Britain, this is an entertaining look at history that fans of Sarah Vowell are sure to enjoy, from the author the San Francisco Chronicle has called “the anti-Mayle . . . acerbic, insulting, un-PC, and mostly hilarious.”
Download or read book Sorry I Don t Speak French written by Graham Fraser and published by National Geographic Books. This book was released on 2007-03-13 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: As the threat of another Quebec referendum on independence looms, this book becomes important for every Canadian — especially as language remains both a barrier and a bridge in our divided country Canada’s language policy is the only connection between two largely unilingual societies — English-speaking Canada and French-speaking Quebec. The country’s success in staying together depends on making it work. How well is it working? Graham Fraser, an English-speaking Canadian who became bilingual, decided to take a clear-eyed look at the situation. The results are startling — a blend of good news and bad. The Official Languages Act was passed with the support of every party in the House way back in 1969 — yet Canada’s language policy is still a controversial, red-hot topic; jobs, ideals, and ultimately the country are at stake. And the myth that the whole thing was always a plot to get francophones top jobs continues to live. Graham Fraser looks at the intentions, the hopes, the fears, the record, the myths, and the unexpected reality of a country that is still grappling with the language challenge that has shaped its history. He finds a paradox: after letting Quebec lawyers run the country for three decades, Canadians keep hoping the next generation will be bilingual — but forty years after learning that the country faced a language crisis, Canada’s universities still treat French as a foreign language. He describes the impact of language on politics and government (not to mention social life in Montreal and Ottawa) in a hard-hitting book that will be discussed everywhere, including the headlines in both languages.
Download or read book French Women Writers written by Eva Martin Sartori and published by U of Nebraska Press. This book was released on 1994-01-01 with total page 660 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Marie de France, Mme. De Sävignä, and Mme. De Lafayette achieved international reputations during periods when women in other European countries were able to write only letters, translations, religious tracts, and miscellaneous fragments. There were obstacles, but French women writers were more or less sustained and empowered by the French culture. Often unconventional in their personal lives and occupied with careers besides writing?as educators, painters, actresses, preachers, salon hostesses, labor organizers?these women did not wait for Simone de Beauvoir to tell them to make existential choices and have "projects in the world." French Women Writers describes the lives and careers of fifty-two literary figures from the twelfth century to the late twentieth. All the contributors are recognized authorities. Some of their subjects, like Colette and George Sand, are celebrated, and others are just now gaining critical notice. From Christine de Pizan and Marguerite de Navarre to Rachilde and Häl_ne Cixous, from Louise Labe to Marguerite Duras?these women speak through the centuries to issues of gender, sexuality, and language. French Women Writers now becomes widely available in this Bison Book edition.
Download or read book The Story of French written by Jean-Benoît Nadeau and published by Macmillan + ORM. This book was released on 2008-01-08 with total page 597 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Why does everything sound better if it's said in French? That fascination is at the heart of The Story of French, the first history of one of the most beautiful languages in the world that was, at one time, the pre-eminent language of literature, science and diplomacy. In a captivating narrative that spans the ages, from Charlemagne to Cirque du Soleil, Jean-Benoît Nadeau and Julie Barlow unravel the mysteries of a language that has maintained its global influence despite the rise of English. As in any good story, The Story of French has spectacular failures, unexpected successes and bears traces of some of history's greatest figures: the tenacity of William the Conqueror, the staunchness of Cardinal Richelieu, and the endurance of the Lewis and Clark expedition. Through this colorful history, Nadeau and Barlow illustrate how French acquired its own peculiar culture, revealing how the culture of the language spread among francophones the world over and yet remains curiously centered in Paris. In fact, French is not only thriving—it still has a surprisingly strong influence on other languages. As lively as it is fascinating, The Story of French challenges long held assumptions about French and shows why it is still the world's other global language.
Download or read book The Map and the Territory written by Michel Houellebecq and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2012-01-03 with total page 289 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The most celebrated and controversial French novelist of our time now delivers his magnum opus—about art and money, love and friendship and death, fathers and sons. The Map and the Territory is the story of an artist, Jed Martin, and his family and lovers and friends, the arc of his entire history rendered with sharp humor and powerful compassion. His earliest photographs, of countless industrial objects, were followed by a surprisingly successful series featuring Michelin road maps, which also happened to bring him the love of his life, Olga, a beautiful Russian working—for a time—in Paris. But global fame and fortune arrive when he turns to painting and produces a host of portraits that capture a wide range of professions, from the commonplace (the owner of a local bar) to the autobiographical (his father, an accomplished architect) and from the celebrated (Bill Gates and Steve Jobs Discussing the Future of Information Technology) to the literary (a writer named Houellebecq, with whom he develops an unusually close relationship). Then, while his aging father (his only living relative) flirts with oblivion, a police inspector seeks Martin’s help in solving an unspeakably gruesome crime—events that prove profoundly unsettling. Even so, now growing old himself, Jed Martin somehow discovers serenity and manages to add another startling chapter to his artistic legacy, a deeply moving conclusion to this saga of hopes and losses and dreams.
Download or read book The Searcher written by Tana French and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2020-10-06 with total page 466 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Best Book of 2020 New York Times |NPR | New York Post "This hushed suspense tale about thwarted dreams of escape may be her best one yet . . . Its own kind of masterpiece." --Maureen Corrigan, The Washington Post "A new Tana French is always cause for celebration . . . Read it once for the plot; read it again for the beauty and subtlety of French's writing." --Sarah Lyall, The New York Times Cal Hooper thought a fixer-upper in a bucolic Irish village would be the perfect escape. After twenty-five years in the Chicago police force and a bruising divorce, he just wants to build a new life in a pretty spot with a good pub where nothing much happens. But when a local kid whose brother has gone missing arm-twists him into investigating, Cal uncovers layers of darkness beneath his picturesque retreat, and starts to realize that even small towns shelter dangerous secrets. "One of the greatest crime novelists writing today" (Vox) weaves a masterful, atmospheric tale of suspense, asking how to tell right from wrong in a world where neither is simple, and what we stake on that decision.
Download or read book French Novelists of Today written by Milton H. Stansbury and published by University of Pennsylvania Press. This book was released on 2017-01-31 with total page 228 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Fourteen of the most important French literati discussed from both the personal and artistic viewpoints. The list includes: Gide, Giradoux, Mauriac, MacOrlan, Larbaud, Morand, Colette, the surrealists, Concteau, Green, de Montherland, Drieu la Rochelle, Romains, and Malrauz.
Download or read book Consent written by Vanessa Springora and published by HarperCollins. This book was released on 2021-02-16 with total page 208 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “Consent” is a Molotov cocktail, flung at the face of the French establishment, a work of dazzling, highly controlled fury...By every conceivable metric, her book is a triumph.” -- The New York Times Already an international literary sensation, an intimate and powerful memoir of a young French teenage girl’s relationship with a famous, much older male writer—a universal #MeToo story of power, manipulation, trauma, recovery, and resiliency that exposes the hypocrisy of a culture that has allowed the sexual abuse of minors to occur unchecked. Sometimes, all it takes is a single voice to shatter the silence of complicity. Thirty years ago, Vanessa Springora was the teenage muse of one of the country’s most celebrated writers, a footnote in the narrative of a very influential man in the French literary world. At the end of 2019, as women around the world began to speak out, Vanessa, now in her forties and the director of one of France’s leading publishing houses, decided to reclaim her own story, offering her perspective of those events sharply known. Consent is the story of one precocious young girl’s stolen adolescence. Devastating in its honesty, Vanessa’s painstakingly memoir lays bare the cultural attitudes and circumstances that made it possible for a thirteen-year-old girl to become involved with a fifty-year-old man who happened to be a notable writer. As she recalls the events of her childhood and her seduction by one of her country’s most notable writers, Vanessa reflects on the ways in which this disturbing relationship changed and affected her as she grew older. Drawing parallels between children’s fairy tales and French history and her personal life, Vanessa offers an intimate and absorbing look at the meaning of love and consent and the toll of trauma and the power of healing in women’s lives. Ultimately, she offers a forceful indictment of a chauvinistic literary world that has for too long accepted and helped perpetuate gender inequality and the exploitation and sexual abuse of children. Translated from the French by Natasha Lehrer "...One of the belated truths that emerges from [Consent] is that Springora is a writer. [...]Her sentences gleam like metal; each chapter snaps shut with the clean brutality of a latch." -- The New Yorker "Consent [is] rapier-sharp, written with restraint, elegance and brevity." -- The Times (London) "[Consent] has something steely in its heart, and it departs from the typical American memoir of childhood abuse in exhilarating ways." -- Slate "Lucid and nuanced...[Consent] will speak to trauma survivors everywhere." -- Los Angeles Review of Books ”A piercing memoir about the sexually abusive relationship she endured at age 14 with a 50-year-old writer...This chilling account will linger with readers long after the last page is turned.” -- Publishers Weekly "Springora's lucid account is a commanding discussion of sexual abuse and victimization, and a powerful act of reclamation." -- Booklist "A chilling story of child abuse and the sophisticated Parisians who looked the other way...[Springora] is an elegant and perceptive writer." -- Kirkus
Download or read book The Fiction of Andr Pieyre de Mandiargues written by David J. Bond and published by Syracuse University Press. This book was released on 1982-10-01 with total page 156 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Novelist, Poet, critic, and writer of short stories, Andre Pieyre de Mandiargues has won considerable praise in France for his highly imaginative work and exquisite poetic style. His 1967 novel La Marge won the Prix Goncourt. Following an introductory biographical chapter in this first full-length critical study of Mandiargues, David bond discusses Mandiargues’s novels and a selection of short stories, finding recurring thematic patterns in his haunting and magical dream world. Bond maintains that the French writer uses fantasy, symbolic statement, and mythical and frankly erotic motifs to explore some of the oldest, most persistent human preoccupation-time, destiny, the beyond, salvation, love-themes that for him defy logical expression. Bond concludes with a discussion of Mandiargues's relationship to other contemporary writers and especially to the surrealists. Bibliography, notes, and index are included, along with a rare painting of Mandiargues by his wife, Bona.
Download or read book French Writers and the Politics of Complicity written by Richard J. Golsan and published by JHU Press. This book was released on 2006-02 with total page 222 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Focusing on the political commitments of three French writers who collaborated with the Vichy Regime and Nazi Germany during World War II, and on those of three leading French intellectuals of the 1990s whose misplaced political idealism led them to support xenophobic, authoritarian regimes and dangerous historical revisionisms, Richard J. Golsan reexamines the notion of political commitment or engagement in two difficult periods in modern French history. Discussing the fiction, essays, and journalism of Henry de Montherlant, Jean Giono, and Alphonse de Châteaubriant, Golsan explores the complexity of artistic and intellectual collaboration during the German Occupation. He demonstrates that, in this context, complicity with political evil often derived from "nonpolitical" motives including sexual orientation, antimodern aesthetics, and dangerously skewed religious beliefs. Turning to the post–cold war era of the 1990s, Golsan examines the philosopher Alain Finkielkraut's support for Croatian independence, the "mediologist" Régis Debray's pro-Serb stance during the bombing of Kosovo, and the historian Stéphane Courtois's revisionist comparison of Nazi and Communist crimes during the 1997 debate surrounding the publication of The Black Book of Communism. In these three cases, laudable motives—and misguided historical comparisons with Vichy, Nazism, and the Occupation period that marked the political and intellectual discourses of France in the 1990s—resulted, paradoxically, in antidemocratic engagements profoundly at odds with the original motivations behind these intellectuals' commitments. In each of these case studies, political complicity derives from a combination of passions and ideals—whether positive or negative, emotional or intellectual—as well as a desire to make the present conform to a particular and generally skewed vision of the past. The full implications of these involvements are neither fully grasped nor understood by their authors, either through lack of objectivity, rationality, or imagination or through willful ignorance. The results are always unfortunate and often disastrous. Considered together, these six intellectuals serve as sobering reminders that political commitments are never as simple or straightforward as they seem and that admirable motives for political involvement can have dangerous and destructive consequences in historical practice.
Download or read book The French Joyce written by Geert Lernout and published by University of Michigan Press. This book was released on 1992 with total page 304 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A major contribution to James Joyce studies, as well as a historical review of the French intellectual climate since the 1960s
Download or read book Speaking Out written by Albert Camus and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2022-02-15 with total page 289 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Nobel Prize winner's most influential and enduring lectures and speeches, newly translated by Quintin Hoare, in what is the first English language publication of this collection. Albert Camus (1913-1960) is unsurpassed among writers for a body of work that animates the wonder and absurdity of existence. Speaking Out: Lectures and Speeches, 1938-1958 brings together, for the first time, thirty-four public statements from across Camus's career that reveal his radical commitment to justice around the world and his role as a public intellectual. From his 1946 lecture at Columbia University about humanity's moral decline, his 1951 BBC broadcast commenting on Britain's general election, and his strident appeal during the Algerian conflict for a civilian truce between Algeria and France, to his speeches on Dostoevsky and Don Quixote, this crucial new collection reflects the scope of Camus's political and cultural influence.
Download or read book The Anomaly written by Hervé Le Tellier and published by Other Press, LLC. This book was released on 2021-11-23 with total page 401 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A New York Times bestseller and a "Best Thriller of the Year" Winner of the Goncourt Prize and now an international phenomenon, this dizzying, whip-smart novel blends crime, fantasy, sci-fi, and thriller as it plumbs the mysteries surrounding a Paris-New York flight. Who would we be if we had made different choices? Told that secret, left that relationship, written that book? We all wonder—the passengers of Air France 006 will find out. In their own way, they were all living double lives when they boarded the plane: Blake, a respectable family man who works as a contract killer. Slimboy, a Nigerian pop star who uses his womanizing image to hide that he’s gay. Joanna, a Black American lawyer pressured to play the good old boys’ game to succeed with her Big Pharma client. Victor Miesel, a critically acclaimed yet largely obscure writer suddenly on the precipice of global fame. About to start their descent to JFK, they hit a shockingly violent patch of turbulence, emerging on the other side to a reality both perfectly familiar and utterly strange. As it charts the fallout of this logic-defying event, The Anomaly takes us on a journey from Lagos and Mumbai to the White House and a top-secret hangar. In Hervé Le Tellier’s most ambitious work yet, high literature follows the lead of a bingeable Netflix series, drawing on the best of genre fiction from “chick lit” to mystery, while also playfully critiquing their hallmarks. An ingenious, timely variation on the doppelgänger theme, it taps into the parts of ourselves that elude us most.
Download or read book The Meursault Investigation written by Kamel Daoud and published by Other Press, LLC. This book was released on 2015-06-02 with total page 161 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A New York Times Notable Book of 2015 “A tour-de-force reimagining of Camus’s The Stranger, from the point of view of the mute Arab victims.” —The New Yorker He was the brother of “the Arab” killed by the infamous Meursault, the antihero of Camus’s classic novel. Seventy years after that event, Harun, who has lived since childhood in the shadow of his sibling’s memory, refuses to let him remain anonymous: he gives his brother a story and a name—Musa—and describes the events that led to Musa’s casual murder on a dazzlingly sunny beach. In a bar in Oran, night after night, he ruminates on his solitude, on his broken heart, on his anger with men desperate for a god, and on his disarray when faced with a country that has so disappointed him. A stranger among his own people, he wants to be granted, finally, the right to die. The Stranger is of course central to Daoud’s story, in which he both endorses and criticizes one of the most famous novels in the world. A worthy complement to its great predecessor, The Meursault Investigation is not only a profound meditation on Arab identity and the disastrous effects of colonialism in Algeria, but also a stunning work of literature in its own right, told in a unique and affecting voice.
