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Lyrical novel of defiance and tragedy among gypsies on the fringes of a French city.
Pauline is young and coquettish. She is also happily married to Marc and has a child. Gilles, kind and self-confident, is twenty years older and a recent divorcee. After he watches Pauline one morning, he asks to meet her. In spite of herself, Pauline agrees. Alice Ferney unfolds the next stages of the seduction in forensic detail and with devastating lucidity. As Pauline faces the possibility of an affair, she is thrown into confusion. Is she just feeling flattered because she is desired? Is she indulging in a fantasy version of love? Or could she have truly fallen for a stranger? We also eavesdrop on the lives of the people around Pauline and Gilles, from Pauline's adoring and unsuspecting husband, to Max and Eve's disintegrating marriage, to Penelope and her relationship with a man older than her father, and Laura, who desperately wants a child. Together, their stories make up a complete picture of the changing degrees of love.
Talk of repair has become ubiquitous in recent years. In the age of trauma culture, art and literature have a new purpose: to do justice, to console, comfort, and heal. Drawing on works of twenty-first-century French-language literature, this monograph shows how literature can not only serve as a means of "personal development", but expand our capacity for empathy, help repair the "brokenness" implied in victimhood, and redress individual and collective traumas. Centered on a critical reflection on discourses of repair (and reparations), it questions the canonical theories on the functions of literature and proposes a new way of writing (and reading) literary history.
"Few gypsies want to be seen as poor, although many are. Such was the case with old Angelina's sons, who possessed nothing other than their caravan and their gypsy blood. But it was young blood that coursed through their veins, a dark and vital flow that attracted women and fathered numberless children. And, like their mother, who had known the era of horses and caravans, they spat upon the very thought that they might be pitied." So begins the story of a matriarch and her tribe, ostracized by society and exiled to the outskirts of the city. Esther, a young librarian from the town, comes to the camp to introduce the children to books and stories. She gradually gains their confidence, and accompanies them, as observer and participant, through an eventful and tragic year in all their lives. Alice Ferney's distinctive style powerfully involves the reader in the family's roller-coaster existence, with its disasters, its comic moments and its battles against an uncomprehending, hostile world; in the love lives of the five boys, the bravery of the children, and eventually, in Angelina's final gesture of defiance.
Winner of the prestigious Prix Goncourt award for biography, this remarkable portrait sheds new light on Virginia Woolf's relationships with her family and friends and how they shaped her work. Forrester weaves a colorful, intense drama that forces readers to rethink their understanding of Woolf, her writing, and her world.
The chapters in this book were first presented at the Women in French Biennial Conference held in Leeds in May 2004. The twelve essays explore the multifaceted commodification of the female body and provide insights into the mutations of French society and culture. British and French scholars examine the paradoxes and contradictions embodied in various images and discourses related to health and illness from different perspectives, ranging from sociological studies to analyses of working diaries, children's medical encyclopaedias and literary texts. The 'resilient female body' as epitomised by the First World War nurse tends by the end of the twentieth century to be construed as the 'sanitis...
Comparing Grief in French, British and Canadian Great War Fiction (1977-2014) offers a comparative analysis of twenty-three First World War novels. Engaging with such themes as war trauma, facial disfigurement, women’s war identities, communal bonds, as well as the concepts of mourning and post-memory, Anna Branach-Kallas and Piotr Sadkowski identify the dominant trends in recent French, British and Canadian fiction about the Great War. Referring to historical, sociological, philosophical and literary sources, they show how, by both consolidating and contesting national myths, fiction continues to construct the 1914-1918 conflict as a cultural trauma, illuminating at the same time some of our most recent ethical concerns.
Humorous Wit is a new compilation of quotations in their most humoristic form. There are over 15,000 of these taken from various parts of the world, with over 1,200 of them translated into English for the first time. This book features 5,000 authors from every corner of the globe, covering a period starting before classical antiquity, when man first started to record his thoughts, to modern times, enriching the cultural heritage. This does not in any way mean that the caveman was less humorous, but the richness of the environment we live in today and the variety of subject matter contribute considerably to a refined sense of humour. Moreover, considering that chimps and other primates also possess the ability to laugh, humour may have been around longer than the human race : )
An irreverent, allusive, scatalogical, tragicomic masterpiece that centers on the patrons of a run-down bar as they try to document the details of their lives in a country that appears to have forgotten the importance of remembering. In Republic of the Congo, in the town of Trois-Cents, in a bar called Credit Gone West, a former schoolteacher known as Broken Glass drinks red wine and records the stories of the bar and its regulars for posterity: Stubborn Snail, the owner, who must battle church people, ex-alcoholics, tribal leaders, and thugs set on destroying him and his business; the Printer, who had his respectable life in France ruined by a white woman, his wife; Robinette, who could out...