The story of an unexpected heroThe Last Communard offers a brilliant, striking portrait of revolutionary Europe through a remarkable personal story.In 1871, Adrien Lejeune fought on the barricades of the Paris Commune. He was imprisoned for treason when the Commune fell and narrowly avoided execution for his role in the struggle for a new future. In later life, he immigrated to Soviet Russia, finding fame as a revolutionary icon. In his native coun...

Tropicality is a centuries-old Western discourse that treats otherness and the exotic in binary – ‘us’ and ‘them’ – terms. It has long been implicated in empire and its anxieties over difference. However, little attention has been paid to its twentieth-century genealogy.This book explores this neglected history through the work of Pierre Gourou, one of the century’s foremost purveyors of what anti-colonial writer Aimé Césaire dubbed tropicalité. It explores how Gourou’s in...

God Does Not Love The WorkersThe sewers of Bucharest, Romania, Christmas 1989. Vlad and other Securitate secret police comrades fan out across a city about to fall to counter-revolution.The show trial and execution of Nicolae and Elena Ceausescu are broadcast on television. Vlad, raised as an assassin in a Securitate orphanage in Targoviste, home of Vlad the Impaler, vows to avenge the death of his adoptive 'parents' in that very town. Moving from safe-hous...

St Andrews, 1563. In a town gripped by Reformation, a baying crowd awaits the execution of Pierre de Chastellart, a French Huguenot poet. From afar, Mary Queen of Scots watches his tortured figure declaim Ronsard's 'Hymn to Death'. But why is the young man being publicly beheaded for high treason? This lyrical and violent novel follows Chastellart and Mary between a France descending into religious warfare and a Scotland of wolves and witch-burnings, whose populace is whipped up by the pre...

The most celebrated and controversial French novelist of our time now delivers his magnum opus—about art and money, love and friendship and death, fathers and sons.The Map and the Territory is the story of an artist, Jed Martin, and his family and lovers and friends, the arc of his entire history rendered with sharp humor and powerful compassion. His earliest photographs, of countless industrial objects, were followed by a surprisingly successful series featuring Michelin ...

A worldwide phenomenon and the most important French novelist since Camus, Michel Houellebecq now delivers his magnum opus–a tale of our present circumstances told from the future, when humanity as we know it has vanished.Surprisingly poignant, philosophically compelling, and occasionally laugh-out-loud funny, The Possibility of an Island is at once an indictment, an elegy, and a celebration of everything we have and are at risk of losing. It is a masterpiece from one of t...

Tel Aviv had already inspired his novel Bande de Français (Goodbye Paris Shalom TelAviv in English), published in 2018. This time, Marco Koskas offers in the form of chronicles all he knows about a city so unique that it has been nicknamed ‘the bubble’. Everything about its cafés and its central station, its magical swimming pools and its roof parties.It’s also the city of girls in shorts and street art, where Ashkenazi philosophers with working-class Parisian acce...

Bucharest, before and during World War II, where Bernard Davidescou lives with his parents and his older brother on Triumph Street, in the middle of a courtyard block inhabited by a dozen Jewish families and two Christian ones. When Romania, under General Ion Antonescu's dictatorship, allies itself with Hitler and invades the USSR, the Jews in Bucharest face the threat of being sent to the Nazi extermination camps, after having survived the terror of the fascist Iron Guard. However, each S...

The new biannual, peer-reviewed Journal of Romanian Studies, jointly developed by The Society for Romanian Studies and ibidem Press, examines critical issues in Romanian studies, linking work in that field to wider theoretical debates and issues of current relevance, and serving as a forum for junior and senior scholars. The journal also presents articles that connect Romania and Moldova comparatively with other states and their ethnic majorities and minorities, and with other groups by in...

Contents Vintilă Mihăilescu A Subjective Centenary: The Peasant Footprint in Recent Romanian History Katherine Verdery Notes on a Century of Surveillance Dennis Deletant Shattered Illusions: Britain and Iuliu Maniu, 1940–1945 Maria Bucur The Queen Is No Sister: Three Faces of Marie of Romania Marius Stan and Vladimir Tismaneanu Stalinism and Anti-Stalinism in Romania: The Case of Alexandru Jar Revisited Reviews on: Katherine Verdery, My Life as a Spy: Investigations in a Secret Police File...

Michel Houellebecq's Serotonin is a caustic, frightening, hilarious, raunchy, offensive, and politically incorrect novel about the decline of Europe, Western civilization, and humanity in general.Deeply depressed by his romantic and professional failures, the aging hedonist and agricultural engineer Florent-Claude Labrouste feels he is "dying of sadness." He hates his young girlfriend, and the feeling is almost certainly mutual; his career is pretty much ov...

Just thirty, with a well-paid job, depression and no love life, the narrator and anti-hero par excellence of this grim, funny and clever novel smokes four packs of cigarettes a day and writes weird animal stories in his spare time. A computer programmer by day, he is tolerably content, until, that is, he's packed off with a colleague - the unimaginably ugly, sexually-frustrated virgin Raphael Tisserand - to train provincial civil servants in the use of a new computer system... A painfully ...