A commonplace book, arranging works of criticism looking at Alfred Hitchcock's Vertigo with fragments of memoir/fiction. Presented first as random notes on watching Hitchcock, the fragments soon take up multiple narratives and threads and, like a...
When a girl falls into a deep and impenetrable sleep, the borders between her provincial French village and the peculiar, beguiling realm of her dreams begin to disappear: A fat woman sprouts delicate wings and takes flight; a failed photographer...
La «Préface», oeuvre à part entière, fait date dans l'histoire littéraire. Sur un ton enlevé, perfide et caustique, l'auteur attaque les bien-pensants, représentants de la tartufferie et de la censure, et ceux qui voudraient voir un côté...
La nouvelle qui donne son titre au recueil, est une des plus connues de Maupassant. Le château d'Uville est occupé par cinq officiers prussiens. Parmi eux, «un tout petit blondin fier et brutal», surnommé Mademoiselle Fifi à...
Liberté a 18 ans. Elle refuse ce que la plupart des femmes tolèrent: un amour imparfait, sans folie. Inapte aux compromis, Mademoiselle Liberté ne conçoit pas d'être raisonnable, de se contenter d'une petite part de...
Eva Ibbotson’s magical novel; set in that most poignant of all times and places, Vienna before the First World War. Susanna’s dress shop stands in the delightful Madensky Square and is the very hub and heart of life. Susanna sympathizes with her...
Set during the fall-out of the Cultural Revolution, these bizarre and delicate stories capture the collision of the old China of vanished dynasties, with communism and today's tiger economy.
The mad woman on the bridge wears a historical gown...
Nobel laureate V. S. Naipaul’s magnificent Magic Seeds continues the story of Willie Chandran, the perennially dissatisfied and self-destructively naive protagonist of his bestselling Half a Life.
Having left a wife and a livelihood in...