What should we remember about The Lesson, the play between drama and burlesque? Find everything you need to know about this work in a complete and detailed reading sheet.You will find in this booklet:- A complete summary- A presentation of the main characters such as the student, the teacher and the maid- An analysis of the specificities of the work: a tragedy, the destruction of language, language as a symbol of power and a satire of educationA reference...

In the tradition of E. M. Forster's Aspects of the Novel and Milan Kundera's The Art of the Novel, James Wood's How Fiction Works is a scintillating study of the magic of fiction--an analysis of its main elements and a celebration of its lasting power.Here one of the most prominent and stylish critics of our time looks into the machinery of storytelling to ask some fundamental questions: What do we mean when we say we "know" a fictional c...

A bestselling author draws on the work of one of history’s most important writers to show us how to best live life in a book that’s "delightfully original.... A self-help book in the deepest sense of the term" (The New York Times).Alain de Botton combines two unlikely genres—literary biography and self-help manual—in the hilarious and unexpectedly practical How Proust Can Change Your Life.Who would have thought that Marcel Proust, one of t...

Curiously practical—this no-nonsense blend of literary biography and self-help unravels how interesting life can be if only you could resist the impulse to rush through the mundane rituals of modern life. Every morning, Marcel Proust sipped his two cups of strong coffee with milk, ate a croissant from one boulangerie, dunking it in his coffee as he slowly read the day’s paper with great care—poring over each headline and section.Only Alain de Botton could have pulled so many useful...

The international publishing sensation is now available in the United States—two brilliant, controversial authors confront each other and their enemies in an unforgettable exchange of letters.In one corner, Bernard-Henri Lévy, creator of the classic Barbarism with a Human Face, dismissed by the media as a wealthy, self-promoting, arrogant do-gooder. In the other, Michel Houellebecq, bestselling author of The Elementary Particles, widely derided as...

An essay with the reach and momentum of a novel, Kate Briggs's This Little Art is a genre-bending song for the practice of literary translation, offering fresh, fierce and timely thinking on reading, writing and living with the works of others. Taking her own experience of translating Roland Barthes's lecture notes as a starting point, the author threads various stories together to give us this portrait of translation as a compelling, complex and intensely relational activity. She...

An informative, fun and rather charming essay on the nature and history of one of life’s most desirable assets, Charm, by renowned culture and design critic, Stephen Bayley.Aiming to wound, a schoolmaster wrote on future design-guru Stephen Bayley’s last ever school report “Charm alone will not get him through”. Bayley took this to mean that an affable, genial, outgoing nature was not enough to ensure survival in a harsh world of statistical performance. But survive and flourish is...

Wayne Booth transformed the study of fiction in the twentieth century and wrote some of the most influential and engaging criticism of our time. In What Every Novelist Needs to Know about Narrators, Booth tackles one of the most difficult issues writers of fiction face: the choice of which narrative approach to take in their work. With trademark Booth aplomb, he articulates the methods behind dramatization, character development, and point of view that are indispensable for succes...

Unlock the more straightforward side of The Lover with this concise and insightful summary and analysis!This engaging summary presents an analysis of The Lover by Marguerite Duras, an autobiographical novel which tells the story of a teenage girl who embarks on a forbidden relationship with a wealthy Chinese man twelve years her senior. They are eventually separated when the young girl is forced to go back to France, where she will once again enco...

For anyone who loves France (or just feels strongly about it) comes a “beautifully written” collection of essays (The New York Times Book Review) on the country and its culture—from the bestselling, Booker Prize-winning author of The Sense of an Ending.Julian Barnes’s appreciation extends from France’s vanishing peasantry to its hyper-literate pop singers, from the gleeful iconoclasm of nouvelle vague cinema to the orgy of drugs and suffering that...

A beautifully designed and darkly comic collection of work, this book collects together the best of Shrigley's work, old and new. It is a celebration of the surreal world of one of our finest contemporary artists.

Unlock the more straightforward side of Nausea with this concise and insightful summary and analysis!This engaging summary presents an analysis of Nausea by Jean-Paul Sartre, which follows one man as he becomes truly aware of the existence of the world around him and grapples with the rising sense of panic this causes. This realisation leads him to abandon the historical biography he is working on and embrace fiction instead, as a way of freeing h...