Under the reign of Louis XV, corruption and intrigue have been allowed to blossom in France. Lord Justin Alastair, the notorious Duke of Avon, is known for his coldness of manner, his remarkable omniscience, and his debauched lifestyle. Society believes the worst of Justin, who is clearly proud of his sobriquet, 'Satanas'.

In a dark Parisian back alley, he is accosted by Leon, a young person dressed in ragged boy's clothing, running away from a brutal rustic guardian. The Duke buys Leon, a redheaded urchin with strangely familiar looks, who is, in fact, Leonie. She serves him with deep devotion.

Among the splendours of Versailles and the dignified mansions of Georgian England, Justin begins to unfold his sinister plans. Leonie plays a fine part in the Duke's long-overdue schemes to avenge himself on the Comte de St Vire. The Duke's plan is simple: parade delicately handsome Leonie in front of his enemy and transform her into the toast of the town, before reclaiming her birthright and destroying her true father in the process.

But the Duke hadn't expected Leonie's breathtaking transformation or the tender emotions she awakened. And he'd already set his dangerous scheme in motion...

A woman is pulled into a love affair with a radical activist, unknowingly echoing her family's dangerous past and risking the foundations of her future in this electrifying novel. The course of your life can change with one split-second decision.

Minnow has always tried to lead the life her single father modeled—private, quiet, hardworking, apolitical. So she is rocked when an instinctive decision to help a student makes her the extremely public face of a scandal in the small town where she teaches. As tensions rise, vandalism and death threats follow, and an overwhelmed Minnow flees to a teaching position in Paris.

There, Minnow falls into an exhilarating and all-consuming relationship with Charles, a young Frenchman whose activism has placed him at odds with his powerful family. As Minnow is pulled into the daring protest Charles and his friends are planning, she unknowingly draws close to repeating a secret tragedy from her family's past. For her father wasn’t always the restrained, conservative man he appears today. There are things he has taken great pains to bury from his family and from the world.

In 1968, Keen is avoiding the Vietnam draft by pursuing a PhD at Harvard. He lives his life in the basement chemistry lab, studiously avoiding the news. But when he unexpectedly falls in love with Olya, a fiery community organizer, he is consumed by her world and loses sight of his own. Learning that his deferment has ended and he’s been drafted, Keen agrees to participate in the latest action that Olya is organizing—one with more dangerous and far-reaching consequences than he could have imagined.

Minnow’s and Keen's intertwining stories take us through the turmoil of the late sixties student movements and into the chaos of the modern world. Exploding with suspense, heart, and intelligence, There's Going to Be Trouble is a story about revolution, legacy, passionate love, and how we live with the consequences of our darkest secrets.

Since his death in 1961 at the age of thirty-six, Frantz Fanon has loomed ever larger. He was the intellectual activist of the postcolonial era, and his writings about race, revolution, and the psychology of power have inspired radical movements across the world. But who was Frantz Fanon? In this searching biography, Adam Shatz tells the story of Fanon's stunning journey--from a civil servant's modest home in Martinique to fighting in the French Army during World War II, practicing psychiatry in rural France and Algeria, and joining the Algerian independence struggle, where he became a spokesman, diplomat, and clandestine strategist before his death at a military hospital in Maryland.

Shatz situates Fanon's writings in the context of his close and contested relations with the French intellectuals of his era, as well as his encounters with psychiatric patients, guerrilla fighters, and the early leaders of independent African states. Today, Fanon's Black Skin, White Masks and The Wretched of the Earth have become canonical texts of the Black and global radical imagination, comparable to James Baldwin's essays in their influence. And yet they are little understood. In The Rebel's Clinic, Shatz offers a dramatic reconstruction of Fanon's extraordinary life--and a guide to the books that underlie Black Lives Matter and other groups attempting to challenge white supremacy and racial capitalism.

The Postcard is a moving novel from the bestselling author Anne Berest. In January 2003, the Berest family receive a mysterious, unsigned postcard. On one side was an image of the Opéra Garnier; on the other, the names of their relatives who were killed in Auschwitz: Ephraïm, Emma, Noémie, and Jacques.

Years later, Anne sought to find the truth behind this postcard. She journeys 100 years into the past, tracing the lives of her ancestors from their flight from Russia following the revolution, their journey to Latvia, Palestine, and Paris, the war and its aftermath. What emerges is a thrilling and sweeping tale based on true events that shatters her certainties about her family, her country, and herself.

At once a gripping investigation into family secrets, a poignant tale of mothers and daughters, and an enthralling portrait of 20th-century Parisian intellectual and artistic life, The Postcard tells the story of a family devastated by the Holocaust and yet somehow restored by love and the power of storytelling.

Imaginez une Terre poncée, avec en son centre une bande de cinq mille kilomètres de large et sur ses franges un miroir de glace à peine rayable, inhabité.

Imaginez qu’un vent féroce en rince la surface. Que les villages qui s’y sont accrochés, avec leurs maisons en goutte d’eau, les chars à voile qui la strient, les airpailleurs debout en plein flot, tous résistent.

Imaginez qu’en Extrême-Aval ait été formé un bloc d’élite d’une vingtaine d’enfants aptes à remonter au cran, rafale en gueule, leur vie durant, le vent jusqu’à sa source, à ce jour jamais atteinte : l’Extrême-Amont.

Mon nom est Sov Strochnis, scribe. Mon nom est Caracole le troubadour et Oroshi Melicerte, aéromaître. Je m’appelle aussi Golgoth, traceur de la Horde, Arval l’éclaireur et parfois même Larco lorsque je braconne l’azur à la cage volante. Ensemble, nous formons la Horde du Contrevent.

Il en a existé trente-trois en huit siècles, toutes infructueuses. Je vous parle au nom de la trente-quatrième : sans doute l’ultime.

Nana is a captivating novel by the French naturalist author Émile Zola. It is the ninth installment in the 20-volume Les Rougon-Macquart series, which presents "The Natural and Social History of a Family under the Second Empire."

The story follows Nana Coupeau, who rises from the grimy streets of Paris to become a high-class escort. Born to drunken parents in the slums, Nana's journey to the top of society is both mesmerizing and destructive. She uses her charm and sensual skills to captivate and eventually ruin the lives of the men who fall for her allure.

Nana becomes a symbol of a corrupt society, and her hedonistic appetite for luxury and pleasure knows no bounds. The novel vividly portrays the opulence and decadence of her world, making Nana a mythical figure in French realism.

Émile Zola masterfully captures the essence of the Second Empire's society, presenting a compelling narrative that explores themes of power, desire, and downfall.

Handsome would-be poet Lucien Chardon is poor and naive, but highly ambitious. Failing to make his name in his dull provincial hometown, he is taken up by a patroness, the captivating married woman Madame de Bargeton, and prepares to forge his way in the glamorous beau monde of Paris.

But Lucien has entered a world far more dangerous than he realized, as Madame de Bargeton's reputation becomes compromised and the fickle, venomous denizens of the courts and salons conspire to keep him out of their ranks. Lucien eventually learns that, wherever he goes, talent counts for nothing in comparison to money, intrigue, and unscrupulousness.

Lost Illusions is one of the greatest novels in the rich procession of the Comédie Humaine, Balzac's panoramic social and moral history of his times.

The Heart takes place over twenty-four intense hours following a tragic accident involving three teenage boys. After a morning of surfing, a car crash leaves one boy brain-dead, while his heart continues to beat.

This audacious novel explores the emotional journey of all involved in the heart transplant that follows. Life is taken from a young man and offered to a woman on the brink of death. With gorgeous, ruminative prose, the story delves into the deepest feelings of grieving parents and dedicated medical professionals as they navigate profound decisions of life and death.

With the precision of a surgeon and the language of a poet, de Kerangal crafts an epic tale of grief, hope, and survival. This novel is as stylistically bold as it is emotionally explosive, mesmerizing readers worldwide.

La Bête humaine is a gripping tale where the instinct of death looms large over the protagonist, Jacques Lantier, a locomotive mechanic. He is acutely aware of how this instinct disguises itself under various appetites, and how the Idea of Death lurks beneath all fixed ideas.

Jacques, a young man, distances himself from women, wine, money, and ambitions, having renounced his instincts. His sole focus is his machine. He understands that the cerebral fissure introduces death into all instincts, working through them. At the origin or end of every instinct, it is about killing, and perhaps also being killed.

Zola, in this novel, powerfully evokes life at the end of the Second Empire in France, where society seemed to be hurtling into the future like the new locomotives and railways it was building. While expressing hope that human nature evolves through education and gradually frees itself of inherited evil, he constantly reminds us of the beast within.

The Wall, the lead story in this collection, introduces three political prisoners on the night prior to their execution. Through the gaze of an impartial doctor—seemingly there for the men's solace—their mental descent is charted in exquisite, often harrowing detail. And as the morning draws inexorably closer, the men cross the psychological wall between life and death, long before the first shot rings out.

This brilliant snapshot of life in anguish is the perfect introduction to a collection of stories where the neurosis of the modern world is mirrored in the lives of the people that inhabit it.

Existentialism Is a Humanism was written to correct common misconceptions about Jean-Paul Sartre's thought. Sartre, the most dominant European intellectual of the post-World War II decades, accepted an invitation to speak on October 29, 1945, at the Club Maintenant in Paris. The unstated objective of his lecture was to expound his philosophy as a form of existentialism, a term much bandied about at the time. Sartre asserted that existentialism was essentially a doctrine for philosophers, though, ironically, he was about to make it accessible to a general audience.

The published text of his lecture quickly became one of the bibles of existentialism and made Sartre an international celebrity. The idea of freedom occupies the center of Sartre’s doctrine. Man, born into an empty, godless universe, is nothing to begin with. He creates his essence—his self, his being—through the choices he freely makes (“existence precedes essence”). Were it not for the contingency of his death, he would never end. Choosing to be this or that is to affirm the value of what we choose. In choosing, therefore, we commit not only ourselves but all of mankind.

This book presents a new English translation of Sartre’s 1945 lecture and his analysis of Camus’s The Stranger, along with a discussion of these works by acclaimed Sartre biographer Annie Cohen-Solal. This edition is a translation of the 1996 French edition, which includes Arlette Elkaïm-Sartre’s introduction and a Q&A with Sartre about his lecture.

The Wild Ass's Skin is Honoré de Balzac's 1831 novel that tells the story of a young man, Raphaël de Valentin, who discovers a piece of shagreen, in this case a rough untanned piece of a wild ass's skin, which has the magical property of granting wishes.

However, the fulfillment of the wisher's desire comes at a cost; after each wish, the skin shrinks a little bit and consumes the physical energy of the wisher.

The Wild Ass's Skin is at once both a work of incredible realism, in the descriptions of Parisian life and culture at the time, and also a work of supernatural fantasy, in the desires that are fulfilled by the wild ass's skin. Balzac uses this fantastical device masterfully to depict the complexity of human nature in civilized society.

A dazzling new novel of friendship and redemption in the face of tragedy and loss set in 1980s Chicago and contemporary Paris.

In 1985, Yale Tishman, the development director for an art gallery in Chicago, is about to pull off an amazing coup, bringing in an extraordinary collection of 1920s paintings as a gift to the gallery. Yet as his career begins to flourish, the carnage of the AIDS epidemic grows around him. One by one, his friends are dying and after his friend Nico's funeral, the virus circles closer and closer to Yale himself. Soon the only person he has left is Fiona, Nico's little sister.

Thirty years later, Fiona is in Paris tracking down her estranged daughter who disappeared into a cult. While staying with an old friend, a famous photographer who documented the Chicago crisis, she finds herself finally grappling with the devastating ways AIDS affected her life and her relationship with her daughter. The two intertwining stories take us through the heartbreak of the eighties and the chaos of the modern world, as both Yale and Fiona struggle to find goodness in the midst of disaster.

Fresh Water for Flowers is a delightful, atmospheric, absorbing fairy tale full of poetry, generosity, and warmth. Violette Toussaint is the caretaker at a cemetery in a small town in Bourgogne. Random visitors, regulars, and, most notably, her colleagues—three gravediggers, three groundskeepers, and a priest—visit her as often as possible to warm themselves in her lodge, where laughter, companionship, and occasional tears mix with the coffee that she offers them. Her daily life is lived to the rhythms of their hilarious and touching confidences.

Violette’s routine is disrupted one day by the arrival of a man—Julien Sole, local police chief—who insists on depositing the ashes of his recently departed mother on the gravesite of a complete stranger. It soon becomes clear that the grave Julien is looking for belongs to his mother’s one-time lover, and that his mother’s story of clandestine love is intertwined with Violette’s own secret past.

With Fresh Water for Flowers, Valérie Perrin has given readers a funny, moving, intimately told story of a woman who believes obstinately in happiness. Perrin has the rare talent of illuminating what is exceptional and poetic in what seems ordinary.

Thérèse Raquin is one of Zola's most famous realist novels, a clinically observed, sinister tale of adultery and murder among the lower classes in nineteenth-century Parisian society.

Set in the claustrophobic atmosphere of a dingy haberdasher's shop in the passage du Pont-Neuf in Paris, this powerful novel tells how the heroine and her lover, Laurent, kill her husband, Camille, but are subsequently haunted by visions of the dead man, and prevented from enjoying the fruits of their crime.

Zola's shocking tale dispassionately dissects the motivations of his characters—mere "human beasts", who kill in order to satisfy their lust—and stands as a key manifesto of the French Naturalist movement, of which the author was the founding father. Published in 1867, this is Zola's most important work before the Rougon-Macquart series and introduces many of the themes that can be traced through the later novel cycle.

For this complete, authoritative English-language edition, D. J. Enright has revised the late Terence Kilmartin's acclaimed reworking of C. K. Scott Moncrieff's translation to take into account the new definitive French editions of À la recherche du temps perdu (the final volume of these new editions was published by the Bibliothèque de la Pléiade in 1989).

She stole his roses. Fleeing the spotlight, burnt out rock star Layla—“Belle”—Dubois seeks refuge in the south of France. That old, half-forgotten heritage in a valley of roses seems like a good place to soothe a wounded heart. She certainly doesn’t expect the most dangerous threat to her heart to pounce on her as soon as she sets foot on the land.

He wants them back. Matt didn’t mean to growl at her quite that loudly. But—his roses! She can’t have his roses. Even if she does have all those curls and green eyes and, and, and…what was he growling about again?

Or maybe he just wants her. When an enemy invades his valley and threatens his home, heart, and livelihood, Matthieu Rosier really knows only one way to defend himself. It might involve kissing. And that might be just the start.

While flying an Allied fighter plane from Paris to England, American ATA pilot and amateur poet, Rose Justice, is captured by the Nazis and sent to Ravensbrück, the notorious women's concentration camp. Trapped in horrific circumstances, Rose finds hope in the impossible through the loyalty, bravery, and friendship of her fellow prisoners. But will that be enough to endure the fate that's in store for her?

Elizabeth Wein, author of the critically-acclaimed and best-selling Code Name Verity, delivers another stunning WWII thriller. The unforgettable story of Rose Justice is forged from heart-wrenching courage, resolve, and the slim, bright chance of survival.

Coeur pourri de laine (DF) est un livre fascinant écrit par Lucio Rosenkreutz. Le récit est né à Strasbourg, France, et a été achevé le 14 juillet 2014. Ce livre offre une narration linguistique extensive qui plonge le lecteur dans les événements dramatiques d'un homicide survenu à Madrid, Espagne.

C'est une continuation captivante du chapitre nº 10 du livre: Grey Angel 2014. Les lecteurs seront tenus en haleine par le style unique de Rosenkreutz, qui mêle mystère et intrigue au cœur de la littérature européenne moderne.

From the highly acclaimed, multiple award-winning Anthony Doerr, All the Light We Cannot See is a stunningly ambitious and beautiful novel about a blind French girl and a German boy whose paths collide in occupied France as both try to survive the devastation of World War II. Marie Laure lives with her father in Paris within walking distance of the Museum of Natural History where he works as the master of the locks (there are thousands of locks in the museum). When she is six, she goes blind, and her father builds her a model of their neighborhood, every house, every manhole, so she can memorize it with her fingers and navigate the real streets with her feet and cane.

When the Germans occupy Paris, father and daughter flee to Saint-Malo on the Brittany coast, where Marie-Laure's agoraphobic great uncle lives in a tall, narrow house by the sea wall. In another world in Germany, an orphan boy, Werner, grows up with his younger sister, Jutta, both enchanted by a crude radio Werner finds. He becomes a master at building and fixing radios, a talent that wins him a place at an elite and brutal military academy and, ultimately, makes him a highly specialized tracker of the Resistance. Werner travels through the heart of Hitler Youth to the far-flung outskirts of Russia, and finally into Saint-Malo, where his path converges with Marie-Laure.

Doerr's combination of soaring imagination with observation is electric. Deftly interweaving the lives of Marie-Laure and Werner, Doerr illuminates the ways, against all odds, people try to be good to one another. Ten years in the writing, All the Light We Cannot See is his most ambitious and dazzling work.

First published in 1877, these three stories are dominated by questions of doubt, love, loneliness, and religious experience; together they confirm Flaubert as a master of the short story.

A Simple Heart (also published as A Simple Soul), relates the story of Félicité, an uneducated serving-woman who retains her Catholic faith despite a life of desolation and loss.

The Legend of Saint Julian Hospitator, inspired by a stained-glass window in Rouen cathedral, describes the fate of a sadistic hunter destined to murder his own parents. The blend of faith and cruelty that dominates this story may also be found in Herodias, a reworking of the tale of Salome and John the Baptist.

The Myth of Sisyphus is a profound and moving philosophical statement by Albert Camus. In this work, Camus poses the fundamental question: Is life worth living?

If human existence holds no significance, what can keep us from suicide? As Camus argues, if there is no God to give meaning to our lives, humans must take on that purpose themselves. This is our "absurd" task, like Sisyphus forever rolling his rock up a hill, as the inevitability of death constantly overshadows us.

Written during the bleakest days of the Second World War, The Myth of Sisyphus argues for an acceptance of reality that encompasses revolt, passion, and, above all, liberty. This volume contains several other essays, including lyrical evocations of the sunlit cities of Algiers and Oran, the settings of his great novels The Outsider and The Plague.

Camus' writings are hymns to the physical world and the elemental pleasures of living, encouraging us to embrace life even in the face of its absurdity.

The Last Day of a Condemned Man (1829) is a short novel by Victor Hugo. Having witnessed several executions by guillotine as a young man, Hugo devoted himself in his art and political life to opposing the death penalty in France. Praised by Dostoevsky as "absolutely the most real and truthful of everything that Hugo wrote," The Last Day of a Condemned Man is a powerful story from an author who defined nineteenth-century French literature.

If you knew when and where you would die, how would you spend your final moments? For Hugo’s unnamed narrator, such an existential question is made reality. Sentenced to death for an unspecified crime, he reflects on his life as its last seconds wane in the shadows of a cramped prison cell. Recording his emotional state, observations, and conversations with a priest and fellow prisoner, the condemned man forces us to not only recognize his humanity, but question our own.

With a beautifully designed cover and professionally typeset manuscript, this edition of Victor Hugo’s The Last Day of a Condemned Man is a classic work of French literature reimagined for modern readers.

The Truth About the Harry Quebert Affair is more than just a crime story. It has been described as a big, fat, intelligent thriller that has captivated readers and critics alike.

On August 30, 1975, the small town of Somerset, New Hampshire, was shaken by the disappearance of a young girl, marking the day it lost its innocence. That fateful summer, Harry Quebert, an author struggling with his craft, fell in love with fifteen-year-old Nola Kellergan. Decades later, Nola's body is unearthed in Quebert's garden, along with a manuscript of the novel that skyrocketed him to fame. Quebert becomes the prime suspect in a case that captures the nation's attention.

Marcus Goldman, Quebert's most talented student, seeks to exonerate his mentor while overcoming his own writer's block. As he delves into the mystery, his efforts to write a new bestseller become intertwined with the case, and the story he's writing starts to reflect real-life events in eerie ways. The country is enthralled by the enigma of 'The Girl Who Touched the Heart of America', but as with Nola's enigmatic life, in death, things are not as they seem.

This novel promises to be a thrilling journey that questions the boundaries between truth and fiction, love and memory, and ultimately, innocence and guilt.

Boris Vian was a jack of all trades, although unfortunately his name was Boris and "Boris of all trades" never took off as a turn of phrase. Nevertheless, Vian was a great songwriter, playwright, singer, jazz critic, and, of course, novelist. Vian's 1947 novel Autumn in Peking (L'Automne à Pékin) is perhaps Vian's most slapstick work, with an added amount of despair in its exotic recipe for a violent cocktail drink.

The story takes place in the imaginary desert called Exopotamie where all the leading characters take part in the building of a train station with tracks that go nowhere. Houses and buildings are destroyed to build this unnecessary structure - and in Vian's world, waste not, make not.

In Alistair Rolls' pioneering study of Vian's novels, "The Flight of the Angels," he expresses that Exopotamie is a thinly disguised version of Paris, where after the war, the city started changing its previous centuries of architecture to something more modern. Yes, something dull to take the place of what was exciting and mysterious.

Vian, in a mixture of great humor and an unequal amount of disgust, introduces various 'eccentric' characters in this 'desert' adventure, such as Anne and Angel who are best friends; and Rochelle who is in love and sleeps with Anne, while Angel is madly in love with her. Besides the trio, there is also Doctor Mangemanche; the archeologist Athanagore Porphyroginite, his aide, Cuivre; and Pipo - all of them in a locality similar to Lewis Carroll's Alice in Wonderland, where there is a tinge of darkness and anything is possible, except for happiness.

The secret behind France's astonishingly well-behaved children. When American journalist Pamela Druckerman has a baby in Paris, she doesn't aspire to become a "French parent." French parenting isn't a known thing, like French fashion or French cheese. Even French parents themselves insist they aren't doing anything special.

Yet, the French children Druckerman knows sleep through the night at two or three months old while those of her American friends take a year or more. French kids eat well-rounded meals that are more likely to include braised leeks than chicken nuggets. And while her American friends spend their visits resolving spats between their kids, her French friends sip coffee while the kids play.

With a notebook stashed in her diaper bag, Druckerman-a former reporter for The Wall Street Journal-sets out to learn the secrets to raising a society of good little sleepers, gourmet eaters, and reasonably relaxed parents. She discovers that French parents are extremely strict about some things and strikingly permissive about others. And she realizes that to be a different kind of parent, you don't just need a different parenting philosophy. You need a very different view of what a child actually is.

Set against the backdrop of World War II, Code Name Verity is a compelling tale of friendship, bravery, and sacrifice. After a British spy plane crashes in Nazi-occupied France, the story unfolds through the eyes of a survivor who is caught by the Gestapo. Facing the threat of execution, she must decide whether to reveal her mission or protect her secrets at all costs.

Through her confession, we learn about her intense bond with the pilot Maddie, and the events that led to their fateful flight. Elizabeth Wein delivers a story that explores the depths of human courage and the unbreakable spirit of two young women determined to survive in a world at war.

The pain of Lucile, my mother, was a part of our childhood and later our adult lives. This pain, undoubtedly, constitutes my sister and me, yet any attempt at explanation is doomed to failure. Writing cannot resolve it; at most, it allows me to pose questions and interrogate memory.

The family of Lucile, ours consequently, has throughout its history sparked numerous hypotheses and comments. People I encountered during my research speak of fascination; I often heard this in my childhood. My family embodies what joy has of the most noisy, the most spectacular, the tireless echo of the dead, and the resounding disaster. Today I also know it illustrates, like so many other families, the power of destruction of the Word, and that of silence.

The book, perhaps, would be nothing other than that: the narrative of this quest, containing within itself its own genesis, its narrative wanderings, its unfinished attempts. But it would be this momentum, from me towards her, hesitant and unfulfilled.

In this dazzling investigation at the heart of family memory, where the most luminous memories meet the most buried secrets, Delphine de Vigan unfolds all our lives, our flaws, and our own wounds with strength.

Exercises in Style presents a simple plot: a man engages in an argument with another passenger on a bus. However, this anecdote is retold ninety-nine times, each in a radically different style. Imagine it as a sonnet, an opera, in slang, and in many more permutations. This virtuoso set of variations acts as a linguistic rust-remover and a guide to literary forms.

Longue confession, Le Lys dans la vallée dépeint l’amour passionné et quasi incestueux d’un jeune homme au sortir de l’adolescence, Félix de Vandenesse, pour une femme mûre, Madame de Mortsauf. À travers elle, Balzac dresse le portrait d’une aristocratie décadente : héritiers de la maladie suspecte de leur père, ses enfants sont condamnés à une vie fébrile, tandis qu’elle leur sacrifie son bonheur.

Félix n’a jamais connu ni l’amour maternel ni celui des femmes : attiré par l’entrave qui pèse sur le corps et la vie de cette mère, il s’ouvre à un érotisme étrange et morbide. Félix et Henriette, ces deux êtres qui souffrent, s’unissent pour opposer à la violence du monde le refuge d’un amour impossible.

Parfois comparée à la princesse de Clèves, en raison de son refus de se donner à celui qu’elle aime, Henriette de Mortsauf en constitue véritablement l’envers monstrueux. Chasteté ne rime pas toujours avec vertu : alors que Félix épuise son ardeur à dérober cette volupté oppressée, le jeune homme est la proie du désir rapace que nourrit la maladie pour la santé, la mort pour la vie.

Pourchassant l’odeur obsédante du lys, Balzac débusque le désir jusqu’en cette vallée qu’on ne traverse qu’au prix d’une fièvre d’amour et d’agonie.

2084. Orwell est loin désormais. Le totalitarisme a pris les traits de la social-démocratie. Le citoyen ne s'opprime plus, il se fabrique, à la pâte à norme, au confort, au consensus.

Au cœur de cette glu, un mouvement : la Volte, dont le Dehors est le pays, et subvertir, la seule arme. Emmenés par Capt, philosophe et stratège, le peintre Kamio et le fulgurant Slift que rien ne bloque ni ne borne, ils iront au bout de leur volution. En perdant beaucoup. En gagnant tout.

La Zone du Dehors est un livre de combat contre nos sociétés de contrôle. Celles que nos gouvernements, nos multinationales, nos technologies et nos médias nous tissent aux fibres, tranquillement. Avec notre plus complice consentement. Peut-être est-il temps d'apprendre à boxer chaos debout contre le swing de la norme?

Explosion in Paris is the story of one woman's determination to better her life because she has finally found the man of her dreams! By refusing to accept her husband's death sentence assessment of her soul, Angela Briann Scott is challenging herself to reach beyond her limits. This is especially true since her accidental meeting with the devastatingly handsome Ross Leigh Stafford. He's a man of high principles, irreproachable character, unsinkable spirit, and unwavering compassion, all the qualities that her husband, Mitch, is seriously lacking.

Angie's adopted country of France glows with charm and beauty through her eyes. By reinventing herself to save her life, she discovers her true essence and she develops a strong sense of self-worth. Her impressive success and enduring strength tell a story that will keep readers engrossed to the very end!

The Temptation of St. Antony is a profound work that deeply influenced the young Freud and served as an inspiration for many artists. This book was Flaubert's lifelong endeavor, taking thirty years to complete.

Based on the story of the third-century saint who lived on an isolated mountaintop in the Egyptian desert, it presents a fantastical narrative of one night during which Anthony is besieged by carnal temptations and philosophical doubt.

Les Mains libres est un modèle de complicité artistique, où deux grands artistes se rencontrent pour créer une œuvre indissociable. Les dessins de Man Ray et les poèmes de Paul Éluard résonnent ensemble de manière intuitive.

Renversant l'ordre habituel des choses, Éluard précise que c'est lui, le poète, qui a "illustré" les dessins de Man Ray. Plutôt que de simples illustrations, les textes et les dessins dialoguent, créant des embarcadères vers des destinations imprévues.

Toutes les pages de ce livre témoignent d'une intuition active et partagée, toujours en mouvement et éclairante. Deux artistes découvrent leur champ commun, avec les mains libres et le bonheur d'être ensemble.

Personne ne l'a vue venir. La Grande Tempête : un ouragan de vent et de neige qui plonge le pays dans l'obscurité et l'effroi.

D'étranges éclairs bleus rampent le long des immeubles, les palpent, à la recherche de leurs proies...

Quand Matt et Tobias se sont éveillés, la Terre n'était plus la même. Désormais seuls, ils vont devoir s'organiser. Pour comprendre. Pour survivre. À cet Autre-Monde.

L'ouverture est le chemin qui te conduira à l'harmonie.
C'est en s'ouvrant que le marchombre perçoit les forces qui constituent l'univers.
C'est en s'ouvrant qu'il les laisse entrer en lui.
C'est en s'ouvrant qu'il peut espérer les comprendre.

Les Fleurs du Mal (The Flowers of Evil) by Charles Baudelaire is a masterwork that scandalized society with its portrayals of sex, same-sex love, death, the corrupting and oppressive power of the modern city, and lost innocence. The book remains powerful and relevant for our time.

In Spleen et idéal, Baudelaire dramatizes the erotic cycle of ecstasy and anguish of sexual and romantic love. Tableaux Parisiens condemns the crushing effects of urban planning on a city's soul and praises the city's anti-heroes, including the deranged and derelict. Le Vin centers on the search for oblivion in drink and drugs. The book explores the many kinds of love that lie outside traditional morality in Fleurs du Mal and rebellion is at the heart of Révolte.

Ellana, l'Envol is a captivating tale of transformation and discovery. With her long, black hair cascading like a curtain before her face, Ellana's stance is a blend of combat readiness and dance-like grace. The energy emanating from her is palpable; she is no longer just a girl, but a bird poised for flight.

Paris in the 1960s. Four patrons of the Condé, a café in the Odéon, chosen from among the bohemian artists and students that make up its clientele, reveal in four narrations the life of Louki, also known as Jacqueline Delanque, and Mme Choureau.

Louki, a young woman who quickly left her husband, wanders through the streets of Paris, pouring out her memories: a difficult childhood, a failed marriage, and a few friendships with the regulars of the café.

The novel is a tapestry of nostalgia, capturing the essence of eternal returns and the search for identity in a city that never sleeps.

Au-dessus des hommes, les Anges.
Au-dessus des Anges, les Dieux.
Au-dessus des Dieux : ?

Le Mystère des Dieux est le troisième volet de la trilogie du Cycle des Dieux. Après Nous, les Dieux (2004) et Le Souffle des Dieux (2005), ce livre continue l'exploration de thèmes philosophiques et spirituels captivants.

The first two stories of a masterwork once thought lost, written by a pre-WWII bestselling author who was deported to Auschwitz and died before her work could be completed. By the early 1940s, when Ukrainian-born Irène Némirovsky began working on what would become Suite Française—the first two parts of a planned five-part novel—she was already a highly successful writer living in Paris. But she was also a Jew, and in 1942 she was arrested and deported to Auschwitz: a month later she was dead at the age of thirty-nine. Two years earlier, living in a small village in central France—where she, her husband, and their two small daughters had fled in a vain attempt to elude the Nazis—she'd begun her novel, a luminous portrayal of a human drama in which she herself would become a victim. When she was arrested, she had completed two parts of the epic, the handwritten manuscripts of which were hidden in a suitcase that her daughters would take with them into hiding and eventually into freedom. Sixty-four years later, at long last, we can read Némirovsky's literary masterpiece.

The first part, "A Storm in June," opens in the chaos of the massive 1940 exodus from Paris on the eve of the Nazi invasion during which several families and individuals are thrown together under circumstances beyond their control. They share nothing but the harsh demands of survival—some trying to maintain lives of privilege, others struggling simply to preserve their lives—but soon, all together, they will be forced to face the awful exigencies of physical and emotional displacement, and the annihilation of the world they know. In the second part, "Dolce," we enter the increasingly complex life of a German-occupied provincial village. Coexisting uneasily with the soldiers billeted among them, the villagers—from aristocrats to shopkeepers to peasants—cope as best they can. Some choose resistance, others collaboration, and as their community is transformed by these acts, the lives of these these men and women reveal nothing less than the very essence of humanity.

Suite Française is a singularly piercing evocation—at once subtle and severe, deeply compassionate, and fiercely ironic—of life and death in occupied France, and a brilliant, profoundly moving work of art.

Et si l'on nous donnait la chance de revenir en arrière ?

Elliott, médecin réputé, père comblé, ne s'est jamais consolé de la disparition d'Ilena, la femme qu'il aimait, morte il y a trente ans. Un jour, par une circonstance extraordinaire, il est ramené dans le passé et rencontre le jeune homme qu'il était alors.

Les années 1970 battent leur plein à San Francisco, Elliott est un jeune médecin passionné et plein d'ambition. Fera-t-il cette fois le geste décisif qui pourrait sauver Ilena?
Saura-t-il modifier son implacable destin ?

The Elegance of the Hedgehog is a novel by the French professor of philosophy, Muriel Barbery. Set within an elegant hôtel particulier in Paris, the story revolves around two main characters: Renée, the concierge, who is typically short, plump, middle-aged, and inconspicuous, with an unexpected passion for art, philosophy, music, and Japanese culture; and Paloma, a twelve-year-old resident of the building, who is talented, precocious, and has decided to end her own life on her thirteenth birthday unless she can find something worth living for.

The narrative follows Renée who, despite her position, conceals a world of intellectual wealth and refined tastes beneath a veneer of simplicity. Similarly, Paloma hides her exceptional intelligence behind the facade of a mediocre pre-teen. When a wealthy Japanese man named Ozu arrives at the building, their lives begin to change as they discover kindred spirits in each other.

Humorous and full of biting wit, the story exalts the quiet victories of the inconspicuous and explores rich secret lives hidden beneath conventional exteriors, evoking a sense of kinship and understanding of human complexities.

A worldwide phenomenon and the most important French novelist since Camus, Michel Houellebecq now delivers his magnum opus–a tale of our present circumstances told from the future, when humanity as we know it has vanished. Surprisingly poignant, philosophically compelling, and occasionally laugh-out-loud funny, The Possibility of an Island is at once an indictment, an elegy, and a celebration of everything we have and are at risk of losing. It is a masterpiece from one of the world’s most innovative writers.

Internationally acclaimed play of cross-cultural friendship set in Paris in the 1960s. Thirteen-year-old Moses lives in the shadow of his less-than-loving father. When he's caught stealing from wise old shopkeeper Monsieur Ibrahim, he discovers an unlikely friend and a whole new world.

Together they embark on a journey that takes them from the streets of Paris to the whirling dervishes of the Golden Crescent. This delightful, moving play has already been a huge hit in Paris and New York.

Sodom and Gomorrah explores the complex themes of homosexual love, both male and female, and the destructive nature of sexual jealousy. Within its pages, Proust offers an unforgiving analysis of the decadent high society of Paris and the rise of a philistine bourgeoisie poised to supplant it.

Characters who had lesser roles in earlier volumes now reappear in a different light and take center stage, notably Albertine, with whom the narrator believes he is in love, and the insanely haughty Baron de Charlus.

This volume is a testament to Proust's ability to weave intricate narratives that delve deeply into the human psyche, making it a critical piece of his monumental series, À la recherche du temps perdu.

The Guermantes Way is the third volume in Marcel Proust's monumental series, In Search of Lost Time. After the relative intimacy of the first two volumes, this installment opens up a vast, dazzling landscape of fashionable Parisian life in the late nineteenth century.

The narrator enters the brilliant, shallow world of the literary and aristocratic salons. Both a salute to, and a devastating satire of a time, place, and culture, this novel defines the great tradition of novels that follow the initiation of a young man into the ways of the world.

This elegantly packaged new translation introduces a new generation of readers to the literary richness of Marcel Proust.