An extraordinary evocation of a grown daughter's attachment to her mother, and of both women's strength and resiliency. "I Remain in Darkness" recounts Annie's attempts first to help her mother recover from Alzheimer's disease, and then, when that proves futile, to bear witness to the older woman's gradual decline and her own experience as a daughter losing a beloved parent. "I Remain in Darkness" is a new high water mark for Ernaux, surging with...

After years of health problems, but none with his heart, the author, at age eighty-two, was told that he needed immediate surgery to clear his blocked arteries. On what he knew might very well be his deathbed, he reflected on his many losses and accomplishments, and on all that remained to be done. Fortunately, he survived the life-threatening heart surgery to turn those reflections into a book which discusses his affection for his family both departed...

"In A Girl's Story, Annie Ernaux revisits the night 50 years earlier when she found herself submerged and controlled by another person's desire and willpower. It is the summer of 1958, the year she turned 18. And then the man she gave herself to moves on. She has submitted her will to his, and now she finds that she is a slave without a master. Now, fifty years later, she realizes she can obliterate the intervening years and return to consider this...

"The Young Man is Annie Ernaux's account of her passionate love affair with A., a man some 30 years younger, when she was in her fifties. The relationship pulls her back to memories of her own youth and at the same time leaves her feeling ageless, outside of time- together with a sense that she is living her life backwards. Amidst talk of having a child together, she feels time running its course, and menopause approaching. The Young Man recalls Ernaux...

How to get along with people, how to deal with violence, how to adjust to losing someone you love--such questions arise in most people's lives. They are all versions of a bigger question: how do you live? How do you do the good or honorable thing, while flourishing and feeling happy? This question obsessed Renaissance writers, none more than Michel Eyquem de Monatigne, perhaps the first truly modern individual. A nobleman, public official and wine-grower,...

"In this rare glimpse into the life of Nobel laureate Patrick Modiano, the author takes up his pen to tell his personal story. He addresses his early years--shadowy times in postwar Paris that haunt his memory and have inspired his world-cherished body of fiction. In the spare, absorbing, and sometimes dreamlike prose that translator Mark Polizzotti captures unerringly, Modiano offers a memoir of his first twenty-one years. Termed one of his "finest...

"In 1963, Annie Ernaux, 23 and unattached, realizes she is pregnant. Shame arises in her like a plague: Understanding that her pregnancy will mark her and her family as social failures, she knows she cannot keep that child. This is the story, written forty years later, of a trauma Ernaux never overcame. In a France where abortion was illegal, she attempted, in vain, to self-administer the abortion with a knitting needle. Fearful and desperate, she...

Biography of French author Jean Genet.

Davidson tells the whole, rich story of Voltaire's life (1694-1778): his early imprisonment in the Bastille; exile in England and his mastery of English; an obsession with money, of which he made a huge amount; a scandalous love life; his infatuation with Frederick the Great; a long exile on the borders of Switzerland; his passion for watch-making; his human rights campaigns and his triumphant return to Paris to die there as celebrity extraordinaire....

Plongez-vous dans l'univers enchanteur de "La Mare au Diable" de George Sand, une histoire touchante et poétique qui célèbre l'amour et la nature. Suivez les pas de Germain, un jeune veuf qui doit faire face aux défis de la vie et aux responsabilités qui lui incombent. Germain se rend au village voisin accompagné de son fils Petit-Pierre et d'une jeune fille, Marie, qu'il doit marier. Leur périple à travers la campagne offre une occasion de...