La charca del diablo

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Wendy Wasserstein

From the Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright and author of the essay collection Shiksa Goddess ("Utterly delicious"--Judith Thurman), a dazzling debut novel, a comedy about New York's urban gentry living in a post-9/11 world--the arbiters of fashion and the doyennes of charity balls; about the rich and the nouveau rich(er), the glamorous and the desperate to be.We meet Francesca Weissman, the Upper East Side pediatrician rated number one by Manhattan magazine, who takes us into the upper strata of privilege and aspiration (she's originally from Queens with a father in hosiery; life on the fringes of glittering New York is fine with her) . . . Samantha Acton, thoroughbred descendant of the Van Rensselaers and the Carnegies, who defines the social order in the great tradition of Mrs. Astor and Babe Paley . . . Judy Tremont from Modesto, California, daughter of a cop--her life's work, her obsession, is New York society and its richest families . . . Barry Santorini, Republican, moviemaker, winner of twelve Oscars, and his wife, the Italian supermarket heiress and former media rep for Giorgio Armani . . . and many more. As Elements of Style opens out, we see a madcap mosaic of the social lives and mores of twenty-first century Manhattan--of romance, work, family, and friendship. Satiric, fierce, touching--and deliciously Wasserstein."Pure Wendy! She effortlessly makes the leap from stage to page with a novel that is loving, compassionate, flat-out funny. Wendy loved the word 'scintillating,' which is the best way to describe her stunning Elements of Style."--John Guare"Wasserstein gets the trappings and tribulations (of friendship and of romance) right, making her depiction of the rich and fab trying to connect with one another witty and entertaining."--Publishers Weekly"Bold, nimble, and funny to its fingertips, Elements of Style is a delight, a triumph. A book that no self-respecting New Yorker should be without. Those cursed with the hell of multiple residences will self-evidently need several copies--and spares, for houseguests."--Flora FraserFrom the Hardcover edition.

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Gerald Martin

The first full and authorized biography of the 1982 winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature--the most popular international novelist of the last fifty years.Over the course of the nearly two decades Gerald Martin gave to the research and writing of this masterly biography, he not only spent many hours in conversation with Gabriel Garcia Marquez himself but also interviewed more than three hundred others, including Garcia Marquez's wife and sons, mother and siblings, literary agent and translators; Carlos Fuentes, Mario Vargas Llosa, and Alvaro Mutis, among other writers; Fidel Castro and Felipe Gonzalez, among other political figures; his closest friends as well as those who consider themselves his detractors. The result is a revelation of both the writer and the man.Garcia Marquez's story is a remarkable one. Born in 1927, raised by grandparents and a clutch of aunts in a small backwater town in Colombia, the shy, intelligent boy matured into a reserved young man, first working as a provincial journalist and later as a foreign correspondent, whose years of obscurity came to an end when, at the age of forty, he published the novel entitled Cien anos de soledad--One Hundred Years of Solitude. Within months, the book had garnered spectacular international acclaim, the author hailed as the standard-bearer of a new literature: magical realism. Eight years later, in 1975, he published The Autumn of the Patriarch, and, in 1981, Chronicle of a Death Foretold, each novel rapturously received by critics and readers alike. With his books read by millions around the world, he had become a man of wealth and influence. Yet, for all his fame, he never lost touch with his roots: though he had lived outside of Colombia since 1955--in Barcelona, Mexico City, Paris--his Nobel Prize was celebrated by Colombians from all walks of life who thought, and still think, of "Gabo" as their own. More books followed, both fiction (Love in the Time of Cholera, The General in his Labyrinth, Memories of My Melancholy Whores) and nonfiction (The Story of a Shipwrecked Sailor, News of a Kidnapping, Living to Tell the Tale). But Garcia Marquez's renown and passion have continued to combine, as well, in a fervent, unflagging, and often controversial political and social activism.While chronicling the particulars of the life, Martin also considers the overarching issues: the tension between Garcia Marquez's celebrity and his quest for literary quality, and between his politics and his writing; the seductions of power, solitude, and love. He explores the contrast between the exuberance of the writer's Caribbean background and the authoritarianism of highland Bogota, showing us how these differences are manifest in his writing and in the very shape his life has taken. He explores the melding of experience and imagination in Garcia Marquez's fiction, and he examines the writer's reasons for--and the public's reaction to--his turning away in the 1980s from the magical realism that had brought him international renown, toward the greater simplicity that would mark his work beginning with Love in the Time of Cholera.Gerald Martin has written a superb biography: richly illuminating, as gripping as any of Gabriel Garcia Marquez's powerful journalism, as enthralling as any of his acclaimed and beloved fiction.From the Hardcover edition.

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Pierre D'Ovidio

Hiver 1945, dans Paris libéré. Un crime qui va obliger le jeune inspecteur Clavault de Paris à interpréter un message laissé dans la bouche du mort.

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Hanne Larsen

Text and photographs chronicle the daily struggles, accomplishments, and pleasures of a six-year-old mentally handicapped boy.