Under Fire (1916) is a novel by Henri Barbusse. Written from notes taken while Barbusse was serving in the First World War, the novel was quickly, recognized as, a powerful tale of perseverance and comradery in the face of unspeakable suffering. Intended to promote the cause of pacifism, Under Fire is deeply critical of the rich and powerful men whose inability to live peacefully, leads time-and-again to the sacrifice of countless human lives. "Each...

It's 1975, and Shaltiel Feigenberg, a professional storyteller and writer, has been taken hostage. He has been abducted from his home in Brooklyn, New York, blindfolded and tied to a chair in a dark basement. His captors, an Arab and an Italian, don't explain why Shaltiel has been chosen, just that his life will be bartered for the freedom of three Palestinian prisoners. As his days of waiting commence, Shaltiel resorts to what he does best, telling...

After eighteen years as a political prisoner in the Bastille, the aging Doctor Manette is finally released and reunited with his daughter in England. There the lives of two very different men, Charles Darnay, an exiled French aristocrat, and Sydney Carton, a disreputable but brilliant English lawyer, become enmeshed through their love for Lucie Manette. From the tranquil roads of London, they are drawn against their will to the vengeful, bloodstained...

Essays on French fiction writers shows the widest possible range of fictional types. Covers those authors considered to be the greatest modern French novelists, their historical importance and their lasting value. Includes discussion of the importance of literary friendships as well as the importance of magazines, school and other connections among French novelists.

Literary biographies of French fiction writers of the Naturalism movement, with its emphasis on political and social questions and topics and the assimilation of the lessons of realism and symbolism.

A new translation of Maupassant's second novel tells the story of the very ambitious Georges Duroy and his rise to the top in fin de siècle Paris.

Focusing on Stendhal, Gérard de Nerval, George Sand, Émile Zola, and Marcel Proust, this book explores the ways that these writers represent and negotiate the relationship between the self and the world as a function of space in a novel turned map. With the rise of the novel and of autobiography, the literary and cultural contexts of nineteenth-century France reconfigured both the ways literature could represent subjects and the ways subjects...