Melville: A Novel
Melville: A Novel

Author: Jean Giono

Publisher: National Geographic Books

Published: 2017-09-12

Total Pages: 0

ISBN-13: 1681371375

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Originally published to promote his French translation of Moby-Dick, Jean Giono's Melville: A Novel is an astonishing literary compound of fiction, biography, personal essay, and criticism. In the fall of 1849, Herman Melville traveled to London to deliver his novel White-Jacket to his publisher. On his return to America, Melville would write Moby-Dick. Melville: A Novel imagines what happened in between: the adventurous writer fleeing London for the country, wrestling with an angel, falling in love with an Irish nationalist, and, finally, meeting the angel’s challenge—to express man’s fate by writing the novel that would become his masterpiece. Eighty years after it appeared in English, Moby-Dick was translated into French for the first time by the Provençal novelist Jean Giono and his friend Lucien Jacques. The publisher persuaded Giono to write a preface, granting him unusual latitude. The result was this literary essay, Melville: A Novel—part biography, part philosophical rumination, part romance, part unfettered fantasy. Paul Eprile’s expressive translation of this intimate homage brings the exchange full circle. Paul Eprile was a co-winner of the French-American Foundation's 2018 Translation Prize for his translation of Melville.

To the Slaughterhouse
To the Slaughterhouse

Author: Jean Giono

Publisher: Peter Owen Modern Classics (20

Published: 2021-07

Total Pages: 256

ISBN-13: 9780720621013

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Long regarded as one of France's finest writers of the twentieth century, Jean Giono is best known for his ecological bestseller The Man Who Planted Trees, but this neglected classic, published in 1931, is his masterpiece. Set during the First World War, conscription comes to a rural Provençal community, and its young men leave for the trenches on the Western Front. Based on his experiences at the battle of Verdun, at which he was one of only eleven survivors from his company, Giono produced one of the most powerful and affecting accounts of war ever written. This unflinchingly realistic yet at times intensely poetic novel grimly contrasts the destruction of men, land and animals at the front with the disintegration of daily life and accepted morality back home in a remote community with its own savagery, lusts and yearnings. Giono ends his masterwork with a message of hope, reflecting his faith in the ability of the earth to renew itself, which readers of The Man Who Planted Trees will find familiar. Part of the new look Peter Owen Modern Classics range featuring a logo crafted by graphic design icon Alvin Lustig.

The Solitude of Compassion
The Solitude of Compassion

Author: Jean Giono

Publisher: Seven Stories Press

Published: 2011-01-04

Total Pages: 180

ISBN-13: 1609800311

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The Solitude of Compassion, a collection of short stories never before available in English, won popular acclaim when it was originally published in France in 1932. It tells of small-town life in Provence, drawing on a whole village of fictional characters, often warm and decent, at times immoral and coarse. Giono writes of a friendship forged in a battlefield trench in the midst of World War I; an old man’s discovery of the song of the world; and, in the title story, the not-unrelated feelings of compassion and pity. In these twenty stories, Giono reveals his marvelous storytelling through his vivid images and lyrical prose, whether he is conveying the delicate scents of lavender and pine trees or the smells of damp earth and fresh blood.

An Italian Journey
An Italian Journey

Author: Jean Giono

Publisher: Northwestern University Press

Published: 1998

Total Pages: 208

ISBN-13: 9780810160286

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In An Italian Journey, Jean Giono describes his journey to the land of his father's people. A reluctant traveler (he rarely left Provence), Giono discovers a strange beauty not only in the palazzi and canals of Venice but also in wistful waiters, suspicious hairdressers, pugnacious men of God, recalcitrant coffeemakers, umbrellas, and field machinery. In Giono's world a stamp collectors' market can appear to verge on revolution and inept municipal musicians suddenly offer Mozartian joys.

The Serpent of Stars
The Serpent of Stars

Author: Jean Giono

Publisher: Archipelago

Published: 2004-04-23

Total Pages: 129

ISBN-13: 1935744453

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The Serpent of Stars (Le serpent d¢étoiles, 1993; reprinted 1999 Grasset) takes place in rural southern France in the early part of the century. The novel’s elusive narrative thread ties landscape to character to an expanse just beyond our grasp. The narrator encounters a shepherding family and glimpse by glimpse, each family member and the shepherding way of life is revealed to us. The novel culminates in a large shepherds’ gathering where a traditional Shepherd’s Play—a kind of creation myth that includes in its cast The River, The Sea, The Man, and The Mountain—is enacted. The work’s proto-environmental world view as well as its hybrid form—part play, part novel—makes The Serpent of Stars astonishingly contemporary. W.S. Merwin’s "Green Fields" begins, "By this part of the century few are left who believe/in the animals for they are not there in the carved parts/of them served on plates and the pleas from slatted trucks..." This novel leaves the reader believing not only in the animals, but the terrain they are part of, the people who tend them, and the life all these elements together compose.

Giono
Giono

Author: Norma Lorre Goodrich

Publisher: Princeton University Press

Published: 2015-03-08

Total Pages: 308

ISBN-13: 1400869188

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Since his death in October 1970, Jean Giono's reputation as a major French novelist has steadily increased. In order to treat most powerfully the essential nature of modern man confronted with the worst problems of the twentieth century, he adapted into prose the tried and true literary modes: the epic, the pastoral, Greek tragedy, Shakespearean tragedy, and autobiography. In Giono's work the old modes and familiar forms continue to fulfill the age-old functions of great literature: we see the Christian epic suddenly made relevant to everyday life or the pagan epic re-explain modern male savagery. In Giono's hands the novel explains man to himself, shows man more clearly the world about him, and offers to men everywhere renewed courage and hope. Originally published in 1973. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

Hill
Hill

Author: Jean Giono

Publisher: New York Review of Books

Published: 2016-04-05

Total Pages: 145

ISBN-13: 1590179196

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An NYRB Classics Original Deep in Provence, a century ago, four stone houses perch on a hillside. Wildness presses in from all sides. Beyond a patchwork of fields, a mass of green threatens to overwhelm the village. The animal world—a miming cat, a malevolent boar—displays a mind of its own. The four houses have a dozen residents—and then there is Gagou, a mute drifter. Janet, the eldest of the men, is bedridden; he feels snakes writhing in his fingers and speaks in tongues. Even so, all is well until the village fountain suddenly stops running. From this point on, humans and the natural world are locked in a life-and-death struggle. All the elements—fire, water, earth, and air—come into play. From an early age, Jean Giono roamed the hills of his native Provence. He absorbed oral traditions and, at the same time, devoured the Greek and Roman classics. Hill, his first novel and the first winner of the Prix Brentano, comes fully back to life in Paul Eprile’s poetic translation.

Blue Boy
Blue Boy

Author: Jean Giono

Publisher: Read Books Ltd

Published: 2013-04-26

Total Pages: 206

ISBN-13: 1473383935

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Blue Boy is a 1932 novel by the French writer Jean Giono. It tells the story of a family in Provence, with an ironer mother and a shoemaker father. The book is largely autobiographical and based on Giono's childhood, although it has many fictional anecdotes.

The Horseman on the Roof
The Horseman on the Roof

Author: Jean Giono

Publisher: North Point Press

Published: 2014-12-23

Total Pages: 433

ISBN-13: 146688777X

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Perhaps no other of his novels better reveals Giono's perfect balance between lyricism and narrative, description and characterization, the epic and the particular, than The Horseman on the Roof. This novel, which Giono began writing in 1934 and which was published in 1951, expanded and solidified his reputation as one of Europe's most important writers. This is a novel of adventure, a roman courtois, that tells the story of Angelo, a nobleman who has been forced to leave Italy because of a duel, and is returning to his homeland by way of Provence. But that region is in the grip of a cholera epidemic, travelers are being imprisoned behind barricades, and exposure to the disease is almost certain. Angelo's escapades, adventures, and heroic self-sacrifice in this hot, hallucinatory landscape, among corpses, criminals and rioting townspeople, share this epic tale.

The Man Who Planted Trees
The Man Who Planted Trees

Author: Jean Giono

Publisher: Peter Owen Publishers

Published: 2008-12

Total Pages: 0

ISBN-13: 9780720613346

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A solitary man plants a forest over many years, rejuvenating a barren wasteland.