Originally published in France in 2012, Pascal Mégeau's definitive biography of legendary film director Jean Renoir is a landmark work-the winner of a Prix Goncourt, France's top literary achievement. Now available in the English language for the first time, Jean Renoir: A Biography, is the definitive study of one of the most fascinating and creative artistic figures of the twentieth century. The French filmmaker made more than forty films from the silent era to the late '60s and...

Robert Bresson, the director of such cinematic master-pieces as Pickpocket, A Man Escaped Mouchette, and L’Argent, was one of the most influential directors in the history of French film, as well as one of the most stubbornly individual: He insisted on the use of nonprofessional actors; he shunned the “advances” of Cinerama and Cinema-Scope (and the work of most of his predecessors and peers); and he minced no words about the damaging influence of capita...

The gripping, true story of a brutal serial killer who unleashed his own reign of terror in Nazi-Occupied Paris.As decapitated heads and dismembered body parts surfaced in the Seine, Commissaire Georges-Victor Massu, head of the Brigade Criminelle, was tasked with tracking down the elusive murderer in a twilight world of Gestapo, gangsters, resistance fighters, pimps, prostitutes, spies, and other shadowy figures of the Parisian underworld. But while trying to solv...

"Alice Kaplan's triple portrait of three iconic mid-century American women dazzles beyond our evergreen fascination with [their] wildly disparate lives." —Patricia Hampl, New York Times Notable authorA year in Paris . . . since World War II, countless American students have been lured by that vision—and been transformed by their sojourn in the City of Light. Dreaming in French tells three stories of that experience, and how it changed the lives of ...

Turn-of-the-century Paris was the beating heart of a rapidly changing world. Painters, scientists, revolutionaries, poets -- all were there. But so, too, were the shadows: Paris was a violent, criminal place, its sinister alleyways the haunts of Apache gangsters and its cafes the gathering places of murderous anarchists.In 1911, it fell victim to perhaps the greatest theft of all time -- the taking of the Mona Lisa from the Louvre. Immediately, Alphonse Bertillon, a detective world-...

The subject of John Singer Sargent's most famous painting was twenty-three-year-old New Orleans Creole Virginie Gautreau, who moved to Paris and quickly became the "it girl" of her day. A relative unknown at the time, Sargent won the commission to paint her; the two must have recognized in each other a like-minded hunger for fame.Unveiled at the 1884 Paris Salon, Gautreau's portrait generated the attention she craved-but it led to infamy rather than stardom. Sargent had painted one...

The chilling true story of a serial killer who preyed on men, women, and children desperate to escape Nazi-occupied Paris.On March 11, 1944, police were called to investigate foul-smelling smoke pouring from the chimney of an elegant private house near the Arc de Triomphe. In the basement of 21 rue Le Sueur, they made the first of many gruesome discoveries: a human hand dangling from the open door of a coal-burning stove.Proceeding to the rear of the home, ...

From a cinematic grand master, "one of the most readable books of movie criticism, and one of the most instructive" ( American Film Institute).An icon. A rebel. A legend. The films of François Truffaut defined an exhilarating new form of cinema for moviegoers the world over. But before Truffaut became a great director, he was a critic who stood at the vanguard, pioneering an innovative way to view movies and to write about the cinematic arts. Now, for the ...

An incandescent group portrait of the midcentury artists and thinkers whose lives, loves, collaborations, and passions were forged against the wartime destruction and postwar rebirth of ParisIn this fascinating tour of a celebrated city during one of its most trying, significant, and ultimately triumphant eras, Agnes Poirier unspools the stories of the poets, writers, painters, and philosophers whose lives collided to extraordinary effect between 1940 and 1950. She...

From New Yorker film critic Richard Brody, Everything Is Cinema: The Working Life of Jean-Luc Godard presents a "serious-minded and meticulously detailed . . . account of the lifelong artistic journey" of one of the most influential filmmakers of our age ( The New York Times).When Jean-Luc Godard wed the ideals of filmmaking to the realities of autobiography and current events...

Three decades after its first publication, The New Wave is still considered one of the fundamental texts on the French film movement of the same name. Led by filmmakers as influential as Truffaut and Godard, the New Wave was a seminal moment in cinematic history, and The New Wave has been hailed as the most complete book ever written about it.The New Wave tells the story of the New Wave through examinations of five of the most important directors of the era: Truffaut, Godard, Chabr...

"It's hard to see how anyone is ever going to better this User's Manual to the life of Georges Perec" - Gilbert Adair, Sunday TimesWinner of the Prix Goncourt for Biography, 1994George Perec (1936-82) was one of the most significant European writers of the twentieth century and undoubtedly the most versatile and innovative writer of his generation.David Bellos's comprehensive biography - which also provides the first full survey of Perec's irreverent, polym...