Blaise Pascal

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Barry Miles

"The Beat Hotel has been closed for nearly forty years. But for a brief period - from just after the publication of Howl in 1957 until the building was sold in 1963 - it was home to Allen Ginsberg, William Burroughs, Gregory Corso, Brion Gysin, Peter Orlovsky, Harold Norse, and a host of other luminaries of the Beat Generation. Now, Barry Miles - acclaimed author of many books on the Beats and a personal acquaintance of many of them - vividly excavates this remarkable period and restores it to a historical picture that has, until now, been skewed in favor of the two coasts of America." "A cheap rooming house on the bohemian Left Bank, the hotel was inhabited mostly by writers and artists, and its communal atmosphere spurred the Beats to incredible heights of creativity."--BOOK JACKET.

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Janet Malcolm

"How had the pair of elderly Jewish lesbians survived the Nazis?” Janet Malcolm asks at the beginning of this extraordinary work of literary biography and investigative journalism. The pair, of course, is Gertrude Stein, the modernist master whose charm was as conspicuous as her fatness” and thin, plain, tense, sour” Alice B. Toklas, the worker bee” who ministered to Stein’s needs throughout their forty-year expatriate marriage.” As Malcolm pursues the truth of the couple’s charmed life in a village in Vichy France, her subject becomes the larger question of biographical truth. The instability of human knowledge is one of our few certainties,” she writes. The portrait of the legendary couple that emerges from this work is unexpectedly charged. The two world wars Stein and Toklas lived through together are paralleled by the private war that went on between them. This war, as Malcolm learned, sometimes flared into bitter combat. Two Lives is also a work of literary criticism. Even the most hermetic of [Stein’s] writings are works of submerged autobiography,” Malcolm writes. The key of 'I' will not unlock the door to their meaning you need a crowbar for that but will sometimes admit you to a kind of anteroom of suggestion.” Whether unpacking the accessible Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, in which Stein solves the koan of autobiography,” or wrestling with The Making of Americans, a masterwork of magisterial disorder,” Malcolm is stunningly perceptive.

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Gilles Plazy

"Pendant une quarantaine d'années les surréalistes, autour d'André Breton, ont inventé dans Paris une poétique de la ville selon laquelle le rêve transfigure le réel. Ils y ont vécu des aventures surprenantes, dialogué avec des fantômes, suscité des magies nouvelles. Paris fut ainsi pour eux le champ magnétique, érotique, en lequel la poésie se dynamisait du frisson de l'inconnu, de l'inattendu, les invitant sans cesse à prendre le large. Du Panthéon, où naquit le surréalisme, à ta place Blanche où fut le foyer du mouvement, de Montmartre à Montparnasse, de la place Dauphine à la rue La Fayette, de la tour Saint-Jacques à la porte Saint-Denis, dans les rues et les cafés, ils ont célébré l'amour, ta poésie et la liberté."--Page 4 of cover.

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Paul Hoffman

Biography of the young Brazilian who moved to Paris where he experimented with flight until Europeans came to call him the man who conquered air.