In his palace in a city vanquished by the years, the Duke Gonzaga lives consumed by his passion for young girls and his deep boredom. Time passes as marked by the more than two hundred clocks situated throughout the palace. When the old hourmaster and his successor both disappear, Gonzaga employs Arturo who becomes the new keeper of the palace's timepieces. Arturo -- called Gog -- also becomes the Duke's friend and for a time alleviates Gonzaga's boredom as they share the nightly clock-keeping rounds. There seems to be the beginning of new life in the realm. The hourmaster marries happily and fathers a daughter. But the Duke's restlessness and ennui return and when the hourmaster vanishes -- for reasons the reader is to discover -- time again stands still. In the words of the translator Richard Howard, Christophe Bataille's third novel "is a remarkable, even triumphant little book".

Product Description: This book is designed to introduce people to the artists and to their fine art pottery. Featuring 450 illustrations of artist portraits, historic village scenes, authentic signatures and hallmarks, pottery making and hundreds of pots, the volume profiles 500 artists over the past two centuries...read more (view table of contents, read Amazon.com's description)

A novel originally written in 1863 presents a forecast of Paris in 1960, a world where money and technology control society and a young poet finds himself out of place in the materialistic, mechanistic society. Reprint.

Product Description: The narrator of this story, Aldo, a world-weary young aristocrat, is posted to the coast of Syrtes, where the Admiralty keeps the seas constantly patrolled to defend the demarcation between two powers still officially at war. This book won the Prix Goncourt.

Product Description: In this appealing and luminous collection of essays, Roland Barthes examines the mundane and exposes hidden texts, causing the reader to look afresh at the famous landmark and symbol of Paris, and also at the Tour de France, the visit to Paris of Billy Graham, the flooding of the Seine—and other shared events and aspects of everyday experience...read more (view table of contents, read Amazon.com's description)

Chronicles a gay man's sexual encounters and one-night affairs in Paris, Milan, New York, San Francisco, and on the French Riviera

A definitive overview of the life and work of the great French Impressionist Edgar Degas features more than three hundred illustrations, many in color, along with two gatefolds, that capture the remarkable artistry of a great painter.

Product Description: In this book, Cioran writes of politics, of history, and of the utopian dream. "A small masterwork . . . a stringent examination of some persistent and murky notions in human history. . . . It is best to read Cioran while sitting...read more

The French author reveals his feelings of alienation in this novel about a young man's search for the key to facing death without fear

A collection of the seventy-five best poems of the year features variety in theme and style, more newcomers, more women contributors, and the eclectic tastes of guest editor Richard Howard, winner of the Pulitzer Prize for poetry.

Product Description: From Library Journal The unique surrealist painter/sculptor/designer Dorothea Tanning (b. 1910) well deserves this sumptuous volume. Her innovative oeuvre is lyrically evoked and reviewed by French critic, playwright, and poet Bailly...read more (view table of contents, read Amazon.com's description)

The host of The New Yankee Workshop and master carpenter of This Old House presents the story of how he and his wife, over four years, built the home of their dreams in rural Massachusetts. 50,000 first printing. $50,000 ad/promo. Tour.

Essays discuss the fundamentals of semiotics, set the guidelines for textual analysis, and examine selections from the Scriptures and a tale by Poe

Poems and monologues deal with artists, poets, victims, families, memories, and inspiration

Part of a series of small hardcover volumes with silk ribbon markers and headbands and gold stamping on the front and spine, and devoted to the world's classic poets. This book includes Baudelaire's complete 'Fleurs du Mal' and extensive selections from 'Paradis Artificiel' and other prose poems.

Collected for the first time, an anthology of Henry James's witty and urbane European travel writings begins with the classic A Little Tour of France, continues with Italian Hours, and concludes with sixteen essays on other European locales.

Sixteen delightful travel essays, collected for the first time, feature James's impressions and opinions of Great Britain, his adopted home, and America, as he revisits his homeland after a twenty-year absence.

Profiles a family of immigrants, the Preks, from Cambodia, struggling to make a better life for themselves as they embrace American culture while still treasuring much of their Cambodian heritage.

Product Description: New translations of de Musset's greatest dramas, featuring cover artwork by Barry Moser.

Forgotten by their countrymen and with their homeland devastated by revolution and religious oppression, a group of French monks are left to create a world and new lives for themselves in late-eighteenth-century Vietnam

Product Description: Imagine middle European 19th century royalty, Twilight Zone twists, urbane humor, loving characterizations.

Product Description: Covering the years 1944 to 1952, this volume of the autobiography of legendary feminist and writer Simone de Beauvoir gives us not only an intimate account of her relationship with Sartre, but also a wonderful portrait of Parisian intellectual life...read more

Product Description: "Not only one of the frankest of autobiographies, but also a brilliantly written book, Leiris' Manhood mingles memories, philosophic reflections, sexual revelation, meditations on bullfighting, and the life-long progress of self-discovery...read more

Product Description: Nedjma is a masterpiece of North African writing. Its intricate plot involves four men in love with the beautiful woman whose name serves as the title of the novel. Nedjma is the central figure of this disorienting novel, but more than the unfortunate wife of a man she does not love, more than the unwilling cause of rivalry among many suitors, Nedjma is the symbol of Algeria...read more