By the winner of the 1985 Nobel Prize in Literature, a riveting, stylistically audacious modernist epic about the French cavalry's bloody face-off against German Panzer tanks during WWII. On a sunny day in May 1940, the French army sent out the cavalry against the invading German army’s panzer tanks. Unsurprisingly, the French were routed. Twenty-six-year-old Claude Simon was among the French forces. As they retreated, he saw his captain shot off his horse by a German sniper. This is the primal scene to which Simon returns repeatedly in his fiction and nowhere so powerfully as in his most famous novel The Flanders Road. Here Simon’s own memories overlap with those of his central character, Georges, whose captain, a distant relative, dies a similar death. Georges reviews the circumstances and sense—or senselessness—of that death, first in the company of a fellow prisoner in a POW camp and then some years later in the course of an ever more erotically charged visit to the captain’s widow, Corinne. As he does, other stories emerge: Corinne’s prewar affair with the jockey Iglésia, who would become the captain’s orderly; the possible suicide of an eighteenth-century ancestor, whose grim portrait loomed large in Georges’s childhood home; Georges’s learned father, whose books are no help against barbarism. The great question throughout, the question that must be urgently asked even as it remains unanswerable, is whether fiction can confront and respond to the trauma of history.

Not in catalog (Orion Blinded)

This volume examines the dynamic relationship between the body, clothing, and identity in sub-Saharan Africa and raises questions that have previously been directed almost exclusively to a Western and urban context. Unusual in its treatment of the body surface as a critical frontier in the production and authentification of identity, Clothing and Difference shows how the body and its adornment have been used to construct and contest social and individual identities in Nigeria, Zimbabwe, Tanzania, Kenya, and other African societies during both colonial and post-colonial times. Grounded in the insights of anthropology and history and influenced by developments in cultural studies, these essays investigate the relations between the personal and the public, and between ideas about the self and those about the family, gender, and national groups. They explore the bodily and material creation of the changing identities of women, spirits, youths, ancestors, and entrepreneurs through a consideration of topics such as fashion, spirit possession, commodity exchange, hygiene, and mourning. By taking African societies as its focus, Clothing and Difference demonstrates that factors considered integral to Western social development--heterogeneity, migration, urbanization, transnational exchange, and media representation--have existed elsewhere in different configurations and with different outcomes. With significance for a wide range of fields, including gender studies, cultural studies, art history, performance studies, political science, semiotics, economics, folklore, and fashion and textile analysis/design, this work provides alternative views of the structures underpinning Western systems of commodification, postmodernism, and cultural differentiation. Contributors. Misty Bastian, Timothy Burke, Hildi Hendrickson, Deborah James, Adeline Masquelier, Elisha Renne, Johanna Schoss, Brad Weiss

No history of literature could afford to overlook Gustave Flaubert, the meticulous craftsman whose Madame Bovary and Sentimental Education are enduring classics. His finished novels are easily available, but his earliest works have been the private province of professional scholars. Early Writings is the first English translation of Flaubert?s astonishing juvenilia, astonishing not only because of its glimmers of genius but also because of its fantasy. Now readers will be able to see the contours of Flaubert?s career more fully; no note how much effort he took to learn and unlearn, to overcome and suppress. The eleven essays ad tales in this collection include about half of Flaubert?s early experiments in writing. They reveal the eye of a precocious artist who used everything from routine newspaper accounts to the psychopathology of his everyday life as material for fiction. His transformation of reality is best exemplified by ?Diary of a Madman,? based on a chance encounter of the pubescent Gustave with Elisa Schlesinger at Trouville during the summer of 1836. The range of his youthful imagination is illustrated by pieces in the Byronic mold, by caricature of philistine values, epic scenes, metaphysical themes, the fantastic genre of the ?wild tale,? and psychological studies that anticipate his larger portrayals of character. Early Writings reveals the young writer working toward more complex tableaux, increasingly preoccupied with the tension between language and art, medium and ideal. From the beginning Flaubert was obsessed by the daunting task of making language eternalize fleeting perceptions.

Michel Tremblay is one of Canada's most prominent writer's . This novel provides the backstory to his most famous chararacters.