An Uncomfortable Bed


Book Description

Experience the suspenseful and darkly humorous narrative of Guy De Maupassant's "An Uncomfortable Bed." This short story follows the unsettling and eerie events that unfold when a man encounters a mysteriously uncomfortable bed. De Maupassant masterfully weaves themes of paranoia, discomfort, and psychological tension into the narrative. De Maupassant excels at creating a chilling atmosphere, blending humor with an underlying sense of dread. His storytelling offers a gripping exploration of how a seemingly ordinary object can become the source of profound unease. "An Uncomfortable Bed" is a captivating and eerie story, ideal for readers who enjoy dark humor and psychological suspense in the masterful prose of one of France's greatest literary figures. -




Pastiches Et Melanges by Marcel Proust


Book Description

This is the first translation into English in its entirety of Marcel Proust's Pastiches et Mélanges, published by Gaston Gallimard in 1919. The first part, Pastiches, contains nine literary parodies about a fraudster, Henri Lemoine, who claimed to be able to manufacture diamonds. The pastiches are in the manner of Balzac, Flaubert, Sainte-Beuve, Henri de Régnier, Michelet, Émile Faguet, Renan and the Goncourt brothers. The second part, Mélanges, consists of four sections: the destruction of cathedrals in the First World War, the separation of church and state, a drama about madness, and Proust's love of reading. Proust is best known for writing À la recherche du temps perdu (variously translated as Remembrance of Things Past and In Search of Lost Time), widely considered to be the greatest novel of the twentieth century. The Melody beneath the Words is the first translation into English in its entirety of Marcel Proust's Pastiches et Mélanges, published by Gaston Gallimard in 1919. The first part, Pastiches, contains nine literary parodies about a fraudster, Henri Lemoine, who claimed to be able to manufacture diamonds. The pastiches are in the manner of Balzac, Flaubert, Sainte-Beuve, Henri de Régnier, Michelet, Émile Faguet, Renan and the Goncourt brothers. The second part, Mélanges, consists of four sections: the destruction of cathedrals in the First World War, the separation of church and state, a drama about madness, and Proust's love of reading. Proust is best known for writing À la recherche du temps perdu (variously translated as Remembrance of Things Past and In Search of Lost Time), widely considered to be the greatest novel of the twentieth century. The Melody beneath the Words is the first translation into English in its entirety of Marcel Proust's Pastiches et Mélanges, published by Gaston Gallimard in 1919. The first part, Pastiches, contains nine literary parodies about a fraudster, Henri Lemoine, who claimed to be able to manufacture diamonds. The pastiches are in the manner of Balzac, Flaubert, Sainte-Beuve, Henri de Régnier, Michelet, Émile Faguet, Renan and the Goncourt brothers. The second part, Mélanges, consists of four sections: the destruction of cathedrals in the First World War, the separation of church and state, a drama about madness, and Proust's love of reading. Proust is best known for writing À la recherche du temps perdu (variously translated as Remembrance of Things Past and In Search of Lost Time), widely considered to be the greatest novel of the twentieth century.




Before We Visit the Goddess


Book Description

"A new novel from the author of Oleander Girl, a novel in stories, built around crucial moments in the lives of 3 generations of women in an Indian/Indian-American Family"--




Orestes


Book Description

Orestes was produced in 1750, an experiment which intensely interested the literary world and the public. In his Dedicatory Letters to the Duchess of Maine, Voltaire has the following passage on the Greek drama: "We should not, I acknowledge, endeavor to imitate what is weak and defective in the ancients: it is most probable that their faults were well known to their contemporaries. I am satisfied, Madam, that the wits of Athens condemned, as well as you, some of those repetitions, and some declamations with which Sophocles has loaded his Electra: they must have observed that he had not dived deep enough into the human heart. I will moreover fairly confess, that there are beauties peculiar not only to the Greek language, but to the climate, to manners and times, which it would be ridiculous to transplant hither. Therefore I have not copied exactly the Electra of Sophocles-much more I knew would be necessary; but I have taken, as well as I could, all the spirit and substance of it."




The Lemoine Affair


Book Description

Their friend Marcel Proust had killed himself after the fall in diamond shares, a collapse that annihilated a part of his fortune. This is the first-ever translation into English of this startling tour-de-force by one of the twentieth century’s greatest writers. The Lemoine Affair was inspired by the real-life French scandal involving Henri Lemoine, who claimed he could manufacture diamonds from coal and convinced numerous people—including officers of the De Beers diamond mine company and Proust himself—to invest in the scheme. In a series of pastiches—imitations written in the style of other writers—Proust tells the story of the embarrassment rippling across high society Paris in the wake of the scandal, poking fun at himself (in one story, a character declares that Marcel Proust is so embarrassed he’s suicidal) while lampooning some of France’s greatest writers, including Flaubert, Balzac, and Saint-Simon. Full of sophisticated wit and dazzling wordplay, and rife with allusions to his friend and fictional characters, many Proust scholars see the dead-on mimicry of The Lemoine Affair—written soon after Proust’s rejection of society life—as the work by which he honed his own unique, masterly voice. The Art of The Novella Series Too short to be a novel, too long to be a short story, the novella is generally unrecognized by academics and publishers. Nonetheless, it is a form beloved and practiced by literature's greatest writers. In the Art Of The Novella series, Melville House celebrates this renegade art form and its practitioners with titles that are, in many instances, presented in book form for the first time.




Death Representations in Literature


Book Description

If the academic field of death studies is a prosperous one, there still seems to be a level of mistrust concerning the capacity of literature to provide socially relevant information about death and to help improve the anthropological understanding of how culture is shaped by the human condition of mortality. Furthermore, the relationship between literature and death tends to be trivialized, in the sense that death representations are interpreted in an over-aestheticized manner. As such, this approach has a propensity to consider death in literature to be significant only for literary studies, and gives rise to certain persistent clichés, such as the power of literature to annihilate death. This volume overcomes such stereotypes, and reveals the great potential of literary studies to provide fresh and accurate ways of interrogating death as a steady and unavoidable human reality and as an ever-continuing socio-cultural construction. The volume brings together researchers from various countries – the USA, the UK, France, Poland, New Zealand, Canada, India, Germany, Greece, and Romania – with different academic backgrounds in fields as diverse as literature, art history, social studies, criminology, musicology, and cultural studies, and provides answers to questions such as: What are the features of death representations in certain literary genres? Is it possible to speak of an homogeneous vision of death in the case of some literary movements? How do writers perceive, imagine, and describe their death through their personal diaries, or how do they metabolize the death of the “significant others” through their writings? To what extent does the literary representation of death refer to the extra-fictional, socio-historically constructed “Death”? Is it moral to represent death in children’s literature? What are the differences and similarities between representing death in literature and death representations in other connected fields? Are metaphors and literary representations of death forms of death denial, or, on the contrary, a more insightful way of capturing the meaning of death?




Bibliography of Forbidden Books -


Book Description

In this first volume of the 1877 work that established him as England's leading authority on pornography, Henry Spencer Ashbee describes scores of "curious, uncommon and erotic books" that were banned or otherwise prohibited from legitimate sale during the Victorian era... and some even until the 1960s. Included in this far-reaching volume are such "gentlemen only" titles as Exhibition of Female Flagellants, The Battles of Venus, and A Cabinet of Amorous Curiosities. This catalog of mostly forgotten works is an invaluable-and highly entertaining-resource for bibliophiles, students of erotica, and collectors of Victoriana. British book collector, travel writer, and bibliographer HENRY SPENCER ASHBEE (1834-1900), aka Pisanus Fraxi, is thought by some to have authored the notorious Victorian sexual memoir My Secret Life.




City of Man


Book Description

An era has ended. The political expression that most galvanized evangelicals during the past quarter-century, the Religious Right, is fading. What's ahead is unclear. Millions of faith-based voters still exist, and they continue to care deeply about hot-button issues like abortion and gay marriage, but the shape of their future political engagement remains to be formed. Into this uncertainty, former White House insiders Michael Gerson and Peter Wehner seek to call evangelicals toward a new kind of political engagement -- a kind that is better both for the church and the country, a kind that cannot be co-opted by either political party, a kind that avoids the historic mistakes of both the Religious Left and the Religious Right. Incisive, bold, and marked equally by pragmatism and idealism, Gerson and Wehner's new book has the potential to chart a new political future not just for values voters, but for the nation as a whole.




The Story of Crass


Book Description

In-depth interviews with the main movers in the punk rock movement--Crass members Penny Rimbaud, Gee Vaucher, and Steve Ignorant--detail the face of the revolution founded by these radical thinkers and artists. When punk ruled the waves, Crass waived the rules by putting out their own records, films, and magazines and setting up a series of situationist pranks that were dutifully covered by the world's press. Not just another iconoclastic band, Crass was a musical, social, and political phenomenon: commune dwellers that were rarely photographed and remained contemptuous of conventional pop stardom. As detailed in this history, their members explored and finally exhausted the possibilities of punk-led anarchy. This definitive biography of the band not only gives backstage access to their lives, philosophies, and the movement that followed, but also to never-before-seen photographs and rare dialogues.