Guillaume Dustan' first three novels, published in French between 1996 and 1998, describing the narrator's sexual odyssey through a Paris still haunted by AIDS.This volume collects a suite of three wildly entertaining and trailblazing short novels by the legendary French anti-assimilationist LGBTQ+ writer Guillaume Dustan. Published sequentially in France between 1996 and 1998, the three novels are exuberant and deliberately affectless accounts of the narrator's se...

"Haunting, a book of ghosts and a book of this moment." —Parul Sehgal, The New York TimesA comic experiment in sociology and self-absorption, the award-winning author Thomas Clerc's autobiographical Interior is a unique invitation into a professor's preoccupations and possessions within the rooms of a small Parisian apartment.Composed of bite-size vignettes, remembrances, and digressions, and filled with lighthearted transitions from pure de...

National Book Critics Circle Award WinnerNational BestsellerLambda Literary Award FinalistNAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY TIME * NPR * The Washington Post * Kirkus Reviews * Washington Independent Review of Books * The Millions * Electric Literature * Ms Magazine * Entropy Magazine * Largehearted Boy * Passerbuys“Irrevere...

The Los Angeles Times bestseller! "A Gallic prescription for living a life that is richer, more sensual, messier, and a lot more fun" (Boston Globe)It's not the shoes, the scarves, or the lipstick that gives French women their allure. It's this: French women don't give a damn. They don't expect men to understand them. They don't care about being liked or being like everyone else. They accept the passage of time, celebrate the immediacy of pleasure...

An international literary phenomenon, The Elementary Particles is a frighteningly original novel–part Marguerite Duras and part Bret Easton Ellis-that leaps headlong into the malaise of contemporary existence.Bruno and Michel are half-brothers abandoned by their mother, an unabashed devotee of the drugged-out free-love world of the sixties. Bruno, the older, has become a raucously promiscuous hedonist himself, while Michel is an emotionally dead molecular biologist...

This New York Times–bestselling memoir of one woman's erotic escapades is "brilliantly literate, utterly unabashed [and] consistently provocative" ( The Philadelphia Inquirer).Since it was first published in France, The Sexual Life of Catherine M. has become a global literary phenomenon, hailed as one of the most important books on sexuality to be published in decades.Catherine Millet, the eminent editor of Art Press, has...

**The New York Times–bestselling author's modern classic that "takes a conventional love story and textures it with philosophical ruminations" ( Kirkus Reviews).A man and a woman meet over casual conversation on a flight from Paris to London, and so begins a love story—from first kiss to first argument, elation to heartbreak, and everything in between. Each stage of the relationship is illuminated with starling clarity, as novelist and philosopher Alain de...

***WARNING!!! EXPLICIT CONTENT!!!***When Nina is offered the once in a lifetime opportunity to live in Paris, she never expects that she will begin a torrid affair with a handsome French businessman. Although she is terrified of giving him her heart, her body is another story.Merci: A Story of Erotica, Sex and Romance is about how one woman is taken to the depths of passion and shown how quickly she can become a slave not only to love but to her lover as well....

Paris, a hotel room, the middle of the afternoon . . .So begins the story of Annabelle, a young escort in Paris who has accepted her final proposition before marrying the powerful and generous man of her dreams, media mogul David Barlet. But the mysterious handwritten notes she has been receiving—notes that detail personal fantasies no one could possibly know—don't prepare her for the fact that her new client is her fiancé's brother, Louie. Through visits to the Hotel des Charmes, ...

An autobiographical novel about growing up gay in a working-class town in Picardy."Every morning in the bathroom I would repeat the same phrase to myself over and over again . . . Today I'm really gonna be a tough guy." Growing up in a poor village in northern France, all Eddy Bellegueule wanted was to be a man in the eyes of his family and neighbors. But from childhood, he was different—"girlish," intellectually precocious, and attracted to other men.

A language barrier is no match for love. Lauren Collins discovered this firsthand when, in her early thirties, she moved to London and fell for a Frenchman named Olivier—a surprising turn of events for someone who didn’t have a passport until she was in college. But what does it mean to love someone in a second language? Collins wonders, as her relationship with Olivier continues to grow entirely in English. Are there things she doesn’t understand about Olivier, having never spoken to him ...

The travel guide to the history of sex, love, and romance