In Elited Prose, from his collection Yokes (1979), we see an example of Édouard Glissant’s broader creative view. Whereas in Gorée, his condemnation of slavery is clear and direct, Glissant does not repeat a militant Négritude sensibility in all his… Read More ›
Yvan Goll’s Dream Grass (Traumkraut) celebrates the poet’s love for his wife, Claire. The emotional pitch of the collection, published a year after his death, reflects the trauma of the poet’s struggle with leukemia, which took his life in 1950…. Read More ›
Paul Éluard was not only one of the major proponents of surrealism, but also one of the greatest love poets of the 20th century. His poetry stands in a long tradition of adoration of the beloved woman, indebted to the… Read More ›
As the title indicates, the series of poems published in Calligrammes was written over several years, but the volume was not published until after the author’s death. As one of France’s avant-garde writers, Apollinaire experimented with new forms of expression,… Read More ›
Like the author’s earlier Hopscotch, the novel 62: A Model Kit defies conventions of linear structure, time, and narrative, thereby seeking to redefine notions of how literary art might both be conceived and received. The reader is informed in an… Read More ›
In this first novel by famed French author Simone de Beauvoir (1908–86), a theater couple, Françoise and Pierre, decide to sponsor the intellectual growth of a young woman from Rouen, and they pay for her to live in Paris, one… Read More ›
One of the few texts that the French writer Marguerite Duras set in her childhood home of Indochina, The Sea Wall was also her first publication to gain both critical and popular notoriety and success. The novel incorporates themes of… Read More ›
Told from a first-person point of view, The Sailor from Gibraltar is a story by the acclaimed French author Marguerite Duras (1914–96). The novel tells of a dissatisfied man in his thirties who is in the midst of a hapless… Read More ›
Originally published in French, The Radiance of the King is the most famous novel of Camara Laye (1928–80), whose name is sometimes listed as Laye Camara. In contrast with a number of early African novels that focused on an African… Read More ›
The Plague was written by Albert Camus (1913–60), one of the most gifted and influential writers and philosophers in the French language of the 20th century. He was awarded the Nobel Prize in literature in 1957. Camus was born in… Read More ›
La symphonie pastorale, translated as The Pastoral Symphony (1931), but just as often called by its French title by English-speaking critics, is part of a group of firstperson narratives called récits. Récits are characterized by a simple and ironic text… Read More ›
The North China Lover was published late in the French author’s life (1914–96). The short novel primarily revisits the events of Marguerite Duras’s 1984 celebrated novel The Lover (L’Amant), and tells of a pivotal love affair between an unnamed teenage… Read More ›
This work marks the second novel written by France’s long-loved author Antoine de Saint-Exupéry (1900–44). The author’s first novel, Southern Mail (Courrier sud), appeared in 1929. His masterpiece, The Little Prince (Le petit prince) was published a year before the author’s… Read More ›
Prominent among his later fiction, Paul Bourget’s (1852–1935) The Night Cometh takes as its focus competing worldviews of life and the burden of death. Set in a World War I-era hospital, the novel’s narrator, Marsal, is a doctor who cannot… Read More ›
Written when the French writer André Breton (1896–1966) was 32 years old, Nadja is a novel that lies between poetry and fiction and thus embodies, as do all of Breton’s writings, what he set out to reveal in his Manifesto… Read More ›
The French novel The Miracle of the Rose was written by Jean Genet (1910–86) in 1943 while the author was imprisoned in La Santé penitentiary in Paris for theft. Published in 1946, this autobiographical work is based on the author’s… Read More ›
Man’s Hope by the French writer André Malraux (1901–76) was first serialized in the communist daily Ce Soir from November 3 to December 7, 1937. The novel was then published in book form at the end of 1937. Owing to… Read More ›
Winner of the Goncourt prize in 1933, the most prestigious French literary award, Man’s Fate by André Malraux (1901–76) is part of an intriguing trilogy, including The Conquerors (1928) and The Royal Way (1930). Similar to these two earlier works,… Read More ›
The novelistic memoir The Lover by Marguerite Duras (1914–96) is a modernist story of sexual coming of age in French colonial Vietnam. It is also a portrait of the young author. It is the most accessible and by far the… Read More ›
This last novel by the popular French writer Antoine de Saint-Exupéry (1900–44) is ostensibly a children’s book, set in the author’s familiar and cherished landscape of the Sahara of northern Africa. Although the central character is a pilot, this tale… Read More ›
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