French Essays

"Quand je dis que je travaille à un essai sur la vieillesse, le plus souvent on s’exclame : "Quelle idée ! Mais vous n’êtes pas vieille ! Quel sujet triste..." Voilà justement pourquoi j’écris ce livre : pour briser la conspiration du silence. À l’égard des personnes âgées, la société est non seulement coupable, mais criminelle. Abritée derrière les mythes de l’expansion et de l’abondance, elle traite les vieillards en parias.

When Roland Barthes's groundbreaking Mythologies first appeared in English in 1972, it was immediately recognized as one of the most significant works in French theory - yet nearly half of the essays from the original work were missing. This new edition of Mythologies is the first complete, authoritative English version of the French classic. It includes the brilliant "Astrology", never published in English before.

There is so much to write about the French. Because they invented cinemas, bicycles, cars, photography, radioactivity, but also the bra, the croque-monsieur, the garbage can, and dentures. Because the French express themselves in a language qualified as one of the sexiest, albeit with sounds so often considered animalistic: coucou, quoi, oui…. Because in France, we intrinsically like to rebel against everything: system, government, our employer, and we go so far as to go on strike preventively against a law that does not yet exist. A country where artists transform urinals into works of ...

In her own words, here is the captivating story of Julia Child’s years in France, where she fell in love with French food and found her “true calling.” From the moment the ship docked in Le Havre, en route to Paris, in the fall of 1948, Julia had an awakening that changed her life. Soon...

“A witty, learned, authoritative survey of philosophical thought.” —The New York Times Book Review The first authoritative and accessible single-volume history of philosophy to cover both Western and Eastern traditions, from one of the world’s most eminent thinkers The story of...

This New York Times bestseller intimately depicts urban life in a gripping book that slips behind cold statistics and sensationalism to reveal the true sagas lurking behind the headlines of gangsta glamour. One of The New York Times’s 100 Best Books of the 21st Century In her extraordinary...

A playfully critical journey through the Coen brothers' filmography From such cult hits as Raising Arizona (1987) and The Big Lebowski (1998) to major critical darlings Fargo (1996), No Country for Old Men (2007), and Inside Llewyn Davis (2013), Ethan and Joel Coen have cultivated a bleakly...

National Best Seller From the National Book Award–winning author of Just Kids: an unforgettable odyssey of a legendary artist, told through the prism of the cafés and haunts she has worked in around the world. It is a book Patti Smith has described as “a roadmap to my life.” M Train...

From the internationally acclaimed Oxford authority on Communism, a definitive history that examines the origins of the ideology, its development in different nations, its collapse in many of those countries following perestroika, and its current incarnations around the globe. The Rise and Fall...

In Simone Weil, du Plessix Gray vividly evokes the life of an equally complex and intriguing figure. A patriot and a mystic, an unruly activist plagued by self-doubt, a pampered intellectual with a credo of manual labor, an ascetic who craved sensuous beauty, Simone Weil died at the age of...

Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky, the highly acclaimed translators of War and Peace, Doctor Zhivago, and Anna Karenina, which was an Oprah Book Club pick and million-copy bestseller, bring their unmatched talents to The Selected Stories of Anton Chekhov, a collection of thirty of...

"Describes with plenty of colour how surrealism, from Rene Magritte's bowler hats to Salvador Dali's watches, was born and developed." - The Times (UK) As she did for the Modernists In Montmartre, noted art historian and biographer Sue Roe now tells the story of the Surrealists in Montparnasse...

Introduction Published in 1928, On Happiness gathers a selection of Propos—brief philosophical essays originally written by Émile Chartier, known as Alain, for the newspaper La Dépêche de Rouen. These meditations, born from everyday life and addressed to ordinary people, form one of the most luminous and accessible works of modern French thought. A direct heir of Montaigne and a disciple of Descartes, Alain sought in clarity of reason and in the discipline of will the foundation of an art of living. Against pessimism and morbid abstractions, he proposes a philosophy of attention and of...

WINNER OF THE INTERNATIONAL BOOKER PRIZE 2025 In Heart Lamp, Banu Mushtaq exquisitely captures the everyday lives of women and girls in Muslim communities in southern India. Written originally in Kannada, these portraits of family and community tensions testify to Mushtaq’s years as a...

PULITZER PRIZE FINALIST A brilliant look at turn-of-the-century Paris through the first in-depth study of the three women Proust used to create his supreme fictional character, the Duchesse de Guermantes. “Weber has done a remarkable job of bringing to life…a world of culture, glamour...

In her own words, here is the captivating story of Julia Child’s years in France, where she fell in love with French food and found her “true calling.” From the moment the ship docked in Le Havre, en route to Paris, in the fall of 1948, Julia had an awakening that changed her life. Soon...

Was Savarkar really a co-conspirator in the Gandhi murder? Was there a pogrom against a particular community after Gandhi's assassination? Decades after his death, Vinayak Damodar Savarkar continues to uniquely influence India's political scenario. An optimistic advocate of Hindu-Muslim unity...

“Slender but weighty. . . . What is moving about this novel is its embrace of what has always driven Kundera, the delicate state of living between being and nothingness.”— Boston Globe From the internationally acclaimed, bestselling author of The Unbearable Lightness of Being, an...

A historical novel that brings to life the resiliency of the indigenous Taíno people in the Caribbean whose culture was virtually destroyed within two generations of their “discovery” by Christopher Columbus in 1492 Paradise Once is a sweeping historical novel that brings to life the...

Paul Theroux celebrates fifty years of wandering the globe by collecting the best writing on travel from the books that shaped him, as a reader and a traveler. Part philosophical guide, part miscellany, part reminiscence, The Tao of Travel enumerates “The Contents of Some Travelers’ Bags”...