"Anka Muhlstein revisits the delights of the French novel. This time she focuses on late 19th- and 20th-century writers--Balzac, Zola, Proust, Huysmans, and Maupassant--through the lens of their passionate involvement with the fine arts. She delves into the crucial role that painters play as characters in their novels, which she pairs with an exploration of the profound influence that painting exercised on the novelists' techniques, offering an intimate...

"A selection of the best short work by France's greatest living nonfiction writer"--

"In the years before World War II, Adolf Hitler wanted to prove the greatness of the Third Reich in everything from track and field to motorsports. The Nazis poured money into the development of new race cars, and Mercedes-Benz came out with a stable of supercharged automobiles called Silver Arrows. Their drivers dominated the sensational world of European Grand Prix racing and saluted Hitler on their many returns home with victory. As the Third Reich...

"A glimpse into a beloved novelist's inner world, shaped by family, art, and literature. In her fiction, Claire Messud "has specialized in creating unusual female characters with ferocious, imaginative inner lives" (Ruth Franklin, New York Times Magazine). Kant's Little Prussian Head and Other Reasons Why I Write opens a window on Messud's own life: a peripatetic upbringing; a warm, complicated family; and, throughout it all, her devotion to art and...

Milan Kundera's new collection of essays is a passionate defense of art in an era that, he argues, no longer values art or beauty. Art is what we possess in the face of evil and the darker side of human nature. With the same mix of emotion and idea that characterizes his novels, Kundera revisits the artists who remain important to him and whose works help us better understand the world we live in and what it means to be human. An astute reader of...

"Phyllis Rose embarks on a grand literary experiment--to read her way through a random shelf of library books, LEQ-LES. Can you have an Extreme Adventure in a library? Phyllis Rose casts herself into the wilds of an Upper East Side lending library in an effort to do just that. Hoping to explore the "real ground of literature," she reads her way through a somewhat randomly chosen shelf of fiction, from LEQ to LES. The shelf has everything Rose could...

"Victor Klemperer (1881-1960) was Professor of French Literature at Dresden University. As a Jew, he was removed from his university post in 1935, only surviving thanks to his marriage to an Aryan. From 1933 to 1935 Klemperer kept detailed diaries, which contain in note form some of the raw material for the German edition of LTI: Lingua Tertii Imperii. First published in 1957, The Language of the Third Reich arose from Klemperer's conviction that...

"Whether at peace of at war, Paris during the first half of the twentieth century pulsated with frenzied energy. Creatives from across Europe flocked to the French capital where they had free rein to experiment with innovative forms of expression. Inspired by the challenge made possible through technological advances and market expectations, members from every artistic discipline -- art, design, architecture, photography, fashion, and cinema -- forged...