Pierrot Mon Ami, considered by many to be one of Raymond Queneau’s finest achievements, is a quirky coming-of-age novel concerning a young man’s initiation into a world filled with deceit, fraud, and manipulation. From his short-lived job at a Paris amusement park where he helps to raise women’s skirts to the delight of an unruly audience, to his frustrated and unsuccessful love of Yvonne, to his failed assignment to care for the tomb of the shadowy Prince Luigi of Poldevia, Pierr...

The cult classic from one of France's most stylish writers'Don't give a damn,' says Zazie, 'what I wanted was to go in the metro'Impish, foul-mouthed Zazie arrives in Paris from the country to stay with her uncle Gabriel. All she really wants to do is ride the metro, but finding it shut because of a strike, Zazie looks for other means of amusement and is soon caught up in a comic adventure that becomes wilder and more manic by the minute. In 1960 Q...

When Vanity Fair author William Thackeray dies without a will, his young adult daughter Anny is forced to support her sister and their mad mother in a Victorian world unfriendly to female talent and ambition. Anny develops a crush on Leslie Stephen, the future father of Virginia Woolf, but it is the prettier sister Minny who steals his heart. After their marriage, Anny finds solace on the Isle of Wight among her father's famous, eccentric friends: the poet Alfred Tennyson, Lewis C...

Based on a short story by George Moore, which was recently adapted into a major Hollywood film starring Glenn Close, Benmussa's story releases a string of disturbing questions about the nature of women and society and is one of the most powerful and ground-breaking plays of the 1970s.

This volume contains Tristan Tzara’s famous manifestos, which first appeared between 1916 and 1921 and became essential texts of the modern movement and models for Breton’s Surrealist manifestos. Art for Tzara was both deadly serious and a game, and the playfulness of his character is apparent not only in his polemic, which often uses dadaist typography, but in the delightful drawings contributed by Francis Picabia.In addition, this volume also contains Tzara’s Lampisteries articles that t...

Translation and the Arts in Modern France sits at the intersection of transposition, translation, and ekphrasis, finding resonances in these areas across periods, places, and forms. Within these contributions, questions of colonization, subjugation, migration, and exile connect Benin to Brittany, and political philosophy to the sentimental novel and to film. Focusing on cultural production from 1830 to the present and privileging French culture, the contributors explore interactions with o...

With a cast of eccentric characters, amusing incidents and an uplifting tone, The Sunday of Life - its title playfully alluding to Hegel's theory of history - is a scintillating novel which showcases Queneau's trademark punning, sly wit and delight in the absurdity of people and situations. When shop-owner Julia Segovia decides that she's going to marry the handsome if exceedingly young and naive soldier Valentin Bru, he willingly goes along with her scheme. Little does he know that he wil...

Published originally as the purported French translation of a novel by fictional Irish writer Sally Mara, We Always Treat Women Too Well is set in Dublin during the 1916 Easter Rising and tells the story of the siege of a small post office by a group of rebels, who discover to their embarrassment that a female postal clerk, Gertie Girdle, is still in the lavatory some time after they have shot or expelled the rest of the staff. The events that follow are not for prudish readers, forming a ...

In late nineteenth-century Paris, the writer Hubert is shocked to discover that Icarus, the protagonist of the new novel he's working on, has vanished. Looking for him among the manuscripts of his rivals does not solve the mystery, so a detective is hired to find the runaway character, who is now in Montparnasse, where he learns to drink absinthe and is picked up by a friendly prostitute.These hilarious adventures make Queneau's novel, presented in the form of a script and parodying variou...

The summer of 1898 is filled with ups and downs for 11-year-old Moses. He's growing apart from his best friend, his superstitious Boo-Nanny butts heads constantly with his pragmatic, educated father, and his mother is reeling from the discovery of a family secret. Yet there are good times, too. He's teaching his grandmother how to read. For the first time she's sharing stories about her life as a slave. And his father and his friends are finally getting the respect and positions of power t...

Original illustrations by Jean Cocteau and Andrzej KlimowskiTwo of the seven monologues by Jean Cocteau (1889-1963) in this edition were written for Édith Piaf. The other five were written for Cocteau’s friend, the celebrated actor Jean Marais, to perform on radio. Although perhaps a minor part of Cocteau’s output of films, plays, poems and ballet scenarios, these exquisite miniatures remain a fascinating form of his dramatic expression.Georges Feydeau (1862-1921) is best k...

An irresistible gift edition of the mindbending thriller that inspired Hitchcock's VertigoHe isn't a cop anymore, but when an old friend asks Flavières to keep an eye on his dazzlingly beautiful wife, how can he refuse? And so he begins to scour the streets of wartime Paris in search of a woman who belongs to no one, not even to herself.Soon, intrigue is replaced by obsession, and dreams by nightmares, as the boundaries between the living and the d...