The Government Clerks by Honore de Balzac is about Monsieur Rabourdin and his life as head of a ministry in Paris. You will enjoy reading about this peculiar family man. Excerpt: "In Paris, where men of thought and study bear a certain likeness to one another, living as they do in a common center, you must have met with several resembling Monsieur Rabourdin, whose acquaintance we are about to make at a moment when he is head of a bureau in one of our most important ministries..."
In 'The Death of a Civil Servant', an administrative clerk accidentally sneezes on a hierarchical superior at the opera, which results in great embarrassment and hilarious and futile attempts at atonement. The other short stories included in this volume, 'A Calculated Marriage', 'The Culprit', 'The Exclamation Mark', 'The Speech-Maker', 'Who Is to Blame?' and 'A Defenceless Creature' are in the same absurdly comical vein. This short collection shows Chekhov in an amusing, playful light, poking fun at the greed, sycophancy and ignorance of his characters, with the moral detachment that also characterizes his major, serious works.
A complete set of the manuals used by North Carolina Superior Court Clerks and their staff. Volume One includes an overview of the clerk¿s office and sets out the law and practice applicable to criminal and civil courtroom procedures and child support procedures before the clerk. Volume Two covers estates, adjudication of incompetence, guardianships, trusts, and special proceedings.
Comprising four one-act comic vaudevilles and four short stories adapted for the stage by Michael Frayn, The Sneeze introduces readers to a less familiar selection of work by one of the greatest precursors of modern drama. First published in 1989, this reissue includes The Sneeze; The Alien Corn; The Bear; The Evils of Tobacco; The Inspector-General; Swan Song; The Prospect, and Plots. Michael Frayn's translations of Chekhov's work marry the expertise of the translator with the innate understanding of a master dramatist and are widely regarded as the truest, most authentic renderings of Chekhov's work: 'His keen imaginative sympathy with the great Russian dramatist extends beyond translation . . . But translation is an art at which he excels.' Spectator
For commoners in the Qing dynasty, the most salient agents of the imperial state were not the emperor's appointed officials but rather the clerks and runners of the county yamen, the lowest level of functionaries in the Qing state's administrative hierarchy. Yet until now we have known very little about these critically important persons beyond the caricatured portrayals of corruption and venality left by Qing high officials and elites. Drawing from the rich archival records of Ba county, Sichuan, the author challenges the simplicity of these portrayals by taking us inside the county yamen to provide the first detailed look at local administrative practice from the perspective of those who actually carried it out. Who were the county clerks and runners? How were they recruited, organized, disciplined, and rewarded? What was the economic basis for a career in the yamen? How did clerks and runners view themselves as well as legitimize their role in Qing government? And what impact did their interests and practices have on symbolically laden elements of imperial government such as the magistrate's court? In addressing these questions, the author traverses the disjuncture between statutory regulations and the realities of daily administrative practice, uncovering a realm of informal, semiautonomous, yet highly structured and even rationalized procedures. Although frequently in violation of formal law, this extra-statutory system nevertheless remained an irreducible component of local government under the Qing. Recognizing the centrality of such informal practice to yamen administration forces us to rethink not only traditional assumptions concerning local corruption in the Qing, but also the ways in which we conceptualize the boundaries between state and society in late imperial China.
