Jules Roy

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Annie Ernaux

She is thirty years old, a teacher married to an executive, mother of two infant sons. She lives in a nice apartment. And yet she is a frozen woman. Like millions of others, she has felt her enthusiasm and curiosity - the strength and happiness that once were a part of her - ebb and then disappear under the weight of her daily routine. The very condition that everyone around her seems to consider normal for a woman is killing her. In A Frozen Woman, Annie Ernaux shows once again her gift for lending power and authenticity to a distinctly womanist voice. While each of Ernaux's books contains an autobiographical element, A Frozen Woman, is the most autobiographical of all. Where A Woman's Story described her relationship with her mother, and Simple Passion described a fleeting love affair with a younger man, A Frozen Woman concentrates the spotlight on Annie herself. Mixing affection, rage and bitterness, this is Ernaux at her most harrowing, affecting and inspiring.

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Michel Surya

"Georges Bataille (1867-1962), philosopher, writer and founder of the influential literary review Critique, had an enormous impact on the thinking of Foucault, Derrida and Baudrillard, and his ideas have been the subjects of recent debates in a wide range of disciplines." "In this biography Michel Surya enters into a complicity with Bataille's oeuvre to provide a detailed exposition of its themes as they developed against the backdrop of his life. The essence of Bataille's life and work were defined by transience and effacement, reflecting a will both to contest the impermanence of things and to confront death. His troubled childhood, his relationships with surrealism and his paradoxical position at the heart of twentieth-century French thought are enriched here with testimonies from Bataille's closest acquaintances, making this a vivid and detailed study. Revealing the context in which he worked, and the ways in which his work and ideas took shape, Surya sheds light on a figure Foucault described as 'one of the most important writers of the century.'"--BOOK JACKET.

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Hubert Nyssen

Anecdotes, réflexions sur la littérature, la critique, le milieu littéraire et journalistique et croquis d'auteurs (Nina Berberova, François Nourissier, Nicolâas Guillén, etc.). Le journal d'un éditeur de premier plan qui se demande qu'est-ce qui le fait courir de Paris à Tel Aviv, d'Arles à Amsterdam, de New York à Montréal, de La Havane à Princeton (c'est l'amour de la littérature universelle).

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Dan Hofstadter

Hofstadter "shows how these rediscovered documents [forgotten personal writing which has resurfaced in France] bear on the erotic lives of their writers, and how the fine French tradition of conducting love affairs developed as an art form....The romantic trajectory runs from Benjamin Constant and Mme. de Staël to the beautiful Mme. Récamier and her lover Chateaubriand; from George Sand and Alfred de Musset to Mme. de Caillavet and Anatole France; and it concludes with a touching portrait, based partly on still-unpublished sources, of the girl who became the model for Proust's Gilberte."--Jacket.