Simone de Beauvoir and Jean-Paul Sartre

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Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz

In 1968, Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz became a founding member of the early women's liberation movement. Along with a small group of dedicated women, she produced the seminal journal series, *No More Fun and Games*. Her group, Cell 16 occupied the radical fringe of the growing movement, considered too outspoken and too outrageous by mainstream advocates for women's rights. Dunbar-Ortiz was also a dedicated anti-war activist and organizer throughout the 1960s and 1970s. During the war years she was a fiery, indefatigable public speaker on issues of patriarchy, capitalism, imperialism, and racism. She worked in Cuba with the Venceremos Brigade, and formed associations with other revolutionaries across the spectrum of radical and underground politics, including the SDS, the Weather Underground, the Revolutionary Union, and the African National Congress. But unlike the majority of those in the New Left—young white men from solidly middle-class suburban families—Dunbar-Ortiz grew up poor, female, and part-Indian in rural Oklahoma, and she often found herself at odds not only with the ruling class but also with the Left and with the women's movement. Dunbar-Ortiz's odyssey from dust-bowl poverty to the urban radical fringes of the New Left gives a working-class, feminist perspective on a time and a movement which forever changed American society.

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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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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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Jean Louis Roy

Jules Roy, écrivain, héros engagé, fut statufié de son vivant. Ses amis le nommaient Julius. Sa belle gueule captait la lumière. Aviateur glorieux, poète, conjuguant ambition et précaution, travail et faveur des astres, il était un père craint et jalousé. Le fils raconte Julius, leur vie, difficile avec lui et loin de lui; ils s'affrontent ou se renforcent l'un l'autre. Mémoire retrouvée. Jules Roy disparu laisse en creux un double.