“Each of us has his tastes inscribed in his brain and heart; whether he fulfills his urges with regret or with joy, he must fulfill them. He should let others act according to their own nature. It’s fate that creates us and guides us throughout our lives: to fight against it would be little more than fruitless, foolish, and reckless!”In the late 1880s, a dashing young Italian aristocrat made an astonishing confession to the novelist Émile Zola. In a series of revealing let...

In 1909, Les Fréquentations de Maurice was serialized in the pages of Akademos and eventually published by a Parisian press in 1912 under the name Sydney Place, a pseudonym for Xavier-Marcel Boulestin, a famed French chef, restaurateur, and the author of cooking books. This is the first English translation of the work.After an exhausting time decorating his new apartment, Maurice Vendal has grown tired of Paris and decides to spend the season in London. Maurice is bored an...

In 1857 the French poet Charles Baudelaire, who was fascinated by lesbianism, created a scandal with Les Fleurs du Mal [The Flowers of Evil]. This collection was originally entitled "The Lesbians" and described women as "femmes damnées," with "disordered souls" suffering in a hypocritical world. Then twenty years later, lesbians in Paris dared to flaunt themselves in that extraordinarily creative period at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries which became known as the ...

In 1857 the French poet Charles Baudelaire, who was fascinated by lesbianism, created a scandal with Les Fleurs du Mal [The Flowers of Evil]. This collection was originally entitled "The Lesbians" and described women as "femmes damnées," with "disordered souls" suffering in a hypocritical world. Then twenty years later, lesbians in Paris dared to flaunt themselves in that extraordinarily creative period at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries which became known as the ...

“Each of us has his tastes inscribed in his brain and heart; whether he fulfills his urges with regret or with joy, he must fulfill them. He should let others act according to their own nature. It’s fate that creates us and guides us throughout our lives: to fight against it would be little more than fruitless, foolish, and reckless!”In the late 1880s, a dashing young Italian aristocrat made an astonishing confession to the novelist Émile Zola. In a series of revealing let...

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.

More than half a century after its translation into English, Erich Auerbach's Mimesis remains a masterpiece of literary criticism. A brilliant display of erudition, wit, and wisdom, his exploration of how great European writers from Homer to Virginia Woolf depicted reality has taught generations how to read Western literature. This new expanded edition includes a substantial essay in introduction by Edward Said as well as an essay, never before translated into English, in which Auerbach re...

In this beautifully illustrated study of intellectual and art history, Dorothy Johnson explores the representation of classical myths by renowned French artists in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, demonstrating the extraordinary influence of the natural sciences and psychology on artistic depiction of myth.Highlighting the work of major painters such as David, Girodet, Gérard, Ingres, and Delacroix and sculptors such as Houdon and Pajou, David to Delacroix

Reading was so important to Marcel Proust that it sometimes seems he was unable to create a personage without a book in hand. Everybody in his work reads: servants and masters, children and parents, artists and physicians. The more sophisticated characters find it natural to speak in quotations. Proust made literary taste a means of defining personalities and gave literature an actual role to play in his novels.In this wonderfully entertaining book, scholar and biographer Anka Muhls...

What if the house you are about to enter was built with the confessed purpose of seducing you, of creating various sensations destined to touch your soul and make you reflect on who you are? Could architecture have such power? This was the assumption of generations of architects at the beginning of modernity.Exploring the role of theatre and fiction in defining character in architecture, Louise Pelletier examines how architecture developed to express political and social intent. Ap...

Alfred Jarry’s creation of the monster-tyrant Ubu was a watershed in theatre history: his play Ubu Roi (whose origins lie in his mercilessly ridiculed former schoolmaster) on the Paris stage in December 1896 brought him instant notoriety. This legendary event is set at the heart of Alfred Jarry, balanced with other achievements that this multi-talented and influential writer crammed into his short life, among them his self-invented science of pataphysics.The reade...

One of the most gifted directors of the post New Wave, Maurice Pialat is frequently compared to such legendary filmmakers as Jean Renoir and Robert Bresson. A quintessentially realist filmmaker, who, like Bresson, was also trained as a painter, Pialat’s particular form of realism influenced an entire generation of young filmmakers in the 1990s.This volume is the first book-length study of Pialat’s cinema in English. It provides an introduction to a complex and difficult director, w...