Sheridan presents a literary biography of one of the most important writers of the 20th century--an intimate portrait of the reluctantly public man, whose work was deeply and inextricably entangled with his life. 35 halftones.

DIVThis debut work lays bare the early brilliance and philosophical conflicts of André Gide, a towering figure in French literature/divDIV /divDIVAndré Gide, one of the masters of French literature, captures the essence of the philosophical Romantic in this profoundly personal first novel, completed when he was just twenty years old. Drawing heavily on his religious upbringing and private journals, The Notebooks of André Walter—with its “white” and “black” halves—tells the story of a young man pining for his forbidden love, cousin Emmanuelle. But his evocative memories and devoted yearnings, carefully crafted through quotations and diary excerpts, lead only to madness and death./divDIV /divDIVAnnotated with footnotes from translator and scholar Wade Baskin, this story within a story offers a unique portrait of the artist as a young man, as it reveals the key themes of self-analysis and moral conscience that Gide explores in his mature works./div

This is the major autobiographical statement from Nobel laureate André Gide. In the events and musings recorded here we find the seeds of those themes that obsessed him throughout his career and imbued his classic novels The Immoralist and The Counterfeiters. Gide led a life of uncompromising self-scrutiny, and his literary works resembled moments of that life. With If It Die, Gide determined to relay without sentiment or embellishment the circumstances of his childhood and the birth of his philosophic wanderings, and in doing so to bring it all to light. Gide’s unapologetic account of his awakening homosexual desire and his portrait of Oscar Wilde and Lord Alfred Douglas as they indulged in debauchery in North Africa are thrilling in their frankness and alone make If It Die an essential companion to the work of a twentieth-century literary master.

Victims of the Book uncovers a long-neglected but once widespread subgenre: the fin-de-siècle novel of formation in France. In the final decades of the nineteenth century, social commentators insistently characterized excessive reading as an emasculating illness that afflicted French youth. Novels about and geared toward adolescent male readers were imbued with a deep worry over young Frenchmen’s masculinity, as evidenced by titles like Crise de jeunesse (Youth in Crisis, 1897), La Crise virile (Crisis of Virility, 1898), La Vie stérile (A Sterile Life, 1892), and La Mortelle Impuissance (Deadly Impotence, 1903). In this book, François Proulx examines a wide panorama of these novels, as well as polemical essays, pedagogical articles, and medical treatises on the perceived threats posed by young Frenchmen’s reading habits. Fin-de-siècle writers responded to this pathologization of reading with a profusion of novels addressed to young male readers, paradoxically proposing their own novels as potential cures. In the early twentieth century, this corpus was critically revisited by a new generation of writers. Victims of the Book shows how André Gide and Marcel Proust in particular reworked the fin-de-siècle paradox to subvert cultural norms about literature and masculinity, proposing instead a queer pact between writer and reader.