The writings of Carlos Fuentes

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Annette Insdorf

Long considered the definitive study of this director's genius, Francois Truffaut returns to print in a revised and updated edition. With fresh insights and an extensive section on the director's last five films - Love on the Run, The Green Room, The Last Metro, The Woman Next Door, and Confidentially YoursAnnette Insdorf captures the essence and totality of his work. She discusses his contributions to the French New Wave, his relations with his mentors Hitchcock and Renoir, and the dominant themes of his cinema - women, love, children, language - and she explores his life in relation to his films, from The Four Hundred Blows to The Man Who Loved Women. As warmly human as its subject, Francois Truffaut immortalizes one of the cinema's most popular, prolific, and profound artists.

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Julia Briggs

Presents a comprehensive analysis of the works of twentieth-century English novelist Virginia Woolf using a collection of Woolf's diaries, letters, and original manuscripts.

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Rasheed El-Enany

Naguib Mahfouz is the most important Arabic fiction writer of this century. Born in 1911, his long and prolific writing career represents the evolution of a novel genre in Arabic literature. His books are a rich record of the tragic tensions attendant on a nations's quest for freedom and modernity. In 1988 he won the Nobel Prize for Literature. This is the only comprehensive study of Mahfouz's achievement. Rasheed El-Enany presents a systemic evaluation of the author's life and environment; local and foreign influences on him; elements of his thought and technique and the evolution of his craft. While each work is discussed individually, emphasis is laid throughout on elements of continuity in his work, whether thematic or aesthetic. In particular, Dr El-Enany challenges the traditional classification of Mahfouz's work into four chronological phases - historical, realist, modernist and indigenous or traditional. It is demonstrated that elements of these forms recur throughout Mahfouz's varied and experimental writings. This book is the story of Mahfouz's struggle to free his novels from the prevalent, predominantly Western moulds and to express his own socio-political thought within the Arabic inheritance.

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Elizabeth Wilson

Shostakovich: A Life Remembered is a unique study of the great composer Dimitri Shostakovich drawn from the reminiscences and reflections of his contemporaries. Using much material never previously published in English, as well as personal accounts from interviews and specially commissioned articles, Elizabeth Wilson has built up a fascinating chronicle of Shostakovich's life. Elizabeth Wilson sheds light on the composer's creative process and his working life in music, and examines the enormous and enduring influence that Shostakovich has had on Soviet musical life. Essential reading for anyone interested in the composer, the book also offers a fascinating perspective on the social and political history of Soviet Russia.