Passion, courage, beauty, indomitable will, rare talent: these are the qualities of the sculptor Camille Claudel. And of the book by Anne Delbee, the book that caused a sensation in France, inspired a motion picture, and resurrected the artist for a publi
In The Elementary Forms of Religious Life (1912), Emile Durkheim sets himself the task of discovering the enduring source of human social identity. He investigates what he considered to be the simplest form of documented religion - totemism among the Abor
Agatha Christie's classic novel The Murder of Roger Ackroyd has sparked great debate in the years since its publication in 1926, inspiring cultural critics from Roland Barthes to Umberto Eco to explore its unique construction: a murder mystery in which th
An NYRB Classics OriginalWe think of Honoré de Balzac as the author of long and fully upholstered novels, stitched together into the magnificent visionary document called The Human Comedy. Yet along with the full-length fiction within The Human Comedy st
He becomes thoroughly attached to her and confides a terrifying truth: he is immortal. But having been resuscitated into enjoying life again, he soon starts breaking free from her grasp and all notions of mortality.
"Non" ; elle a cri� tout haut. Pas Catherine. Je ne permettrai pas qu'on lui fasse ce qu'on m'a fait. Qu'a-t-on fait de moi ? Cette femme qui n'aime personne, insensible aux beaut�s du monde, incapable m�me de pleurer, cette femme que je vomis. Cath
Jean Blomart, patriot leader against the German forces of occupation, waits throughout an endless night for his lover, Helene, to die. He is the one who sent her on the mission that led to her death, and before morning, he must decide how many others to s
Los Angeles has always been a place of paradisal promise and apocalyptic undercurrents. Simone de Beauvoir saw a kaleidoscopic "hall of mirrors," Aldous Huxley a "city of dreadful joy." Jack Kerouac found a "huge desert encampment," David Thomson imagined
Simone de Beauvoir, novelist, dramatist, and philosopher, was the most distinguished woman writer in modern France. A leading exponent of French existentialism, her work complements, though it is independent of, that of Jean-Paul Sartre. In "The Ethics of
