Poetic, comic, obsessed with minutiae, My Beautiful Bus is a welcome dose of serious frivolity at the expense of the contemporary novel. Based on an actual bus trip across France taken by Oulipo-member Jacques Jouet in the late '80s, his fictional reconstruction of the experience twenty years later focuses not so much on the scenery as on the possibilities offered an author by the eponymous vehicle and its occupants. With detours through everything from Puss in Boots to Pascal's m...

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 role—with increasingly ridiculous cons...

In this brilliant and sobering self-portrait, Édouard Levé hides nothing from his readers, setting out his entire life, more or less at random, in a string of declarative sentences.Autoportrait is a physical, psychological, sexual, political, and philosophical triumph. Beyond "sincerity," Levé works toward an objectivity so radical it could pass for crudeness, triviality, even banality: the author has stripped himself bare. With the force of a set of maxim...

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.

THE INTERNATIONAL PUBLISHING SENSATION WITH OVER 10 MILLION COPIES SOLD WORLDWIDE'Witty and touching' - Gillian Anderson'Wins over its fans with a life-affirming message, a generous portion of heart and Barbery's frequently wicked sense of humor' - Time Magazine'Clever, informative and moving' - ObserverRenée is the concierge of a grand Parisian apartment building. To the snobbish residents ...

The #1 international bestselling historical novel from the award-winning and New York Times –bestselling author of The Name of the Rose .Nineteenth-century Europe—from Turin to Prague to Paris—abounds with the ghastly and the mysterious. Jesuits plot against Freemasons. Italian republicans strangle priests with their own intestines. French criminals plan bombings by day and cele...

Henry Miller's famously banned book is "a matter-of-fact celebration of chucking one's dreary life and following your heart to Paris" (Richard Price).Now hailed as an American classic, Tropic of Cancer, Henry Miller's masterpiece, was banned as obscene in this country for twenty-seven years after its first publication in Paris in 1934. Only a historic court ruling that changed American censorship standards, ushering in a new era of freedom and frankness in...

‘What a marvellous book this is . . . de Botton dissects what [Proust] had to say about friendship, reading, looking carefully, paying attention taking your time, being alive and adds his own delicious commentary. The result is an intoxicating as it is wise, amusing as well as stimulating, and presented in so fresh a fashion as to be unique . . . I could not stop, and now much start all over again.’ Brian Masters, Mail on Sunday‘De Botton not only has a complete understan...

A NEW YORK TIMES BOOK OF THE YEAR‘Talking to you in English’, he said, ‘is like touching you with gloves.’A language barrier is no match for love. New Yorker journalist Lauren Collins discovers this first-hand when, in her early thirties, she moves to London and falls for Olivier, a Frenchman. As their relationship begins to grow, Lauren senses that there are things she doesn’t understand about Olivier, having never spoken to him ...

A sensational international bestseller, and winner of Frances’ coveted Prix Goncourt, ‘The Lover’ is an unforgettable portrayal of the incandescent relationship between two lovers, and of the hate that slowly tears the girl’s family apart.Saigon, 1930s: a poor young French girl meets the elegant son of a wealthy Chinese family. Soon they are lovers, locked into a private world of passion and intensity that defies all the conventions of their society.A sensational internatio...

Dialogue Between a Priest and a Dying Man is a dialogue written by the Marquis de Sade while incarcerated in 1782, expressing his atheism by having the dying libertine convince the priest of the mistakes of a pious life. Excerpted from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.

Just thirty, with a well-paid job, depression and no love life, the narrator and anti-hero par excellence of this grim, funny and clever novel smokes four packs of cigarettes a day and writes weird animal stories in his spare time. A computer programmer by day, he is tolerably content, until, that is, he's packed off with a colleague - the unimaginably ugly, sexually-frustrated virgin Raphael Tisserand - to train provincial civil servants in the use of a new computer system... A painfully ...