false 29954 0 0 3755250 0061353450 9780061353451 99 <![CDATA[The Kindly Ones]]> http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1237595942m/3755250.jpg http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1237595942s/3755250.jpg http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/3755250.The_Kindly_Ones 3.49 231
The Kindly Ones won the Prix Goncourt, France’s most prestigious literary award, as well as the Académie Française’s Prix de Littérature. It has sold more than one million copies in Europe alone.

The Kindly Ones is the fictional memoir of Dr. Max Aue, a former Nazi officer who survived the war and has reinvented himself, many years later, as a middle-class entrepreneur and family man in northern France. Max is an intellectual steeped in philosophy, literature, and classical music. He is also a cold-blooded assassin and the consummate bureaucrat. Through the eyes of this cultivated yet monstrous man, we experience the horrors of the Second World War and the Nazi genocide of the Jews in graphic, disturbingly precise detail. During the period from June 1941 through April 1945, Max is posted to Poland, the Ukraine, and the Caucasus; he is present at the Battle of Stalingrad, at Auschwitz and Cracow; he visits occupied Paris and lives through the chaos of the final days of the Nazi regime in Berlin. Although Max is a totally imagined character, his world is peopled by real historical figures, such as Eichmann, Himmler, Göring, Speer, Heydrich, Höss, and Hitler himself.

Massive in scope, horrific in subject matter, and shocking in its protagonist, Littell’s masterpiece is intense, hallucinatory, and utterly original. Critics abroad have compared this provocative and controversial work of literature to Tolstoy’s War and Peace, a classic epic of war that, like The Kindly Ones, is a morally challenging read.]]> 141301 3.62 387 143 29954 3.52 289 118 2006 1079635 0971865957 9780971865952 3 <![CDATA[War, Evil, and the End of History]]> http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1180814109m/1079635.jpg http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1180814109s/1079635.jpg http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1079635.War_Evil_and_the_End_of_History 3.96 27 50622 3.39 321 65 29954 3.52 289 118 2001 890137 1933633417 9781933633411 5 <![CDATA[Lemoine Affair (The Art of the Novella)]]> http://www.goodreads.com/images/nocover-111x148.jpg http://www.goodreads.com/images/nocover-60x80.jpg http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/890137.Lemoine_Affair 3.47 15 It is surprising but true: a polished, mature work by Marcel Proust that is unavailable in English translation-until now. In this overlooked comedic gem based on a true story, the author considered one of the most important writers of the twentieth century tells the tale of a con artist who claimed he could manufacture diamonds, with each chapter of the tale written in the style of a different French writer.

This delicious spoof of Balzac, Flaubert, Chateaubriand, and others is presented in a sparkling, nuanced translation by the award-winning Charlotte Mandell, exclusively for The Art of the Novella series.

]]> 233619 4.29 7601 1018 29954 3.52 289 118 2006 2048187 0804742863 9780804742863 0 <![CDATA[Fragments of the Artwork]]> http://www.goodreads.com/images/nocover-111x148.jpg http://www.goodreads.com/images/nocover-60x80.jpg http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/2048187.Fragments_of_the_Artwork 0.0 0 Fragments of the Artwork brings together Jean Genet’s critical writings and open letters on art and aesthetic issues. This collection testifies to Genet’s enormous influence on the modern theater, on the development of the novel, and on the representation of crime, sex, gender, and race. In lyrical essays and one candid interview, these works present an untutored, original, defiant Genet, displaying his provocative insights and acuities on a range of topics.

Genet wrestles with the athletic genius of Rembrandt, adores the intricate criminal resurrections of Dostoevsky, challenges our easy readings of Brecht, and, in what is one of the most exalting art historical essays ever written, provides us with his detailed personal account of the work and presence of Alberto Giacometti. Altogether these essays comprise a series of engrossing meditations on the central motives of theatricality and art.

</div>]]> 29952 4.02 2420 208 29954 3.52 289 118 1982 5089313 0804729344 9780804729345 0 <![CDATA[Faux Pas]]> http://www.goodreads.com/images/nocover-111x148.jpg http://www.goodreads.com/images/nocover-60x80.jpg http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/5089313.Faux_Pas 0.0 0 Faux Pas is the first collection of Maurice Blanchot’s essays on literature and language, consisting of fifty-four short pieces that were originally issued as reviews in literary journals, and one long introductory meditation that defines the trajectory of the whole volume. These essays—like those collected in the other five books of criticism published over several decades—have established Blanchot as the most lucid and powerful French critic of the second half of the twentieth century. Sober reconstructions of the main tenets of both classical and modern, both literary and theoretical texts, they have attained the status of model readings for authors as diverse as da Vinci and Kierkegaard, Melville and Proust, Molière, Goethe, and Mallarmé.

However, the book is not a miscellaneous collection of exquisite essays. The first section of the volume, “From Anguish to Language,” indicates the relative unity of its trajectory and its special moment in the development of Blanchot’s thought. “Anguish” was a prominent notion for the existentialist philosophies of the period of his first work, and in this book Blanchot reflects on the necessary transition from the paradoxes of anguish to a focus on the paradoxes of language. He does so without ever betraying the affective tensions that attach themselves to linguistic utterances, but he also insists that the pathos of anxiety is, in the last resort, comical. Whoever writes “I am lonely” can judge himself to be quite comical, as he evokes his solitude by addressing a reader and using means that make it impossible to be alone.

This comedy of language is retraced in Blanchot’s intensely luminous essays on poetry and narration, on silence and symbolism, the novel and morals, the stranger, the enigma, time, and the very possibility of literature in the works of Blake, Balzac, Rimbaud, and Gide, Bergson and Brice Parain, Rilke and Bataille, Sartre, Camus, Queneau, and so many others.

</div>]]> 62478 4.19 635 47 29954 3.52 289 118 1987 7294771 0823227995 9780823227990 0 <![CDATA[Listen]]> http://www.goodreads.com/images/nocover-111x148.jpg http://www.goodreads.com/images/nocover-60x80.jpg http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/7294771-listen 0.0 0 40922 3.95 183 24 29954 3.52 289 118 2007 6754925 0823231186 9780823231188 0 <![CDATA[The Fall of Sleep]]> http://www.goodreads.com/images/books/67/925/6754925-m-1255582145.jpg http://www.goodreads.com/images/books/67/925/6754925-s-1255582145.jpg http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/6754925-the-fall-of-sleep 0.0 0 40922 3.95 183 24 29954 3.52 289 118 2009