Marcel Proust's Search for Lost Time
A Reader's Guide to The Remembrance of Things Past
Written by Patrick Alexander

Format: Trade Paperback, 400 pages
Publisher: Vintage
On Sale: September 22, 2009
Price: $15.95
ISBN: 978-0-307-47232-8 (0-307-47232-9)

An accessible, irreverent guide to one of the most admired—and entertaining—novels of the past century. There is no other guide like this; a user-friendly and enticing entry into the marvelously enjoyable world of Proust.

At seven volumes, three thousand pages, and more than four hundred characters, as well as a towering reputation... Read more >

The Random House Book of 20th Century French Poetry

Written by Paul Auster

Format: Trade Paperback, 688 pages
Publisher: Vintage
On Sale: January 12, 1984
Price: $26.00
ISBN: 978-0-394-71748-7 (0-394-71748-1)

"Indispensable...a book that everyone interested in modern poetry should have close to hand, a source of renewable delights and discoveries, a book that will long claim our attention...To my knowledge, no current anthology is as full and as deftly edited."--Peter Brooks, The New York Times Book Review

"One of the freshest and... Read more >

Epileptic

Written by David B.

Format: Trade Paperback, 368 pages
Publisher: Pantheon
On Sale: July 4, 2006
Price: $19.95
ISBN: 978-0-375-71468-9 (0-375-71468-5)

Hailed by The Comics Journal as one of Europe’s most important and innovative comics artists, David B. has created a masterpiece in Epileptic, his stunning and emotionally resonant autobiography about growing up with an epileptic brother. Epileptic gathers together and makes available in English for the first time all six volumes... Read more >

Epileptic

Written by David B.

Format: Hardcover, 368 pages
Publisher: Pantheon
On Sale: January 4, 2005
Price: $28.95
ISBN: 978-0-375-42318-5 (0-375-42318-4)

From the highly-acclaimed French comics artist, a moving and powerful graphic memoir that describes growing up with an epileptic brother in France in the late 60s and 70s and the devastating effects of his illness on the entire family. David B. was born Pierre-Francois Beauchard in a small town outside of... Read more >

Cousin Bette

Written by Honore de Balzac

Format: Hardcover, 496 pages
Publisher: Everyman's Library
On Sale: October 15, 1991
Price: $20.00
ISBN: 978-0-679-40671-6 (0-679-40671-9)

Introduction by Michael Tilby; Translation by James Waring

Written in 1846 at the height of Balzac’s powers, this novel portrays the stunningly malevolent Cousin Bette and her intricate plans for revenge against the wealthy relatives on whom she depends and whose condescension she bitterly resents. As Bette’s insidious deceit relentlessly unravels... Read more >

Eugenie Grandet

Written by Honore de Balzac

Format: Hardcover, 288 pages
Publisher: Everyman's Library
On Sale: November 3, 1992
Price: $17.00
ISBN: 978-0-679-41716-3 (0-679-41716-8)

Translated By Ellen Marriage with An Introduction By Fredric R. Jameson

Many people (among them Henry James) have considered Balzac to be the greatest of all novelists. Eugenie Grandet, his spare, classical story of a girl whose life is blighted by her father’s hysterical greed, goes a long way to justifying that... Read more >

Old Goriot

Written by Honore de Balzac

Format: Hardcover, 272 pages
Publisher: Everyman's Library
On Sale: November 26, 1991
Price: $17.00
ISBN: 978-0-679-40535-1 (0-679-40535-6)

Introduction by Daniel Adamson Read more >

Something to Declare
Essays on France and French Culture
Written by Julian Barnes

Format: Trade Paperback, 320 pages
Publisher: Vintage
On Sale: September 9, 2003
Price: $14.95
ISBN: 978-1-4000-3087-3 (1-4000-3087-0)

Anyone who loves France (or just feels strongly about it), or has succumbed to the spell of Julian Barnes’s previous books, will be enraptured by this collection of essays on the country and its culture.

Barnes’s appreciation extends from France’s vanishing peasantry to its hyper-literate pop singers, from the gleeful iconoclasm... Read more >

Fanfarlo

Written by Charles Baudelaire
Translated by Edward K. Kaplan

Format: Trade Paperback, 64 pages
Publisher: Melville House
On Sale: August 28, 2012
Price: $11.00
ISBN: 978-1-61219-109-6 (1-61219-109-6)

A stunning new translation of a neglected masterpiece by one of history’s most celebrated writers.

Ten years before Baudelaire published his masterpiece, The Flowers of Evil, the great poet penned the only prose fiction of his career: La Fanfarlo. The novella describes the torrid real-life affair the poet had with Jean Duval... Read more >

The Romance of Tristan and Iseult

Written by Joseph Bedier
Translated by Hilaire Belloc

Format: Trade Paperback, 224 pages
Publisher: Vintage
On Sale: May 31, 1994
Price: $13.00
ISBN: 978-0-679-75016-1 (0-679-75016-9)

A tale of chivalry and doomed, transcendent love, The Romance of Tristan and Iseult is one of the most resonant works of Western literature, as well as the basis for our enduring idea of romance. The story of the Cornish knight and the Irish princess who meet by deception, fall in... Read more >

The Class

Written by Francois Begaudeau
Translated by Linda Asher

Format: Trade Paperback, 272 pages
Publisher: Seven Stories Press
On Sale: April 7, 2009
Price: $17.95
ISBN: 978-1-58322-885-2 (1-58322-885-3)

Winner of the Prix France Culture/Télérama prize, The Class explores timely issues of race, class, identity, colonial history, immigration, and education, “suspend[ing] judgment and liberat[ing] the raw words of kids in a deconsecrated classroom” (Le Monde). The novel’s eponymous film version, directed by Laurent Cantet, starring author Bégaudeau as himself, won... Read more >

Illuminations
Essays and Reflections
Written by Walter Benjamin

Format: Trade Paperback, 288 pages
Publisher: Schocken
On Sale: January 13, 1969
Price: $16.00
ISBN: 978-0-8052-0241-0 (0-8052-0241-2)

Illuminations includes Benjamin's views on Kafka, with whom he felt the closest personal affinity, his studies on Baudelaire and Proust (both of whom he translated), his essays on Leskov and on Brecht's Epic Theater. Also included are his penetrating study on "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,"... Read more >

Where Tigers Are at Home

Written by Jean-Marie Blas de Robles
Translated by Mike Mitchell

Format: Hardcover, 832 pages
Publisher: Other Press
On Sale: March 5, 2013
Price: $32.50
ISBN: 978-1-59051-562-4 (1-59051-562-5)

Winner of the Prix Médicis, this multifaceted literary novel follows the Jesuit scholar Athanasius Kircher across 17th century Europe and Eleazard von Wogau, a retired French correspondent, through modern Brazil.
 
When Eleazard begins editing a strange, unpublished biography of Kircher, the rest of his life seems to begin unraveling–his ex-wife goes on... Read more >

Caligula and Three Other Plays

Written by Albert Camus

Format: Trade Paperback, 320 pages
Publisher: Vintage
On Sale: February 12, 1962
Price: $10.36
ISBN: 978-0-394-70207-0 (0-394-70207-7)

Also includes The Misunderstanding, State of Siege, and The Just Assassins. Translated by Stuart Gilbert. Read more >

Exile and the Kingdom

Written by Albert Camus

Format: Trade Paperback, 192 pages
Publisher: Vintage
On Sale: February 13, 2007
Price: $15.00
ISBN: 978-0-307-27858-6 (0-307-27858-1)

These six stories display Albert Camus at the height of his powers. From a variety of masterfully rendered perspectives and tones, they depict people at decisive moments of revelation. A wife betrays her huband to give herself to the desert night. A renegade missionary is brutally converted to the worship of... Read more >

The Fall

Written by Albert Camus

Format: Trade Paperback, 160 pages
Publisher: Vintage
On Sale: May 7, 1991
Price: $13.95
ISBN: 978-0-679-72022-5 (0-679-72022-7)

Mordant, brilliant, elegantly styled, The Fall is a novel of the conscience of modern man in the face of evil. In a seedy bar in Amsterdam, Clamence, an expatriate Frenchman, indulges in a calculated confession. He recalls his past life as a respected Parisian lawyer, a champion of noble causes, and... Read more >

The First Man

Written by Albert Camus

Format: Trade Paperback, 336 pages
Publisher: Vintage
On Sale: August 6, 1996
Price: $16.00
ISBN: 978-0-679-76816-6 (0-679-76816-5)

Camus tells the story of Jacques Cormery, a boy who lived a life much like his own. Camus summons up the sights, sounds and textures of a childhood circumscribed by poverty and a father's death yet redeemed by the austere beauty of Algeria and the boy's attachment to his nearly deaf-mute... Read more >

Happy Death

Written by Albert Camus

Format: Trade Paperback, 208 pages
Publisher: Vintage
On Sale: August 29, 1995
Price: $15.00
ISBN: 978-0-679-76400-7 (0-679-76400-3)

Camus wrote A Happy Death, his first novel, when he was in his early twenties. In it Camus laid the foundation for The Stranger, focusing in both works on an Algerian clerk who kills a man in cold blood. He also revealed himself to an extent that he never would... Read more >

Lyrical and Critical Essays

Written by Albert Camus

Format: Trade Paperback, 384 pages
Publisher: Vintage
On Sale: September 12, 1970
Price: $16.00
ISBN: 978-0-394-70852-2 (0-394-70852-0)

Edited by Philip Thody, translated by Ellen Conroy Kennedy.

"Here now, for the first time in a complete English translation, we have Camus' three little volumes of essays, plus a selection of his critical comments on literature and his own place in it. As might be expected, the main interest of... Read more >

The Myth of Sisyphus
And Other Essays
Written by Albert Camus

Format: Trade Paperback, 224 pages
Publisher: Vintage
On Sale: May 7, 1991
Price: $14.00
ISBN: 978-0-679-73373-7 (0-679-73373-6)

The Myth of Sisyphus and Other Essays is a crucial exposition of existentialist thought. With lyric eloquence, Camus brilliantly posits a way out of despair, reaffirming the value of personal existence, and the possibility of life lived with dignity and authenticity. Translated by Justin O'Brien. Read more >

The Plague, The Fall, Exile and the Kingdom, and Selected Essays

Written by Albert Camus

Format: Hardcover, 696 pages
Publisher: Everyman's Library
On Sale: August 17, 2004
Price: $25.00
ISBN: 978-1-4000-4255-5 (1-4000-4255-0)

From one of the most brilliant and influential thinkers of the twentieth century–two novels, six short stories, and a pair of essays in a single volume. In both his essays and his fiction, Albert Camus (1913—1960) de-ployed his lyric eloquence in defense against despair, providing an affirmation of the brave assertion... Read more >

The Plague

Written by Albert Camus

Format: Trade Paperback, 320 pages
Publisher: Vintage
On Sale: May 7, 1991
Price: $14.95
ISBN: 978-0-679-72021-8 (0-679-72021-9)

In Oran, a coastal town in North Africa, the plague begins as a series of portents, unheeded by the people. It gradually becomes an omnipresent reality, obliterating all traces of the past and driving its victims to almost unearthly extremes of suffering, madness and compassion. The Plague is at once a... Read more >

The Rebel
An Essay on Man in Revolt
Written by Albert Camus

Format: Trade Paperback, 320 pages
Publisher: Vintage
On Sale: January 1, 1992
Price: $14.95
ISBN: 978-0-679-73384-3 (0-679-73384-1)

Camus' major essay on the nature and origins of rebellion demonstrates how revolution, by its very nature, inevitably leads to a new tyranny.  For Camus, the urge to rebel is manifested in man's timeless Promethean struggle against the conditions of his existence, as well as the popular uprisings against established orders throughout... Read more >

Resistance, Rebellion, and Death
Essays
Written by Albert Camus

Format: Trade Paperback, 288 pages
Publisher: Vintage
On Sale: August 29, 1995
Price: $15.00
ISBN: 978-0-679-76401-4 (0-679-76401-1)

In the speech he gave upon accepting the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1957, Camus said that a writer "cannot serve today those who make history; he must serve those who are subject to it." In these twenty-three political essays, he demonstrates his commitment to history's victims, from the fallen maquis... Read more >

The Stranger

Written by Albert Camus

Format: Trade Paperback, 144 pages
Publisher: Vintage
On Sale: March 13, 1989
Price: $12.95
ISBN: 978-0-679-72020-1 (0-679-72020-0)

Through this story of an ordinary man who unwittingly gets drawn into a senseless murder on a sun-drenched Algerian beach, Camus explored what he termed "the nakedness of man faced with the absurd."  Now, in an illuminating new American translation by Matthew Ward, extraordinary for its exactitude and clarity, the original intent... Read more >