You may have to Search all our reviewed books and magazines, click the sign up button below to create a free account.
The hiring of a new secretary shouldn't be a big deal--just a slight a change in the office environment. But for the protagonist of this novel, it is a declaration of war, a call to arms: "The new secretary has only been here two days," she says, "and I'm already talking about evil, a word I shouldn't even be using--arming myself for battle and choosing my weapons." Her quiet life of sacrifice and service has been rudely disrupted by the new hire, and she is not--despite the advice of her doctor, her neighbors, and her daughter--about to leave it at that. Instead, sabotage, alcohol, and kindness become the arsenal in a conflict fought across copy rooms and office parties. But the humor is undercut by a sadness, a sense of defeat that makes this slim novel resonate with the injustice of our increasingly impersonal, corporate world.
Aged fifteen, as Franco's forces begin their murderous purges and cities across Spain rise up against the old order, Montse has never heard the word fascista before. In any case, the villagers say facha (the ch is a real Spanish ch, by the way, with a real spit). Montse lives in a small village, high in the hills, where few people can read or write and fewer still ever leave. If everything goes according to her mother's plan, Montse will never leave either. She will become a good, humble maid for the local landowners, muchísimas gracias, with every Sunday off to dance the jota in the church square. But Montse's world is changing. Her brother José has just returned from Lérida with a red and black scarf and a new, dangerous vocabulary and his words are beginning to open up new realms to his little sister. She might not understand half of what he says, but how can anyone become a maid in the Burgos family when their head is ringing with shouts of Revolución, Comunidad and Libertad? The war, it seems, has arrived in the nick of time.
The Power of Flies begins in a courtroom, where a man is undergoing an interrogation. He has committed a crime, and he must now explain himself. But instead of letting the judge, lawyer, and psychiatrist question him, he asks himself all the questions--and answers them. While ranting on to the court about various topics--his family, the museum where he works as a tour guide, and even the French philosopher and mathematician, Blaise Pascal--the narrator of The Power of Flies reveals himself to be both calculating and unstable. In this latest novel from acclaimed French writer Lydie Salvayre, it is up to the reader to sort through his philosophical diatribe to discover why this man turned killer.
A story of an awards ceremony of a massive automotive factory takes acceptance speeches and presentations, makes them into individual minibiographies, and explores the insanity and chaos that is a reflection of human life.
In Some Useful Advice for Apprentice Process-Servers - a short piece also included in this book - the author grants the process-server a right of reply, which he uses to chilling effect."--Jacket.
Relational Responses to Trauma in Twenty-First-Century French and Spanish Women's Writing offers new insight into what it means to write relational lives. It broadens the parameters of existing discussions in terms of geography as well as genre, drawing together two literatures whose prominence in life-writing theory to date could hardly be more different: while French women's writing has long been at the centre of international discussions of autobiography, the relative invisibility of Spanish women's writing remains striking. The dialogue that thus underpins this study, between diverse twenty-first-century case studies and broader approaches to life-writing, shines a light on what is gaine...
The rapidity of postwar globalization and the structural changes it has brought to both social and spatial aspects of everyday life has meant, in France as elsewhere, the destabilizing of senses of place, identity, and belonging, as once familiar, local environments are increasingly de-localized and made porous to global trends and planetary preoccupations. Maps and Territories identifies such preoccupations as a fundamental underlying impetus for the contemporary French novel. Indeed, like France itself, the protagonists of its best fiction are constantly called upon to renegotiate their identity in order to maintain any sense of belonging within the troubled territories they call home. Map...
A direct response to Albert Camus' call for Algerians to tell the world their story, The Poor Man's Son remains after half a century the definitive map of the Kabyle soul.
Through the door of a Swiss inn the reader steps into a painting. Two men talk to each other and before long the writer -someone like them, one of them- begins to address us. Thus commences the fugue that is Beauty on Earth,in which the coming of a beautiful orphan to her uncle's inn brings a gradual chaos upon his town. Swiss novelist Charles-Ferdinand Ramuz published La Beauté in 1927. This translation by Michelle Bailat-Jones is a gift for which English language readers have waited decades.