Now available for the first time in the United States, a celebrated translation of the first volume of Proust's In Search of Lost Time.
Swann's Way, the first of the seven volumes that constitute Marcel Proust's lifework, In Search of Lost Time, introduces the larger themes of the whole work while standing on its own as a brilliant evocation of childhood, hopeless love, and the French Belle Époque.
We first encounter Proust's narrator in middle age, consumed with regret for his misspent life. Suddenly, he is back in the past, seized by memories of childhood: his clinging attachment to his mother, his dread of his father, summers in the country and the two walks his family was in the habit of taking-one by an aristocratic estate, the other by the house of a certain Charles Swann, to whom a mystery was attached. A child's world, and the world of adults the child struggles to imagine, spread out before us, while Proust's pages teem with incident and puzzlement, pathos and humor.
The novel then takes a further step backwards to tell the story of Swann's infatuation with the courtesan Odette. Swann, man-about-town and familiar of royalty, is reduced to walking after midnight, forlorn as a child awaiting a goodnight kiss.
James Grieve began his career translating Proust in the early 1970s, driven by his dismay at how many readers recoiled from what they imagined to be the difficulty of Proust's work, and his translation of Swann's Way brings out the book's fluency and speed as no other version does. It offers an unequaled introduction to an incomparably absorbing work of art.
A greatest-hits selection from some of the most popular poets of the Romantic movement, including Goethe, Schiller, Schlegel, and Heine, in a gorgeously jacketed small hardcover
Unlike the more earnest English Romantic poets, followers of the Romantic movement in Germany valued wit and humor along with beauty. Admiration for nature is also prominent in their poetry, and in particular the dramatic forests which still cover large areas of Germany. Love and death crop up repeatedly as themes in such famous works as Goethe's «Elf King» and Wagner's Tristan and Isolde. Characters from myth and folklore abound-most famously Lorelei, an enchantress who is associated with the rock of the same name on the bank of the Rhine, who is featured in several poems in this volume. Also gathered here are such favorites as Hölderlin's «Bread and Wine,» Schiller's «The Visit of the Gods,» Eichendorff's «Nocturne,» and Heine's «The Magic Month of May,» along with works by the most famous women writers of the Romantic era, including Karoline von Günderrode and Sophie Mereau.
Everyman's Library pursues the highest production standards, printing on acid-free cream-colored paper, with full-cloth cases with two-color foil stamping, decorative endpapers, silk ribbon markers, European-style half-round spines, and a full-color illustrated jacket.
The first young adult book about the great writer and social justice activist plunges us into the heart of Victor Hugo's fierce fight against the death penalty.
A new addition to the "They Said No" series.
The guillotine. When Victor Hugo was a child in early 1800s France, it was common to walk down the street and see a petty thief or vagrant beheaded at the guillotine. It was a brutal punishment and also a public spectacle. Hugo was sickened and haunted by these public executions. For him, no man has the right or the power to end the life of another, whatever the crime committed.
Hugo was a poet and novelist, author of Les Miserables and The Hunchback of Notre Dame among many others. But equally important to him was his work that protected life, like his book The Last Day of a Condemned Man, which allowed readers to understand what it might feel like to contemplate one's impending death. He also led a fight to save an assassin named Tapner: he had "declared war on the guillotine."
Many activists have taken up the fight to end the death penalty. And much progress has been made around the world. Yet many countries--China, Iran, Egypt, the United States and many others--despite calls from those around the world who continue to say no, still allow the death penalty as a form of state-sanctioned punishment.
A witty, insightful, and delightfully snarky blend of pop culture meets memoir meets real-life Devil Wears Prada as readers learn the stories behind twenty-five years at Vanity Fair from the magazine's former deputy editor "Dilettante offers the best seat in the house into the workings of one of the great cultural institutions of our time."--Buzz Bissinger, New York Times bestselling author of Friday Night Lights Dana Brown was a twenty-one-year-old college dropout playing in punk bands and partying his way through downtown New York's early-nineties milieu when he first encountered Graydon Carter, the legendary editor of Vanity Fair. After the two had a handful of brief interactions (mostly with Brown in the role of cater waiter at Carter's famous cultural salons he hosted at his home), Carter saw what he believed to be Brown's untapped potential, and on a whim, hired him as his assistant. Brown instantly became a trusted confidante and witness to all of the biggest parties, blowups, and takedowns. From inside the famed Vanity Fair Oscar parties to the emerging world of the tech elite, Brown's job offered him access to some of the most exclusive gatherings and powerful people in the world, and the chance to learn in real time what exactly a magazine editor does--all while trying to stay sober enough from the required party scene attendance to get the job done. Against all odds, he rose up the ranks to eventually become the magazine's deputy editor, spending a quarter century curating tastes at one of the most storied cultural shops ever assembled.
Dilettante reveals Brown's most memorable moments from the halcyon days of the magazine business, explores his own journey as an unpedigreed outsider to established editor, and shares glimpses of some of the famous and infamous stories (and people) that tracked the magazine's extraordinary run all keenly observed by Brown. He recounts tales from the trenches, including encounters with everyone from Anna Wintour, Lee Radziwill, and Condé Nast owner Si Newhouse, to Seth Rogen, Caitlyn Jenner, and acclaimed journalists Dominick Dunne and Christopher Hitchens.
Written with equal parts affection, cultural exploration, and nostalgia, Dilettante is a defining story within that most magical time and place in the culture of media. It is also a highly readable memoir that skillfully delivers a universal coming-of-age story about growing up and finding your place in the world.
The captivating, deeply reported true story of how one of the most notorious novels ever written--Marquis de Sade's 120 Days of Sodom--landed at the heart of one of the biggest scams in modern literary history.
"Reading The Curse of the Marquis de Sade, with the Marquis, the sabotage of rare manuscript sales, and a massive Ponzi scheme at its center, felt like a twisty waterslide shooting through a sleazy and bizarre landscape. This book is wild."--Adam McKay, Academy Award-winning filmmaker Described as both "one of the most important novels ever written" and "the gospel of evil," 120 Days of Sodom was written by the Marquis de Sade, a notorious eighteenth-century aristocrat who waged a campaign of mayhem and debauchery across France, evaded execution, and inspired the word "sadism," which came to mean receiving pleasure from pain. Despite all his crimes, Sade considered this work to be his greatest transgression.
The original manuscript of 120 Days of Sodom, a tiny scroll penned in the bowels of the Bastille in Paris, would embark on a centuries-spanning odyssey across Europe, passing from nineteenth-century banned book collectors to pioneering sex researchers to avant-garde artists before being hidden away from Nazi book burnings. In 2014, the world heralded its return to France when the scroll was purchased for millions by Gérard Lhéritier, the self-made son of a plumber who had used his savvy business skills to upend France's renowned rare-book market. But the sale opened the door to vendettas by the government, feuds among antiquarian booksellers, manuscript sales derailed by sabotage, a record-breaking lottery jackpot, and allegations of a decade-long billion-euro con, the specifics of which, if true, would make the scroll part of France's largest-ever Ponzi scheme.
Told with gripping reporting and flush with deceit and scandal, The Curse of the Marquis de Sade weaves together the sweeping odyssey of 120 Days of Sodom and the spectacular rise and fall of Lhéritier, once the "king of manuscripts" and now known to many as the Bernie Madoff of France. At its center is an urgent question for all those who cherish the written word: As the age of handwriting comes to an end, what do we owe the original texts left behind?
