Mortenol, ou, Les infortunes de la servitude

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Louis Patsouras

Jean Grave and The Anarchist Tradition in France focuses on the anarchist activity of an outstanding French anarchist, flourishing in the 1880-1920 period, whose theoretical works place him alongside the foremost anarchist thinkers: William Godwin, Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, and Michael Bakunin. But he was also a journalist, best known as the leading editor of Les Temps Nouveaux, in which he enlisted many of his painter and writer friends, such as Camille and Lucien Pissarro, Paul Signac, and Lucien Descaves, to aid the anarchist cause. The leading French collaborator of Peter Kropotkin, Grave was involved in several of the major happenings of the Third Republic: the wave of fear occasioned by anarchist terrorism, the Dreyfus Case, and the rise of anarcho-syndicalism whose chief spokeperson was Georges Sorel. The work ends with and examination of the French anarchist tradition after Grave, with Simone Weil, Albert Camus, Jean-Paul Sartre, and the 1968 French Revolution.

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Shari Benstock

The first new biography of America's foremost woman of letters in twenty years, No Gifts from Chance presents an Edith Wharton for our times. Far from the emotionally withdrawn and neurasthenic victim of earlier portraits, she is revealed here as an ambitious, disciplined, and self-determined woman who fashioned life to her own desires. Drawing on government records, legal and medical documents, and recently opened collections of Wharton's letters, Shari Benstocks̀ biography offers new information on what have been called the key mysteries of her life: the question of her paternity, her troubled relations with her mother and older brothers, her marriage to manic-depressive Teddy Wharton, and her extramarital affair with Morton Fullerton. No Gifts from Chance also examines long-ignored facets of Wharton's life - her complex and often calculating relationships with publishers, her internationally acclaimed charitable work during World War I, and the poignant story of her ultimate financial distress that contributed to her death, a story told here for the first time. At the center of this biography is Wharton's writing life. No Gifts from Chance charts her immense literary productivity (some forty-seven books, including The Age of Innocence, The House of Mirth, and Ethan Frome), tracking her writing processes from notebook entries through editorial revisions and examining the critical reception of her narrative fiction, poetry, travel writing, literary and cultural criticism, and memoir. Here, too, is a rare glimpse of the intricate relationship between the writer's public reputation and her private life, from her lonely literary apprenticeship in late-Victorian America to her emergence as a literary figure in Edwardian England and Belle Epoque Paris, when she developed enduring friendships with Henry James and Bernard Berenson, to her Age of Acclaim as America's most respected writer during the postwar jazz age. A magisterial Edith Wharton dominates these pages: astute and tough-minded in business, passionate and sexually confident in love, audacious and prolific in her art, principled and courageous in her life. This is the story of an artist who had no role models in a society that feared creative and independent women, but who triumphantly defied convention and made herself into America's first great and most beloved woman novelist.

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Flo Groberg and Tom Sileo

Describes the author's childhood relocation from France to the U.S., where as a naturalized citizen he joined the military and served multiple tours in Afghanistan before he was wounded while protecting his patrol from a suicide bomber.

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Marjorie Agosín

"In Osorno, Chile, the Nazis were the great feudal lords of the south and being Jewish was like possessing a savage and dangerous scar." The author thus describes the backdrop for this memoir of growing up as the daughter of European Jewish immigrants to Chile in the years before and after World War II. Speaking through the voice of her mother, she says, "I write these sometimes intermittent and true memories with the voice of an adolescent and then of a woman. . . . I wish to talk about my life in an unseemly and noisy house in southern Chile and about a town with fifty Nazis and three Jewish families. Everything I tell you is true and this is why I write so that it will be even more certain." This beautifully written story offers glimpses of cultures and landscapes little known outside of Chile. The narrative weaves back and forth through time offering the stories of the narrator's family: her father who had to leave Vienna around 1920 because he fell in love with a Christian cabaret dancer, her paternal grandmother who came to Chile in 1939 with a number tattooed on her arm, her mother's family from Odessa, and numerous aunts and uncles. The narrator returns to Osorno in 1993 and notes how little has changed. The Germans still display portraits of Hitler in their homes and sell Hitler memorabilia.