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 New Novel New Wave New Politics written by Lynn A. Higgins and published by U of Nebraska Press. This book was released on 1998-03-01 with total page 276 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Until now, writings on the celebrated movements in literature and film that emerged in France in the mid-1950s - the New Novel and New Wave - have concentrated on their formal innovations, not on their engagement with history or politics. New Novel, New Wave, New Politics overturns this traditional approach. Lynn A. Higgins argues that the New Novelists (e.g., Alain Robbe-Grillet, Claude Simon, Marguerite Duras) and New Wave filmmakers (e.g., Claude Chabrol, Francois Truffaut, Jean-Luc Godard, Alain Resnais) "engage in a kind of historiography.... They enact the conflicts, the double binds of postwar history and representation." Higgins claims that what art historian Serge Guilbaut has said of American Abstract Expressionism is equally true of the New Novel and New Wavethat its aesthetic innovations "provided a way for avant-garde artists to preserve their sense of social 'commitment'... while eschewing the art of propaganda and illustration. It was in a sense a political apoliticism." Higgins shows how the New Novel and New Wave are related developments. "While their individual styles and themes remain distinctive, " she writes, "they share an ecriture that can be described as alternately, or interconnectedly, filmic and novelistic." New Wave filmmakers borrowed novelistic devices and made frequent literary allusions, while the "vision of the novelists is distinctly cinematic." A lively account that takes us to the crossroads where culture and politics meet, New Novel, New Wave, New Politics dramatically revises our view of a whole generation of important, influential artists.
Download or read book The Algerian New Novel written by Valérie K. Orlando and published by University of Virginia Press. This book was released on 2017-05-10 with total page 432 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Disputing the claim that Algerian writing during the struggle against French colonial rule dealt almost exclusively with revolutionary themes, The Algerian New Novel shows how Algerian authors writing in French actively contributed to the experimental forms of the period, expressing a new age literarily as well as politically and culturally. Looking at canonical Algerian literature as part of the larger literary production in French during decolonization, Valérie K. Orlando considers how novels by Rachid Boudjedra, Mohammed Dib, Assia Djebar, Nabile Farès, Yamina Mechakra, and Kateb Yacine both influenced and were reflectors of the sociopolitical and cultural transformation that took place during this period in Algeria. Although their themes were rooted in Algeria, the avant-garde writing styles of these authors were influenced by early twentieth-century American modernists, the New Novelists of 1940s–50s France, and African American authors of the 1950s–60s. This complex mix of influences led Algerian writers to develop a unique modern literary aesthetic to express their world, a tradition of experimentation and fragmentation that still characterizes the work of contemporary Algerian francophone writers.
Download or read book The Paris Labyrinth written by Gilles Legardinier and published by Flammarion. This book was released on 2021-05-12T00:00:00+02:00 with total page 443 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In turn-of-the-twentieth-century France, Vincent - an ingenious designer of secret passages - embarks on a thrilling adventure to unlock ancient mysteries in a quest for a lost treasure. Along the way, he battles against dark forces as he tries to discern who he can trust, while racing against the clock. Vincent knows what it means to keep a secret. With his troupe of talented craftsmen - his only family - he designs hidden compartments for priceless treasures and passages for undetectable escape routes. The rich and powerful who hire him pay handsomely for his work - and for his discretion. As Paris hosts the 1889 World’s Fair, the city fills with visitors who come to see the controversial new Eiffel Tower with its gravity-defying elevators, to discover the latest inventions from across the globe, or to scout for prospective investment opportunities. After Vincent takes on an urgent secret mission, his team suddenly becomes the target of attempted assassinations. In a race against time, as death licks at their heels, they puzzle over who could be behind the violence. A client trying to erase tracks to a secret? The dark forces of the occult somehow provoked by their work? Confronted with mysteries uncovered from the past, and a life-or-death challenge that tests the limits of his ability, Vincent will do everything in his power to thwart the menace and protect his friends... if only he can survive.
Download or read book The Seine The River that Made Paris written by Elaine Sciolino and published by W. W. Norton & Company. This book was released on 2019-10-29 with total page 304 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A vibrant, enchanting tour of the Seine from longtime New York Times foreign correspondent and best-selling author Elaine Sciolino. Elaine Sciolino came to Paris as a young foreign correspondent and was seduced by a river. In The Seine, she tells the story of that river from its source on a remote plateau of Burgundy to the wide estuary where its waters meet the sea, and the cities, tributaries, islands, ports, and bridges in between. Sciolino explores the Seine through its rich history and lively characters: a bargewoman, a riverbank bookseller, a houseboat dweller, a famous cinematographer known for capturing the river’s light. She discovers the story of Sequana—the Gallo-Roman healing goddess who gave the Seine its name—and follows the river through Paris, where it determined the city’s destiny and now snakes through all aspects of daily life. She patrols with river police, rows with a restorer of antique boats, sips champagne at a vineyard along the river, and even dares to go for a swim. She finds the Seine in art, literature, music, and movies from Renoir and Les Misérables to Puccini and La La Land. Along the way, she reveals how the river that created Paris has touched her own life. A powerful afterword tells the dramatic story of how water from the depths of the Seine saved Notre-Dame from destruction during the devastating fire in April 2019. A “storyteller at heart” (June Sawyers, Chicago Tribune) with a “sumptuous eye for detail” (Sinclair McKay, Daily Telegraph), Sciolino braids memoir, travelogue, and history through the Seine’s winding route. The Seine offers a love letter to Paris and the most romantic river in the world, and invites readers to explore its magic for themselves.
Download or read book The Cambridge History of the Novel in French written by Adam Watt and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2021-02-25 with total page 848 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This History is the first in a century to trace the development and impact of the novel in French from its beginnings to the present. Leading specialists explore how novelists writing in French have responded to the diverse personal, economic, socio-political, cultural-artistic and environmental factors that shaped their worlds. From the novel's medieval precursors to the impact of the internet, the History provides fresh accounts of canonical and lesser-known authors, offering a global perspective beyond the national borders of 'the Hexagon' to explore France's colonial past and its legacies. Accessible chapters range widely, including the French novel in Sub-Saharan Africa, data analysis of the novel system in the seventeenth century, social critique in women's writing, Sade's banned works and more. Highlighting continuities and divergence between and within different periods, this lively volume offers routes through a diverse literary landscape while encouraging comparison and connection-making between writers, works and historical periods.
Download or read book Submission written by Michel Houellebecq and published by Random House. This book was released on 2016-09-08 with total page 258 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: As the 2022 French Presidential election looms, two candidates emerge as favourites: Marine Le Pen of the Front National, and the charismatic Muhammed Ben Abbes of the growing Muslim Fraternity. Forming a controversial alliance with the political left to block the Front National’s alarming ascendency, Ben Abbes sweeps to power, and overnight the country is transformed. This proves to be the death knell of French secularism, as Islamic law comes into force: women are veiled, polygamy is encouraged and, for our narrator François – misanthropic, middle-aged and alienated – life is set on a new course. Submission is a devastating satire, comic and melancholy by turns, and a profound meditation on faith and meaning in Western society.
Download or read book A Hero of France written by Alan Furst and published by Random House. This book was released on 2016-05-31 with total page 257 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • From the bestselling master espionage writer, hailed by Vince Flynn as “the best in the business,” comes a riveting novel about the French Resistance in Nazi-occupied Paris. NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY THE WASHINGTON POST 1941. The City of Light is dark and silent at night. But in Paris and in the farmhouses, barns, and churches of the French countryside, small groups of ordinary men and women are determined to take down the occupying forces of Adolf Hitler. Mathieu, a leader of the French Resistance, leads one such cell, helping downed British airmen escape back to England. Alan Furst’s suspenseful, fast-paced thriller captures this dangerous time as no one ever has before. He brings Paris and occupied France to life, along with courageous citizens who outmaneuver collaborators, informers, blackmailers, and spies, risking everything to fulfill perilous clandestine missions. Aiding Mathieu as part of his covert network are Lisette, a seventeen-year-old student and courier; Max de Lyon, an arms dealer turned nightclub owner; Chantal, a woman of class and confidence; Daniel, a Jewish teacher fueled by revenge; Joëlle, who falls in love with Mathieu; and Annemarie, a willful aristocrat with deep roots in France, and a desire to act. As the German military police heighten surveillance, Mathieu and his team face a new threat, dispatched by the Reich to destroy them all. Shot through with the author’s trademark fine writing, breathtaking suspense, and intense scenes of seduction and passion, Alan Furst’s A Hero of France is at once one of the finest novels written about the French Resistance and the most gripping novel yet by the living master of the spy thriller.
Download or read book French Lessons written by Ellen Sussman and published by Ballantine Books. This book was released on 2011-07-05 with total page 257 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A single day in Paris changes the lives of three Americans as they each set off to explore the city with a French tutor, learning about language, love, and loss as their lives intersect in surprising ways. Josie, Riley, and Jeremy have come to the City of Light for different reasons: Josie, a young high school teacher, arrives in hopes of healing a broken heart. Riley, a spirited but lonely expat housewife, struggles to feel connected to her husband and her new country. And Jeremy, the reserved husband of a renowned actress, is accompanying his wife on a film shoot, yet he feels distant from her world. As they meet with their tutors—Josie with Nico, a sensitive poet; Riley with Phillippe, a shameless flirt; and Jeremy with the consummately beautiful Chantal—each succumbs to unexpected passion and unpredictable adventures. Yet as they traverse Paris’s grand boulevards and intimate, winding streets, they uncover surprising secrets about one another—and come to understand long-buried truths about themselves.
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 New Paris written by Lindsey Tramuta and published by Abrams. This book was released on 2017-04-18 with total page 535 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “[Tramuta] draws back the curtain on the city’s hipper, more happening side—as obsessed with coffee, creativity, and brunch as Brooklyn or Berlin.” —My Little Paris The city long-adored for its medieval beauty, old-timey brasseries, and corner cafés has even more to offer today. In the last few years, a flood of new ideas and creative locals has infused a once-static, traditional city with a new open-minded sensibility and energy. Journalist Lindsey Tramuta offers detailed insight into the rapidly evolving worlds of food, wine, pastry, coffee, beer, fashion, and design in the delightful city of Paris. Tramuta puts the spotlight on the new trends and people that are making France’s capital a more whimsical, creative, vibrant, and curious place to explore than its classical reputation might suggest. With hundreds of striking photographs that capture this fresh, animated spirit—and a curated directory of Tramuta’s favorite places to eat, drink, stay, and shop—The New Paris shows us the storied City of Light as never before. “The author’s vibrant and precise command of English frames this lively collection of insights about cultural change and stories regarding multiple chefs and merchants.” —Forbes “As the culinary scene in Paris evolves, a new palate of flavors and styles of eating have emerged, redefining what is ‘French cuisine.’ The New Paris documents these changes through the lens of bakers, coffee roasters, ice cream makers, chefs, and even food truck owners. A thoughtful, and delicious, look at how Paris continues to delight and excite the palates of visitors and locals.” —David Lebovitz, author of My Paris Kitchen
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 The End of Eddy written by Édouard Louis and published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. This book was released on 2017-05-02 with total page 208 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An autobiographical novel about growing up gay in a working-class town in Picardy. “Every morning in the bathroom I would repeat the same phrase to myself over and over again . . . Today I’m really gonna be a tough guy.” Growing up in a poor village in northern France, all Eddy Bellegueule wanted was to be a man in the eyes of his family and neighbors. But from childhood, he was different—“girlish,” intellectually precocious, and attracted to other men. Already translated into twenty languages, The End of Eddy captures the violence and desperation of life in a French factory town. It is also a sensitive, universal portrait of boyhood and sexual awakening. Like Karl Ove Knausgaard or Edmund White, Édouard Louis writes from his own undisguised experience, but he writes with an openness and a compassionate intelligence that are all his own. The result—a critical and popular triumph—has made him the most celebrated French writer of his generation.
Download or read book The Impudent Ones written by Marguerite Duras and published by The New Press. This book was released on 2021-03-09 with total page 271 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Published for the first time in English, the debut novel of Marguerite Duras—renowned author of The Lover and The War—is the story of a family’s moral reckoning and a daughter’s fall from grace Marguerite Duras rose to global stardom with her erotic masterpiece The Lover (L’Amant), which won the prestigious Prix Goncourt, has over a million copies in print in English, has been translated into forty-three languages, and was adapted into a canonical film in 1992. While almost all of Duras’s novels have been translated into English, her debut The Impudent Ones (Les Impudents) has been a glaring exception—until now. Fans of Duras will be thrilled to discover the germ of her bold, vital prose and signature blend of memoir and fiction in this intense and mournful story of the Taneran family, which introduces Duras’s classic themes of familial conflict, illicit romance, and scandal in the sleepy suburbs and southwest provinces of France. Duras’s great gift was her ability to bring vivid and passionate life to characters with whom society may not have sympathized, but with whom readers certainly do. With storytelling that evokes in equal parts beauty and brutality, The Impudent Ones depicts the scalding effects of seduction and disrepute on the soul of a young French girl. Including an essay on the story behind The Impudent Ones by Jean Vallier—biographer of the late Duras—which contextualizes the origins of Duras’s debut novel, this one-of-a-kind publishing endeavor will delight established Duras fans and a new generation of readers alike.
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 A French Novel written by Frédéric Beigbeder and published by HarperCollins UK. This book was released on 2013-07-18 with total page 186 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Arrested for snorting cocaine off a car bonnet, award-winning author and quintessential dilettante Frederic Beigbeder reflects on his troubled childhood, while spending a night in the cells.
Download or read book Degenerative Realism written by Christy Wampole and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2020-06-23 with total page 195 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A new strain of realism has emerged in France. The novels that embody it represent diverse fears—immigration and demographic change, radical Islam, feminism, new technologies, globalization, American capitalism, and the European Union—but these books, often best-sellers, share crucial affinities. In their dystopian visions, the collapse of France, Europe, and Western civilization is portrayed as all but certain and the literary mode of realism begins to break down. Above all, they depict a degenerative force whose effects on the nation and on reality itself can be felt. Examining key novels by Michel Houellebecq, Frédéric Beigbeder, Aurélien Bellanger, Yann Moix, and other French writers, Christy Wampole identifies and critiques this emergent tendency toward “degenerative realism.” She considers the ways these writers draw on social science, the New Journalism of the 1960s, political pamphlets, reportage, and social media to construct an atmosphere of disintegration and decline. Wampole maps how degenerative realist novels explore a world contaminated by conspiracy theories, mysticism, and misinformation, responding to the internet age’s confusion between fact and fiction with a lament for the loss of the real and an unrelenting emphasis on the role of the media in crafting reality. In a time of widespread populist anxieties over the perceived decline of the French nation, this book diagnoses the literary symptoms of today’s reactionary revival.
