“Men speak freely of the women they’ve had, and we’re condemned to silence. Why? Aren’t we as free as you? Don’t we, like you, have the right to take pleasure wherever we find it? . . . They praise seducers in art, poetry, and literature and put a mask of infamy on any woman who’s had many lovers. This is the point where the fight must be fought. Women’s morality must triumph, and that’s what I’m working at . . .” Thus Ariane, unconventional, irrepressible, and irre-sistible, at seventeen the queen bee of the provincial Russian town where, after her mother’s early demise, she lives with her freethinking aunt. But Ariane is tired of breaking hearts in the sticks. Her father may wish to marry her off, but she means to go to the university in Moscow, and she will do whatever it takes to make her way the way she likes. In Moscow, Ariane is in her element. She loves the glamour of the big city. She’s undaunted by its dangers. Before long, she meets Constantin Michel, businessman, man of the world, man-about-town. A new struggle begins.The inspiration for Billy Wilder’s Love in the Afternoon, Ariane has the perverse glitter of Nabokov and the disabused curiosity and keen emotional intelligence of Colette. It is a brilliant exploration—engrossing, unnerving, comic, and cunning—of the matchless cruelty of desire.

The collapse of Austria-Hungary in 1918 left all Austrians in a state of political, social, and economic turmoil, but Jews in particular found their lives shaken to the core. Although Jews' former comfort zone suddenly disappeared, the dissolution of the Dual Monarchy also created plenty of room for innovation and change in the realm of culture. Jews eagerly took up the challenge to fill this void, and they became heavily invested in culture as a way to shape their new, but also vexed, self-understandings. By isolating the years between the World Wars and examining formative events in both Vienna and the provinces, Becoming Austrians: Jews and Culture between the World Wars demonstrates that an intensified marking of people, places, and events as "Jewish" accompanied the crises occurring in the wake of Austria-Hungary's collapse, with profound effects on Austria's cultural legacy. In some cases, the consequences of this marking resulted in grave injustices. Philipp Halsmann, for example, was wrongfully imprisoned for the murder of his father years before he became a world-famous photographer. And the men who shot and killed writer Hugo Bettauer and philosopher Moritz Schlick received inadequate punishment for their murderous deeds. But engagements with the terms of Jewish difference also characterized the creation of culture, as shown in Hugo Bettauer's satirical novel The City without Jews and its film adaptation, other texts by Veza Canetti, David Vogel, A.M. Fuchs, Vicki Baum, and Mela Hartwig, and performances at the Salzburg Festival and the Yiddish theater in Vienna. By examining the lives, works, and deeds of a broad range of Austrians, Lisa Silverman reveals how the social codings of politics, gender, and nation received a powerful boost when articulated along the lines of Jewish difference.

An obsessive and revealing self-portrait of a remarkable woman humiliated by the circumstances of her birth and by her physical appearance, La Bâtarde relates Violette Leduc’s long search for her own identity through a series of agonizing and passionate love affairs with both men and women. When first published, La Bâtarde earned Violette Leduc comparisons to Jean Genet for the frank depiction of her sexual escapades and immoral behavior. A confession that contains portraits of several famous French authors, this book is more than just a scintillating memoir—like that of Henry Miller, Leduc’s brilliant writing style and attention to language transform this autobiography into a work of art.