Claude Simon, a Nobel Prize–winning author and cultural icon in France, has written a Proustian novel, intermingling the memories of youth and old age. His madeleine is the trolley of the book’s title, the transport that took him to and from school ev
During the German advance through Belgium into France in 1940, which led to the fall of France, Captain de Reixach is shot dead by a sniper. Three of his dragoons, involved with him in different capacities, remember him and help the reader piece together
Part prophecy and part erotic fantasy, this classic tale of otherworldly depravity features New York itself—or a foreigner's nightmare of New York—as its true protagonist. Set in the towers and tunnels of the quintessential American city, Alain Robbe-
"In the fact of being born there is such an absence of necessity that when you think about it a little more than usual you are left... with a foolish grin" -E.M. CioranE.M. Cioran confronts the place of today's world in the context of human history. He fo
Richard Howard's exuberant and definitive rendition of Stendhal's stirring tale has brought about the rediscovery of this classic by modern readers. Stendhal narrates a young aristocrat's adventures in Napoleon's army and in the court of Parma, illuminati
In his consideration of the language of the fashion magazine—the structural analysis of descriptions of women's clothing by writers about fashion—Barthes gives us a brief history of semiology. At the same time, he identifies economics as the underlyin
These late essays of Roland Barthes's are concerned with the visible and the audible, and here the preoccupations are particularly intense and rewarding, in part because Barthes was himself, by predilection, an artist and a musician, and in part because h
In this appealing and luminous collection of essays, Roland Barthes examines the mundane and exposes hidden texts, causing the reader to look afresh at the famous landmark and symbol of Paris, and also at the Tour de France, the visit to Paris of Billy Gr
Here, in one volume, are two remarkable novels by the chief spokesman of the so-called “new novel” which has caused such discussion and aroused such controversy. “Jealousy,” said the New York Times Book Review “is a technical masterpiece, impecc
