Catalog Search Results
1) Suicide
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English
Description
Suicide cannot be read as simply another novel-it is, in a sense, the author's own oblique, public suicide note, a unique meditation on this most extreme of refusals. Presenting itself as an investigation into the suicide of a close friend-perhaps real, perhaps fictional-more than twenty years earlier, Levé gives us, little by little, a striking portrait of a man, with all his talents and flaws, who chose to reject his life, and all the people who...
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Who's really telling this story? That's the mystery at the heart of Danielle Mémoire's novel, which opens with a writer on stage at a public reading-a public reading that isn't one, because she never reads a word, much to the audience's annoyance. When an audience member finally heckles her, the writer's response sets off a chain reaction of nested stories that tumble one after another like a row of dominoes.
Each storyteller in the series (most...
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A memoir and meditation on the themes of separation and silence, The Summer of the Elder Tree was Marie Chaix's first book to appear in fourteen years, and deals with the reasons for her withdrawal from writing and the events in her life since the death of her mother (as detailed in Silences, or a Woman's Life). With uncompromising sincerity, and in the same beautiful prose for which she is renowned, Marie Chaix here takes stock of her life as a woman...
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The eighteenth-century German physicist Georg Christoph Lichtenberg left behind at the time of his death thousands of fragmentary notes commenting on a dazzling and at the same time puzzling array of subjects. Pierre Senges's Fragments of Lichtenberg imaginatively and hilariously reconstructs the efforts of scholars across three centuries to piece together Lichtenberg's disparate notes into a coherent philosophical or artistic statement. What emerges...
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The answers are spontaneous, revealing, ominous, insignificant, grotesque, amusing, lecherous, tragic and trivial by turns, and lovable in their cheerful imperfection. This is a book about the basics: love, sexuality, death, and all the other things that lurk in our everyday thoughts.
6) Absinth
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English
Description
In Absinth, you'll meet three main characters trying to figure out their life on the backdrop of the upcoming Apocalypse: Iris, a fortune-teller who cannot see not the future but weirdly anachronistic versions of the past; Sid Saperstein, a shameless huckster chosen to publish a sacred manuscript whose message will shake heaven and earth alike; Hermes, the Greek messenger god, dispatched by Zeus to sound out his fellow deities, still smarting from...
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A middle-aged couple takes in a prurient young woman picked up from the side of the road; a single mother struggles against the hostile feelings she harbors towards her precocious son; a man has alternative fantasies of domination and submission involving a fellow commuter; a hotel room is booked by an elderly woman in search of a place to end her life. In the fourteen stories that make up A Perfect Disharmony, Sébastien Brebel explores the experiences...
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In a mythical African land, some shipwrecked and uniquely talented passengers stage a grand gala to entertain themselves and their captor, the great chieftain Talou. In performance after bizarre performance-starring, among others, a zither-playing worm, a marksman who can peel an egg at fifty yards, a railway car that rolls on calves' lungs, and fabulous machines that paint, weave, and compose music-Raymond Roussel demonstrates why it is that André...
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English
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In this nominally true story of an epic, transcontinental road trip, Jean Rolin travels to Africa from darkest France, accompanying a battered Audi to its new life as a taxi to be operated by the family of a Congolese security guard. The ghost of Joseph Conrad haunts Rolin's journey, as do memories of his expatriate youth in Kinshasa in the early 1960s-but no less present are W. G. Sebald and Marcel Proust, who are the guiding lights for Rolin's sensual...
10) Upstaged
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Two minutes into the second act, there is a knock on Nicolas Boehlmer's dressing-room door, just as he's smoking his last cigarette before having to go back on stage...and, without thinking, he says, "Come in," still in character. He quickly finds himself bound, gagged, and stripped by a man who appears to be his mirror image: costumed in the same wig, make-up, and clothes. Nicolas is powerless to prevent his usurper from going out and playing his...
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A musty bar in off-season Cannon Beach, Oregon, provides the setting for an unsuspecting Frenchman's introduction to the many ways life can go wrong for the unlucky in America. He listens as the barflies nightly recount their tales of woe-betrayal, broken families, financial ruin. Though they seem at first to tolerate the newcomer's presence and sympathy, a tide of violence is rising, one he perceives only dimly until it is too late to escape. Made...
12) Origin Unknown
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Oliver Rohe's first novel is a word-crazed monologue in the mind of a man named Selber flying back to his war-torn native country for the first time in years. Grappling with his fear of flying and increasingly possessed by reminiscences of his long-dead childhood friend Roman, the narrator begins to wonder if any of his thoughts, or the decisions he has made in his life, are truly his own. From meditations upon loss, violence, repetition, and individuality,...
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The delightful and daring English-language debut of French author Hervé le Tellier is a series of short, intimately interconnected stories making up a lively user's manual to pleasure, relating the various liaisons of couples from Anna and Ben to Yolande and Zach (taking in Chloe and Xavier along the way, as well as twenty others, as you may have guessed), until the criss-crossing of their lives and partners makes up a pattern as intricate as the...
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Every night when she goes to sleep, a woman dreams of erotic encounters with different men. She dreams of being the sponge squeezed to foaming in a gas station attendant's hand, and of twining her bare skin with a sea lion's thick pelt under the watchful eye of the sea lion trainer. From a gas station attendant to a sea lion trainer, a watchmaker to a teacher, a furrier to an astrologer, each evening's new encounter is more sensual and extravagant...
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For seventeen years, Narcisse Dièze, chronic sufferer of a mysterious condition called
"cerebral rheumatism"; has lived in the protective confines of a psychiatric hospital. There
he has been attended by a contingent of nurses, for whom he has obligingly fathered somewhere
between thirty-five and one hundred seventy-one children. (No one knows the exact number.)
But the doctors abruptly decide that he is cured and prod him to reenter the outside...
16) Making a Novel
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English
Description
Moving back and forth between detailed explanation and personal anecdotes, Gérard Gavarry's Making a Novel is partly a memoir of a writer's life and partly a memoir of his work, showing us how every story, no matter how well-planned, could always have been written countless other ways.
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Description
The ugly side of superheroes
What if you suddenly had superpowers? What would you do? How would your friends and family react? What would your obligations to society be?
The superheroes' first missions- combating terrorists or rescuing disaster victims- are a boon to France. Yet while these actions bring the country pride, unity quickly starts to unravel. These superheroes, ultimately, are human. Paparazzi are everywhere. One has an affair...
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In The Disappearance of Jim Sullivan, disappearance is both a theme and a stylistic device. Indeed, this publication narrates the disappearance of Dwayne Koster, who, fascinated by the story of Jim Sullivan, commits suicide in the New Mexico desert, which was the setting of the rocker's disappearance in 1975. But, this novel is for the most part set in the metanarrative tale of its own genesis, and, as a result, is partially eclipsed: its -fictitious-...
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