What am I going to wear? The question that diverts us all is first presented in the toddler years when the mastery of getting dressed is a triumph and opinions about clothing are emphatic. These four board books illustrated by collage-artist Marthe Jocelyn are a unique tribute to the colors, textures, and patterns that make clothes a child’s favorite pastime. Ready for Winter displays a full wardrobe, introducing lovely words like turtleneck and galoshes, and allowing even the very young reader to be an expert on what should be worn next season.
Mainly out of loneliness, a messed-up writer falls in love with Marthe, his female main character, and decides not to let her die as initially planned, but to invite her into his life to help him write his next novel. He also welcomes popular characters from other successful novels, all experts in love. In addition, he summons Vivian, a prostitute – like Vivian from the movie “Pretty Woman” – who is an expert in “love for sale” to spice up the story. The characters (and their writer) embark on an erotic journey of sensuality, sex, and murder, as the writer takes copious notes that turn into an unusual meta-novel offering different vistas on life, death, murder, and love. The story ends in Vietnam at the lake of Dalat, where according to an old legend, pine trees formed intimate couples holding each other, entwining their roots after a young couple committed suicide. The legend renews itself at midnight the day the writer’s group arrives. Will they find love or will they seek death?
THE STORY: Having decided to travel about the country after his discharge from the army, Homer Smith has fixed up a bed in the back of his station wagon and headed west, his plan being to stop for a day's work here and there as the spirit moves him
In this outstanding biography, Ralph Freedman traces Rilke's extraordinary career by combining detailed accounts of salient episodes from the poet's restless life with an intimate reading of the verse and prose that refract them."
"[T]he amazing story of a woman who lived through one of the worst times in human history, losing family members to the Nazis but surviving with her spirit and integrity intact.” —Publishers Weekly Marthe Cohn was a young Jewish woman living just across the German border in France when Hitler rose to power. Her family sheltered Jews fleeing the Nazis, including Jewish children sent away by their terrified parents. But soon her homeland was also under Nazi rule. As the Nazi occupation escalated, Marthe’s sister was arrested and sent to Auschwitz and the rest of her family was forced to flee to the south of France. Always a fighter, Marthe joined the French Army and became a member of the intelligence service of the French First Army. Marthe, using her perfect German accent and blond hair to pose as a young German nurse who was desperately trying to obtain word of a fictional fiancé, would slip behind enemy lines to retrieve inside information about Nazi troop movements. By traveling throughout the countryside and approaching troops sympathetic to her plight--risking death every time she did so--she learned where they were going next and was able to alert Allied commanders. When, at the age of eighty, Marthe Cohn was awarded France’s highest military honor, the Médaille Militaire, not even her children knew to what extent this modest woman had helped defeat the Nazi empire. At its heart, this remarkable memoir is the tale of an ordinary human being who, under extraordinary circumstances, became the hero her country needed her to be.
It is easy to forget how deeply embedded in social hierarchy was the literature and learning that has come down to us from the early modern European world. From fiction to philosophy, from poetry to history, works of all kinds emerged from and through the social hierarchy that was a fundamental fact of everyday life. Paying attention to it changes how we might understand and interpret the works themselves, whether canonical and familiar or largely forgotten. But a second, related fact is much overlooked too: works also often emanated from families, not just from individuals. Families were driving forces in the production—that is, in the composing, editing, translating, or publishing—of countless works. Relatives collaborated with each other, edited each other, or continued the unfinished works of deceased family members; some imitated or were inspired by the works of long-dead relatives. The reason why this second fact (about families) is connected to the first (about social hierarchy) is that families were in the period a basic social medium through which social status was claimed, maintained, threatened, or lost. So producing literary works was one of the many ways in which families claimed their place in the social world. The process was however often fraught, difficult, or disappointing. If families created works as a form of socio-cultural legacy that might continue to benefit their future members, not all members benefited equally; women sometimes produced or claimed the legacy for themselves, but they were often sidelined from it. Relatives sometimes disagreed bitterly about family history, identity (not least religious), and so about the picture of themselves and their family that they wished to project more widely in society through their written works, whether printed or manuscript. So although family was a fundamental social medium out of which so many works emerged, that process could be conflictual as well as harmonious. The intertwined role of family and social hierarchy within literary production is explored in this book through the case of France, from the late fifteenth to the mid-seventeenth century. Some families are studied here in detail, such as that of the most widely read French poet of the age, Clément Marot. But the extent of this phenomenon is quantified too: some two hundred families are identified as each containing more than one literary producer, and in the case of one family an extraordinary twenty-seven.
This volume makes available an international collection of plays, from Britain, the US, Germany, France and Russia, providing an essential and fascinating resource for anyone interested in the theatre culture of this period. Lovesick brings together six plays, each with individual introductions, including an author biography and a production history. The editor provides a contextual introduction to the volume offering valuable information about the ancestry of gay theatre and queer performance. The anthology reveals how 'sexual deviance' made its way into the drama of this time, and also how homosexual playwrights used comic or lyrical devices in order to celebrate a 'superior sensibility'.
