Product Description
Classic naturalist novel, in the original French.First published in 1888. According to Wikipedia: "Emile Zola (2 April 1840 - 29 September 1902) was an influential French writer, the most important example of the literary school of naturalism, and a major figure in the political liberalization of France...After his first major novel, Therese Raquin (1867), Zola started the long series called Les Rougon Macquart, about a family under the Second Empire... More than half of Zola's novels were part of this set of 20 collectively known as Les Rougon-Macquart. Unlike Balzac who in the midst of his literary career re synthetized his work into La Comedie Humaine, Zola from the outset at the age of 28 had thought of the complete layout of the series. Set in France's Second Empire, the series traces the "environmental" influences of violence, alcohol, and prostitution which became more prevalent during the second wave of the industrial revolution." ... Read more

Product Description
Classic naturalist novel, in the original French. Originally published in 1887.
According to Wikipedia: "Emile Zola (2 April 1840 - 29 September 1902) was an influential French writer, the most important example of the literary school of naturalism, and a major figure in the political liberalization of France...After his first major novel, Therese Raquin (1867), Zola started the long series called Les Rougon Macquart, about a family under the Second Empire... More than half of Zola's novels were part of this set of 20 collectively known as Les Rougon-Macquart. Unlike Balzac who in the midst of his literary career re synthetized his work into La Comedie Humaine, Zola from the outset at the age of 28 had thought of the complete layout of the series. Set in France's Second Empire, the series traces the "environmental" influences of violence, alcohol, and prostitution which became more prevalent during the second wave of the industrial revolution." ... Read more

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the discourses of a wonderful eccentric.'___ Edward Lucie-Smith . ... Read more

Product Description
French is not only the language of love, it's the language of diplomacy, business, fine wines, and style. With The Everything® Learning French Book with CD, 2nd Edition, you'll speak everyday French in a matter of days. With these easy-to-follow vocabulary lists, along with complete instruction on written and spoken grammar, you'll learn:

• C vs. Ç: The basics of the French alphabet and accents
• Bonjour! Comment allez-vous?: Common French phrases and greetings
• Je voudrais un café au lait, s'il vous plait: The polite way to place orders and make requests
• Merci beaucoup: Guidelines to French etiquette

David Hebert is a freelance writer who is fluent in French. He is the coauthor of The Everything® Learning French Book, 1st Edition. He lives in Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (7)

I Purchased "New" but was given a"Used" book.
The first chapter ofthe book has all red pen underlines which is really annoying considering I paid for a "new" book. I justlet it pass as I live in Europe and it is too much for me to return such purchase.I think I'lllive with this second-handbook. I think I'll just purchase a new one with a CD... LearningFrench without a CD is futile. I thought this one has CD too considering the German and Spanish versions have. It's my fault when I didnot examineit closely when I was ordering.

The delivery was so quick though. I was expecting it to be delivered around last week ofJanuary but I thinkbefore 2009 ended,it was already here in Netherlands! Very quick delivery!

Cette bein!
I find this book and CD to be very helpful as I am taking French lessons.
Bon chance!

Useful Add-on French Manual
This book is a welcome addition to anyone learning French. It is probably best for one who has had a semester of French, but I have found it to be one of the better review books. I think the layout is good and the additional CD gives a plus to the text. For me, one of the better French language books I have purchased.

Not impressed
The title of this book "The Everythng Learning French..... in No Time" is a bit deceiving. I have taught intensive French for over 25 years and was the Director of an Intensive French Program. You simply cannot learn French or any other language "in no time", a few key words and expressions perhaps. And of course there are people who are trilingual and are just "picking up" French, but in general it is deceptive to claim to be able to teach a casual tourist a foreign language in a few classes. There are plenty of Elementary French books as well as "method" type books out there. Some are better than others. This one wasn't bad just not one I would consider using. The pronunciation part was especially poor.

Everything Learning French Book
I found this book to be very informative and easy to learn the French language.It has everything you need to know, very good. ... Read more

Product Description
This is a dual-language book with the French text on the left side, and the English text on the right side of each spread. The texts are precisely synchronized. A great book for learning both languages while reading a French classic masterpiece. Translated by Eleanor Marx, Karl Marx's daughter. ... Read more

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Every Friday, for half a decade beginning in 1909, whenever she was in Paris, Natalie Clifford Barney hosted the one of the most brilliant international salons of its day. Barney received in her home such literary, artistic, musical and intellectual beacons of the 20th century as James Joyce, Ezra Pound, Gertrude Stein, Colette, Isadora Duncan, Auguste Rodin, Romaine Brooks, William Carlos Williams, Paul Valery, Renee Vivian, Edna St. Vincent Millay and Truman Capote. In 1929, she shared her life, in and out of the salon, through the publication of the first of three volumes of reminiscences. Here Barney explores her family tree, chronicles her friendships and associations through reprinted correspondence and recreated conversations, and evokes the golden age of her salon in a gallery of literary portraits. The first half of the volume features a baker's dozen of the male writers she kneow, from Oscar Wilde, whom she literally ran into at the age of five, to Pierre Louys, who encouraged her fledgling writing career and Paul Valery, an "Immortal" in the Academie Francaise.Barney dedicated the latter half of her diary to the Academie des Femmes, which she founded in 1927, as a counterpart to the male bastion of the French Academy. The book preserves the proceedings of meetings between such figures as Lucie Delarue-Mardrus, Colette, Gertrude Stein, Djuna Barnes and Mina Loy, in the distinctive voices of their speakers. ... Read more

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What happens when a writer throws herself into the service of one of the richest businessmen in the world? Will all the luxuries and corruption of the business world turn her into a complacent drone?In Portrait of the Writer as a Domesticated Animal, the narrator accepts a job writing a laudatory authorized biography of a fast-food magnate, whose egotism borders on megalomania. She thus enters a world of call girls, celebrities, investment portfolios, and bitter rivalries, where the desire to dominate others motivates every decision. Quickly seduced, she takes to all the silver platters and evenings spent chatting with Robert De Niro—until her cold-hearted, brutish boss receives an unexpected visit from his mother, who upends his faith in the corporate world, threatening to destroy both his opulent lifestyle and his sanity. A trenchant satire of greed and self-interest—in idealists and tycoons both—Lydie Salvayre’s latest novel proves her once again to be France’s funniest and most insightful critic of modern life. Portrait was a finalist for the Prix Goncourt, France’s highest literary award. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (1)

Yes, I would like fries with that.
Fame, fortune, power, greed - all things to be detested in others. Right? Well, until you get a taste. Then, you might find it isn't so horrible. Maybe.

This is a low key novel written by a French author with a degree in psychiatry. Written in an autobiographical style, she lets us follow her as she takes on a job. It's a job she feels uncomfortable about; writing a biography of the richest man in the world; the biggest businessman in the world, the one man in the world who stands for all she and her friends find deplorable - Tobold The Hamburger King.

We travel with her, and him and his wife and his minions and we watch some change, some stay the same and a few of them learn some things along the way.

Quite unusual in idea and well translated (presumably) this has little going for it that sounds like much fun in description. Yet, on reflection, it was considerably more entertaining than it seemed to be at the start. If the Product Description above piques your interest, then this is well worth your time.
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Customer Reviews (1)

"I wanted to go on gliding between people and objects like a fish moving with the current during a torrential flood".
POISSON D'OR - 'Fish of Gold' *) is one of the most touching and poignant stories I have read in a long time. Superbly written in the author's typical easygoing, lyrical and melodious language, this is a young African girl's intimate chronicle of her search for identity and roots. J-M G Le Clézio has created his vivacious heroine so convincingly that the reader feels for her and with her, soon to be so completely absorbed by her story and the world as seen through her eyes.

Laila, kidnapped from her village at the age of six or seven and handed from one hand to another, has finally been bought by Lalla Asma, a gentle old Jewish lady, in a big city in northern Morocco (likely Rabat). Her gold earrings with the crescent moon, the symbol of her tribe, are the only clue to her background. While protected and educated by her owner and quasi-grandmother, life takes a rough turn when the old lady falls ill and dies. Laila has to leave the secure compound and adjust to life on the street and on the run. She is pretty, black, with a big head of wild frizzy hair, and men and women are pursuing her for a wide range of reasons. Her survival takes the form of an odyssey that spans three continents. Friends and 'big sisters' are found and lost, lessons, some of them painful, have to be learned: "... we don't own ourselves any longer; we never want anything [from others] but it is always others who decide our fate."

Having lost her hearing in one ear during her kidnapping, she experiences music in the depth of her body. Listening to the chansons every night in a bar, she literally "drinks the words and the music"; for her they are more important nourishment than food. "[The sound of the drums] rolls deep underground - all the way to the other side of the world...to wake up the music on the water's other shore...like a song, a language. I needed that and it felt good." Maybe, music will also be like a guide to her future and her past...

In this novel Le Clézio touches on many of his recurrent themes: displacement and alienation, freedom and independence, hope and determination, loneliness and yearning to reconnect with one's roots and to find out who one really is. There are parallels between the lives of Laila and Lalla, the heroine of the author's 1980 novel Desert (Nobel Prize Literature 2008) (French Edition). In POISSON D'OR, published in 1997, the personal quest of his young heroine is more fully and intimately conveyed: with any number of close calls, dramatic encounters and many, many coincidences. The totality of her experiences may seem to represent much more than one young person's life could contain. However, the author has a purpose for this approach: it brings out the diversity of experiences that displaced and poor people can face. Letting his protagonist live among those without identity papers, family or security in poor neighbourhoods of big cities (such as Rabat or later on Paris or Boston), Le Clézio paints a vivid and realistic social portrait of our societies' underbelly. His critique, conveyed through Laila's voice, is harsh. Yet, her optimistic naiveté and perseverance as she attempts to learn how to become who she wants to be give the novel a warm and gentle and at times mesmerizing feel. A book, difficult to put down and to forget for a long time. [Friederike Knabe]


*) The novel is not yet available in English and all quotes are my translations.
... Read more

Product Description
A remarkable collection of writings by members of the group known as Oulipo, this anthology includes, among others, Italo Calvino, Harry Mathews, Georges Perec, Jacques Roubad, and Raymond Queneau. Founded in Paris in 1960, Oulipo approaches writing in a way that has yet to make its impact in the United States and its creative writing programs. Rather than inspiration, rather than experience, rather than self-expression, the Oulipans view imaginative writing as an exercise dominated by the method of "constraints." While a major contribution to literary theory, Oulipo is perhaps most distinguished as an indispensable guide to writers. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (3)

It does a good job at breaking down a convoluted subject
Most people who purchase this book are probably English majors or academics.I picked this book up because I'm interested in the subject of Oulipo and its connections to 'apaphysics.Indeed, the forward to this book talks about how Oulipo began as an offshoot of 'apaphysics but, shortly after, lost any official ties with the aforementioned group.

Oulipo is a bit difficult to wrap your head around at first.It is a relatively new movement in French literature.It is not merely a collection of structualists (although an exception is made for Claude Levi-Strauss).The best definition for Oulipo that I can give you from what I've learned by reading this book is this: Oulipo is a workshop of writers who strive to create new forms of writing, based upon restrictions... constraints.They create a new form, provide a few examples, and move on.

How is this potential literature?A good example is "Cent Mille Milliard de poemes" or, in English "One Hundred Thousand Billion Poems."The collection itself is only ten sonnets... but each line can be cut&pasted into any of the other sonnets, which means that the number of possible poems becomes 10 to the 14th power, or One Hundred Thousand Billion Poems.Even the most ardent reader will only read a small handful of these poems within their lifetime.Therefore, most of the writing is, and will always be potential.

Of course, this is just one form and one example.That specific example was the where it started to really click for me.I'm still deep in the book, and I highly reccommend it.It might not be the easiest book to pick-up, but like I said earlier, most anyone picking this up is probaby familiar with the writers involved in Oulipo, or has read literary criticisms and other academic texts.This is not dense like Derridie, but none-the-less, it is a very academic minded book.

A Glimpse
If you are curious about the inner workings of an infamous group of dedicated outcasts and writers with a passion for both elaborate and finite (read: calculated) creativity, I would suggest you get a copy of this book. I was engrossed from the beginning and kept finding historical "secrets" of these writing masters to titillate me. It was, simply, a glimpse at what is possible in writing.

Oulipo- The American Book Review

Works of fiction contain a single plot, with all of its imaginable permutations, Tlon, Uglor, Orbiris, Tertius - Jorge Louis Borges

Warren F. Motte has collected a series of critical writing from The Ouvrior de Litterature Potentielle or Oulipo (The Workshop of Potential Literature), a primarily French group organized around Raymond Queneau and primarily concerned with methods of creating new literary structures. Their ideas offer a welcome relief to the staid and stale conviction that literary forms have been handed down from the ancients along with the rest of language, as if structures like sonnets or mystery novels are as intrinsically a part of language as vowels or nouns.

These essays illuminate the limited ways that contemporary fiction approaches the idea of form. In the limited framework of the short story structure, readers find great variation and even invention, but the actual form of the story seems as rigid a language structure as the blues are a song structure, tirelessly repeating the AAB structure into infinity; I asked my captain for the time of day. I asked my captain for the time of day. He said hed thrown his watch away.

A writer who wants to be free needs to confront the constrictions and value of literary form. Yet, literary form seems to come out of a black box, so much so that writing that somehow confounds formats, like Lawrence Sternes Tristam Shandy or Edwin A. Abbotts Flatland or more recently Ben Marcuss The Age of Wire and String seems to be inspired but frivolous oddities rather than the result of a literary method. The Oulipo, however, have developed a method for subverting expectations and for being as creative with form as writers are expected to be with content. Franáois Le Lionnais writes in the Second Oulipo Manifesto, Should humanity lie back and be satisfied to watch new thoughts make ancient verses?

Literature that satisfies a particular

form fulfills the esthetic aims of that form. For instance, the novel developed several hundred years ago as a result of an expanded middle class audience. The form typically follows a protagonists conflict with society and in the end the protagonist either achieves some kind of reconciliation with society or dies; the form of the novel performs as both a platform for an anarchic point of view but also reassures its audience that eccentricity will be absorbed in the end. A sonnet straps language into iambic pentameter, a straight jacket rhyme scheme, and limits the subject to a single sentiment. The Poetry Handbook includes this rule for the sonnet, Groups of sonnets using the same form and relate to the same theme, which is often love of a women or the love of God. The inherent value of the form exerts a hidden force on the content of the work. Form functions like a medium and in this sense limits the range of meaning expressed by language just as wood grain limits

the direction of the carved line in a wood block.

By building mazes and trying to escape them, the Oulipo have started a dialogue about ways to imagine new literary structures. By building artificial rules the Oulipo have escaped the prison of old forms.

Founded in late 1960 in France, at a colloquium on the work of Raymond Queneau, in order to research new writing by combining mathematics and literature (and also to just horse around) the Oulipo soon expanded to include all writing using self-imposed restrictive systems. The group didnt publicly publish until 1973, La Litterature Potentielle. The best known of the groups work are Italo Calvinos If on a winters night a traveler and Georges Perecs Life: A Users Manual. A truncated role call of the more familiar names includes: Noël Arnaud, Italo Calvino, Ross Chambers, Stanley Chapman, Marcel Duchamp, Paul Fournal, Franáois Le Lionnais, Harry Matthews, Georges Perec, and Raymond Queneau.

Oulipo contains the critical writings of the Oulipo, including Franáois Le Lionnaiss Manifestoes, a history of the Lipogram by Georges Perec, and Jacques Roulaurds explanation of the mathematical method of Raymond Queneau. Reading the critical writing gives a foundation in the method and the nature of the groups experiment. Jean Lescures Brief History of the Oulipo chronicles the formulation of the group as an formally informal gathering of mathematicians and writers who began to apply mathematical formulas to literary forms. The end matter of the book contains a thorough bibliography of the principal Oulipo players and their work.

Raymond Queneaus Cent Mille Millards de Poems (One hundred thousand billion poems), expresses the Oulipian ideal. It is a series of ten sonnets contrived so that each line of each sonnet can be replaced with any corresponding line of the other ten sonnets, sort of like a sonnet version of one of those childrens flip-books where you can change the head of animals. The possibilities put forth by this arrangement would be to the order of 1014, one hundred trillion sonnets. The potential text explodes into an incomprehensible size. According to [Queneaus] calculations, if one read a sonnet per minute eight hours a day, two hundred days per year, it would take more than a million centuries to finish the text.

The Oulipo seem to be most interested in discovering how to express literature by limiting the writers choices, either by the construction of mathematical formulas that produce results, formal constraints and rules that produces results, or language games that produce results, in this sense I mean results as in the result of an equation. The lipogram, where a single letter is stricken from the text, is an ancient exercise the Oulipians have appropriated for their toolbox. Ideally, each Oulipian structure would result in one potential literature, not necessarily a single text because The One Hundred Thousand Billion Poems is a single potential literature, but nearly an infinite text. For a writer, drafting an Oulipian work should be more like filling out a crossword puzzle or doing calculus homework then an act of inspiration. The muse has had her hard drive reformatted and inspiration is not to be trusted.

To practitioners approaching writing as a craft, as if the writing of stories was along the lines of knitting sweaters, this exploration seems at best frivolous and maybe a little pretentious if all you want to do is make sweaters. However, these are useful generative tools. Not only do they provide a developed handbag of new literary forms, but these tools also establish a solid framework for developing a criticism about literary structure. This book is a vital and concise introduction to the Oulipian technique. ... Read more

Product Description

Are legal concepts of intellectual property and copyright related to artistic notions of invention and originality? Do literary and legal scholars have anything to learn from each other, or should the legal debate be viewed as separate from questions of aesthetics? Bridging what are usually perceived as two distinct areas of inquiry, this interdisciplinary volume begins with a reflection on the "origins" of literary and legal questions in the Enlightenment to consider their ramifications in the post-Enlightenment and contemporary world. Tying in to the growing scholarly interest in connections between law and literature, on the one hand, and to the contemporary interrogation of "originality" and "authorship," on the other hand, the present volume furthers research in the field by providing a dense study of the legal and historical context to re-examine our current assumptions about supposed earlier Enlightenment and Romantic ideals of individual authorship and originality.

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Product Description
The Astonished Universe is an uplifting and luminous book of poetry about consciousness. It is Red Hen Press' first bilingual edition in English and French. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (19)

Serenity with no blemishes
If human emotions are the vibrations of the brain, then they will exhibit a resonance when encountering the words in this book.

If human thought is a river, it will seep over its banks when encountering the words in this book.

If reading poetry can bring momentary solace, it will find a restful equilibrium when encountering the words in this book.

If memory is fleeting it will absorb as a sponge when encountering the words in this book.

If the universe could feel astonishment, it would do so when encountering the words in this book.

Blends French and English, Love and Nature, Perfectly
This lovely book of poems came into my life just as I am committing myself to spending the next twenty years as intelligence officer to the poor.We are going to create a global free public grid for early warning and decision support and free multilingual education "one cell call at a time," with a prioritization of needs able to influence three trillion dollars a year: the trillion that foundations give out willy-nilly; the trillion in corporate services that can profit from going green; and the trillion now spent on war that we can over time, through public education, redirect toward waging peace.

This volume is especially valuable to me not just for its open and peaceful thoughts, but because it was written in English, translated into French, and the facing pages offer the poem in French to the left and English to the right.I can think of no finer way to begin my long road back to mastery of the language of diplomacy, than by ensuring I read one poem a night, in both languages, for a very long time to come.

El Recuerdo (the Memory) is already a favorite within this volume.

See also the volume by Philip Levine that I have carried with me all these years that will now be joined by The Astonished Universe:
7 years from somewhere: Poems

A universal language
Hélène Cardona's poems transport us to the realm of myth and spirit, where nothing is tangible yet everything is essential. In French or English, her words speak to our soul.

The Astonished Strength
This is a remarkable book of poetry.I am absolutely delighted and I highly recommend this magical read.

The Astonished Universe
I LOVED this gem of a book!I especially liked the chapter Life in Suspension as I identified with the fleeting and random memories from my own childhood that came floating up as I was reading...
there is a unique 'sound' to each poem - clear and strong, but with a delicate, fragile echo. ... Read more

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Customer Reviews (1)

Two Valuable Views Of The Slave Trade
I would say that if you are a student of history, or literature, or not necessarily either, but you would like to have a better understanding of historical events that have shaped our western world and culture, then this book will be of interest to you.It is well crafted, and because of the subject matter, you might need to absorb it over a period of time.This is not the sort of book you read in one sitting.

It is very interesting, educational and informative. This book is searing. It gives one pause and much to digest and consider.It also leaves you wondering about the nature of many things. ... Read more

Product Description
This file includes (in the original French): Madame Bovary, 1857; La Tentation de Saint Antoine, 1848; Trois Contes, 1878 (Un Coeur Simple, La Légende de Saint-Julien l'Hospitalier, Hérodias), Bouvard et Pécuchet, 1881, and Dictionnaire des Idees Recues, 1913. According to Wikipedia: "Gustave Flaubert (December 12, 1821 – May 8, 1880) was a French writer who is counted among the greatest Western novelists. He is known especially for his first published novel, Madame Bovary (1857), and for his scrupulous devotion to his art and style."
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Product Description
A new edition of a classic anthology, updated for the modern student.Selections in French, with introductory material and notes in English.Includes time lines, introductions to each period and its culture, and short biographies of the authors. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (1)

Good overview
This series is more or less what I was looking for: A broad sample of French literature through the ages, with diverse styles and genres. My only criticism is that the introductions are in English. ... Read more

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Barzun, Essay on French Verse. From the author of From Dawn to Decadence. ... Read more

Product Description
Updated for the 2008 AP French Literature Exam - Featuring the complete texts of L'École des femmes, Pierre & Jean, Candide, Le Cid and the required poems on the 2008 Advanced Placement French Literature required reading list, this anthology saves the expense and inconvenience of otherwise obtaining several separate texts. ... Read more