When an epidemic threatens to destroy the silk trade in France, the young merchant Herve Joncour leaves his doting wife and his comfortable home in the small town of Lavilledieu and travels across Sib…
"My father tried to kill my mother one Sunday in June, in the early afternoon." Thus begins Shame, the probing story of the twelve-year-old girl who will become the author herself, and the single trau…
In her spare, stark style, Annie Ernaux documents the desires and indignities of a human heart ensnared in an all-consuming passion. Blurring the line between fact and fiction, an unnamed narrator att…
In 1963, Annie Ernaux, 23 and unattached, realizes she is pregnant. Shame arises in her like a plague: Understanding that her pregnancy will mark her and her family as social failures, she knows she c…
Written by Rimbaud at age 18 in the wake of a tempestuous affair with fellow poet, Paul Verlaine, A Season in Hell has been a touchstone for anguished poets, artists and lovers for over a century. Thi…
