How to Be a Parisian brilliantly deconstructs the French woman's views on culture, fashion and attitude. Unlike other books on French style, this illustrated handbook is full of wit and self deprecating humour. Authors Anne Berest, Audrey Diwan, Caroline De Maigret and Sophie Mas are bohemian free thinkers and iconoclasts, and they are not afraid to cut through some of the myths. They say what you don't expect to hear, just the way you want to hear it. They are not against smoking in bed, and all for art, politics and culture, making everything look easy, and going against the grain.

French Dressing looks at the ancien régime's scenarios of libertine seduction--unsafe sex and its consequences for women's lives. It places the gender performances of male and female-authored novels in dialogue in order to recover the complexity of a century obsessed, as we are today, with writing and living plots of desire. French Dressing exposes the erotic anxieties behind a national culture of sexual self-display--French undressing.

The Allied landings on the coast of Normandy on June 6, 1944, have assumed legendary status in the annals of World War II. But in overly romanticizing D-day, Olivier Wieviorka argues, we have lost sight of the full picture. Normandy offers a balanced, complete account that reveals the successes and weaknesses of the titanic enterprise. In addition to describing the landings with precision and drama, Wieviorka covers the planning and diplomatic background, Allied relationships, German defensive preparations, morale of the armies, economics and logistics, political and military leaders, and civilians' and soldiers' experience of the fighting. Surprisingly, the landing itself was not the slaughter the general staff expected. The greater battle for Normandy-waged on farmland whose infamous hedgerows, the bocage, created formidable obstacles-took a severe toll not only in lives lost, but on the survivors who experienced this grueling ordeal. D-day, Wieviorka notes, was a striking accomplishment, but it was war, violent and cruel. Errors, desertions, rivalries, psychological trauma, self-serving motives, thefts, and rapes were all part of the story. Rather than diminishing the Allied achievement, this candid book underscores the price of victory and acknowledges the British, American, and Canadian soldiers who dashed onto the Normandy beaches not as demigods, but as young men.

The Misunderstanding is Irène Némirovsky's first novel, written when she was just twenty-one and published in a literary journal two years later. An intense story of self-destructive and blighted love, it is also a tragic satire of French society after the Great War. Yves Harteloup, scarred by the war, is a disappointed young man, old money fallen on hard times, who returns for the summer to the rich, comfortable Atlantic resort of Hendaye, where he spent blissful childhood holidays. He becomes infatuated with a beautiful, bored young woman, Denise, whose rich husband is often away on business. Intoxicated by summer nights and Yves' intensity, Denise falls passionately in love, before the idyll has to end and Yves must return to his mundane office job. In the mournful Paris autumn their love flounders on mutual misunderstanding, in the apparently unbridgeable gap between a life of idle wealth and the demands of making a living, between a woman's needs and a man's way of loving. As Denise is driven mad with desire and jealous suspicion, Yves, too sure of her, tortures himself and her with his emotional ambivalence. Taking her sophisticated mother's advice, Denise takes action...which she may regret forever. With a sharp satirical eye and a characteristic perception for the fault lines in human relationships, Irène Némirovsky's first novel shows sure signs of the brilliant novelist she was to become.

In David Adjmi’s contemporary take on the young queen of France, Marie is a confection created by a society that values extravagance and artifice. But France’s love affair with the royals sours as revolution brews, and for Marie, the political suddenly becomes very personal. From the light and breezy banter at the palace to the surging chants of “Liberté, Egalité, Fraternité!” in the streets, Marie Antoinette holds a mirror up to our contemporary society that might just be entertaining itself to death. -- Publisher's website.

When animals and their symbolic representations—in the Royal Menagerie, in art, in medicine, in philosophy—helped transform the French state and culture. Peter Sahlins's brilliant new book reveals the remarkable and understudied “animal moment” in and around 1668 in which authors (including La Fontaine, whose Fables appeared in that year), anatomists, painters, sculptors, and especially the young Louis XIV turned their attention to nonhuman beings. At the center of the Year of the Animal was the Royal Menagerie in the gardens of Versailles, dominated by exotic and graceful birds. In the unfolding of his original and sophisticated argument, Sahlins shows how the animal bodies of the menagerie and others were critical to a dramatic rethinking of governance, nature, and the human. The animals of 1668 helped to shift an entire worldview in France—what Sahlins calls Renaissance humanimalism toward more modern expressions of classical naturalism and mechanism. In the wake of 1668 came the debasement of animals and the strengthening of human animality, including in Descartes's animal-machine, highly contested during the Year of the Animal. At the same time, Louis XIV and his intellectual servants used the animals of Versailles to develop and then to transform the symbolic language of French absolutism. Louis XIV came to adopt a model of sovereignty after 1668 in which his absolute authority is represented in manifold ways with the bodies of animals and justified by the bestial nature of his human subjects. 1668 explores and reproduces the king's animal collections—in printed text, weaving, poetry, and engraving, all seen from a unique interdisciplinary perspective. Sahlins brings the animals of 1668 together and to life as he observes them critically in their native habitats—within the animal palace itself by Louis Le Vau, the paintings and tapestries of Charles Le Brun, the garden installations of André Le Nôtre, the literary work of Charles Perrault and the natural history of his brother Claude, the poetry of Madeleine de Scudéry, the philosophy of René Descartes, the engravings of Sébastien Leclerc, the transfusion experiments of Jean Denis, and others. The author joins the nonhuman and human agents of 1668—panthers and painters, swans and scientists, weasels and weavers—in a learned and sophisticated treatment that will engage scholars and students of early modern France and Europe and readers broadly interested in the subject of animals in human history.

One of the hallmarks of French author Patrick Modiano's writing is a singular ability to revisit particular motifs and episodes, infusing each telling with new detail and emotional nuance. In this evocative novel the internationally acclaimed author takes up one of his most compelling themes: a love affair with a woman who disappears, and a narrator grappling with the mystery of a relationship stopped short. Set in mid-sixties Paris, After the Circus traces the relationship between the narrator, a young man not quite of legal age, and the slightly older, enigmatic woman he first glimpses at a police interrogation. The two lovers make their uncertain way into each other's hearts, but the narrator soon finds himself in the unsettling, ominous presence of others. Who are these people? Are they real, or simply evoked? Part romance, part detective story, this mesmerizing book fully demonstrates Modiano's signature use of atmosphere and suggestion as he investigates the perils and the exhilaration of young love.

Lewald (1811-1889), the best-selling German woman writer in the nineteenth century, proved a keen and perceptive observer of the social, artistic, and political life of her times, of which these Recollections offer an excellent example. Written from a woman's perspective, this firsthand account of the revolutions in both Germany and France must be considered a unique document. It is further enhanced by her detailed description of the Frankfurt Parliament and her relationships with many of the prominent politicians and thinkers of that eventful period.

"I had to do something to escape Hitler's clutches," writes Esti Freud. Yet she waits with her then-16-year-old daughter, Sophie in Paris, until German canons can be heard in the distance, before deciding to escape by bicycle across France as Sophie keeps looking back to see whether German tanks will overtake them. Both women survive by sheer miracle and, in their own ways, come to feel a need to keep a personal record of those tumultuous times. In a memoir written at age 79, Esti Freud, daughter-in-law of Sigmund Freud and wife of his oldest son Martin, looks back on her life that began before the 20th century, was lived on three continents, and stretched through two world wars and the Holocaust. Twenty years after her mother's death, daughter Sophie turned to Esti's memoir as a scaffold for this book, expanding it through family letters and archival material. Out of these documents the author has created a fascinating, many-voiced mosaic--the story of a famous family and of a century seen through the eyes of many characters. Indomitable Esti was not an easy person to love. While she establishes herself professionally three times, in three different languages, her troubled family relationships leave her lonely, often deeply unhappy. Sophie confides that Esti died without son or daughter at her side. This work gives an insider's, in-law view of the family Freud, its foundations, and flaws. The relationship between Esti, daughter of a wealthy Vienna attorney and her husband Martin Freud is foreshadowed by the young lovers' fathers. At first meeting Esti, Sigmund told his son the glamorous woman was "too beautiful" for the clan, meaning her splendor belied a lifestyle not conducive to the frugal Freud ways. And Esti's father, on hearing of her love for Martin, expressed regret she was involved with a man who was "not a financially favorable linkage," and that his family was not respectable since patriarch Sigmund was "just another psychiatrist, and one who writes pornography books at that." Thus begins the ill-fated relationship that would rock two families and a generation of children to come. Sophie weaves into the text letters she inherited, including letters from Martin while he was a prisoner of war, and excerpts from her own diary, kept as an adolescent. The resulting mosaic will fascinate--and perhaps disturb--readers interested in Freud and psychoanalysis, as well as those intrigued by relationships and family.

Maxine Kumin's novel is onve of the first serious fictions to deal with the new possibiliti4es of man=woman relationships. It is about the genuine liberation of two people struggling honestly toward a mutually rewarding love. It is a refreshing and humanizing book, written with the grace and skill of one of America's best poets.