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My Contemporaries
Recollections of Proust, Piaf, Colette, and a host of luminaries from Bohemian Paris For almost 50 years up until his death in 1963, Jean Cocteau held a unique place in French cultural life. The breadth of his artistic success bears witness to the astounding variety of his talents. In the fields of theater, cinema, art, ballet, and literature, Cocteau made many lifelong friends. Intimate portraits of some of the greatest artists of his age are included in this memorable memoir. Jean Cocteau was drawn to larger-than-life or seemingly unreal characters. He believed that their unreality was often the clue to the secrets of their personality. In descriptions of his contemporaries, Cocteau is able to illustrate everything that is accessible, sympathetic, memorable, durable, all-pervading, or dazzling about them. Ranging from the moving and atmospheric (the dying Proust in his cork-lined chamber) to the hilariously camp (Colette being carried from her apartment by sedan chair to have lunch across the road), it is in these portraits that the essence of his own work can be found. The portraits include Proust, Picasso, Piaf, Colette, Chaplin, and many more.
Guilty
An unfinished manuscript by Anna Kavan, about a young man facing corruptions in a futuristic world, is published for the first time.
Narcissus and Goldmund
"Narcissus and Goldmund "is the story of a passionate yet uneasy friendship between two men of opposite character. Narcissus, an ascetic instructor at a cloister school, has devoted himself solely to scholarly and spiritual pursuits. One of his students is the sensual, restless Goldmund, who is immediately drawn to his teacher's fierce intellect and sense of discipline. When Narcissus persuades the young student that he is not meant for a life of self-denial, Goldmund sets off in pursuit of aesthetic and physical pleasures, a path that leads him to a final, unexpected reunion with Narcissus.
To the Slaughterhouse
A vigorous anti-war novel. Conscription reaches into the hills as the First World War comes to a small Provencial community one blazing August. A committed pacifist, Giono produced one of the most affecting accounts of war ever written, with its horrifying scenes of war and descriptions of harsh, primitive conditions in the trenches. His fiercely realistic novel contrasts the wholesale destruction of men, land, and animals at the front with the moral disintegration of the lonely and anxious people left behind.
The Journey to the East
In simple, mesmerizing prose, Hermann Hesse tells of a journey both geographic and spiritual. H.H., a German choirmaster, is invited on an expedition with the League, a secret society whose members include Paul Klee, Mozart, and Albertus Magnus. The participants traverse both space and time, encountering Noah's Ark in Zurich and Don Quixote at Bremgarten. The pilgrims' ultimate destination is the East, the "Home of the Light," where they expect to find spiritual renewal. Yet the harmony that ruled at the outset of the trip soon degenerates into open conflict. Each traveler finds the rest of the group intolerable and heads off in his own direction, with H.H. bitterly blaming the others for the failure of the journey. It is only long after the trip, while poring over records in the League archives, that H.H. discovers his own role in the dissolution of the group, and the ominous significance of the journey itself.
Thomas the Impostor
Guillaume Thomas is desperate for thrills, glamour and adventure. At just 16 years old he has learned how much can be gained by lying. Cocteau's visionary novel is a 'hymn to the cult of youth' in which the WWI battlefields become an exaggerated spectacle where fiction and reality are inseparable.
Demian
Schoolboy Emil Sinclair boasts of a theft and finds himself blackmailed by a bully. He turns to Max Demain in whom he finds a friend and mentor. Under this strangely self-possessed figure's guidance, Emil discovers a new world of corruption and evil.
Peter Owen, Not a Nice Jewish Boy
In this wry, candid and sometimes poignant memoir, Peter Owen recalls his lonely Jewish boyhood in Nazi Germany and migration to England where he survived the London Blitz, a teenage dalliance with aspiring actress Fenella Fielding, and working with a motley variety of book publishers. He founded his eponymous publishing firm in 1951, becoming one of the youngest publishers in Britain. A pioneer of books on social themes, gay and lesbian writing and literature in translation, Owen’s authors included ten Nobel laureates and brought Hermann Hesse, Ezra Pound and Anaïs Nin to a wider audience. Enjoying their success, he and his wife Wendy were memorably stylish and eccentric figures at the literary parties of the 1960s and 1970s. Owen describes his often hilarious encounters with many of those he published, including John Lennon, Yoko Ono and Salvador Dalí, his adventures in Japan with Yukio Mishima and Shūsaku Endō, and in Morocco with Tennessee Williams and Paul and Jane Bowles. As one of the last of the great émigré publishers, his death in 2016 aged 89 signalled the end of a literary era.
