Jordan

Bruna Guedes

Husain Kothari

FRNK

Uendi Prifti

Abdul Hasib

Loughlin Sullivan

Delaney Knopp

Auriel W

Blake Molmen

Dani Shahar

Luis Javier Campos nieto

'The Wall', the lead story in this collection, introduces three political prisoners on the night prior to their execution. Through the gaze of an impartial doctor--seemingly there for the men's solace--their mental descent is charted in exquisite, often harrowing detail. And as the morning draws inexorably closer, the men cross the psychological wall between life and death, long before the first shot rings out.This brilliant snapshot of life in anguish is the perfect introduction to a collection of stories where the neurosis of the modern world is mirrored in the lives of the people that inhabit it.

A ruthless dissection of American life in the late 1960s, Play It as It Lays captures the mood of an entire generation, the ennui of contemporary society reflected in spare prose that blisters and haunts the reader. Set in a place beyond good and evil - literally in Hollywood, Las Vegas, and the barren wastes of the Mojave Desert, but figuratively in the landscape of an arid soul - it remains more than three decades after its original publication a profoundly disturbing novel, riveting in its exploration of a woman and a society in crisis and stunning in the still-startling intensity of its prose.

Somewhere in Della’s consumptive, industrial wasteland of a city, a bomb goes off. It is not the first, and will not be the last.Reactions to the attacks are polarized. Police activity intensifies. Della’s revolutionary parents welcome the upheaval but are trapped within their own insular beliefs. Her activist restaurant co-workers, who would rather change their identities than the world around them, resume a shallow rebellion of hair-dye, sex parties, and self-absorption. As those bombs keep inching closer, thudding deep and real between the sounds of katydids fluttering in the still of the city night, and the destruction begins to excite her. What begins as terror threats called in to greasy bro-bars across the block boils over into a desperate plot, intoxicating and captivating Della and leaving her little chance for escape.Zazen unfolds as a search for clarity soured by irresolution and catastrophe, yet made vital by the thin, wild veins of imagination run through each escalating moment, tensing and relaxing, unfurling and ensnaring. Vanessa Veselka renders Della and her world with beautiful, freighting, and phantasmagorically intelligent accuracy, crafting from their shattered constitutions a perversely perfect mirror for our own selves and state.

Taken from the original, uncensored journals of Anaïs Nin, Henry and June spans a single year in Nin's life when she discovers love and torment in one insatiable couple. From late 1931 to the end of 1932, Nin falls in love with Henry Miller's writing and his wife June's striking beauty. When June leaves Paris for New York, Henry and Anaïs begin a fiery affair that liberates her sexually and morally, but also undermines her marriage and eventually leads her into psychoanalysis. As she grapples with her own conscience, a single question dominates her thoughts: What will happen when June returns to Paris? An intimate account of one woman's sexual awakening, Henry and June exposes the pain and pleasure felt by a single person trapped between two loves.

But a wound opened inside. Delight and melancholy welled up simultaneously from the depths of her mind. She could not understand why nor protect herself from them. They streamed over her together with the light, making her shrink with painful impatience. Tears came, God knows how. One moment she was crushed to the ground by life's misery, the next, new strength coursed exulting through her - it was like madness.It was easier to love the younger Jacob. Escape the suffocating Selmer home. Mrs. Selmer's teary gaze, her little boy. The doom landing of the Magistrate's face. Jacob could never do anything right. He tells the elder Alberta that he isn't who she thinks he is at all. The kind of letting himself off the hook of the family to be a fish on other lands. All of those nights of pushing him into good grades. I don't know if it was as impossible as he said to make it in that school. He was already out the door. Jacob and Alberta betray each other. Alberta wanted him to die there with her just above rock bottom. Jacob tells Alberta that she should at least try the impossible of pleasing their mother, reminds her that their parents are pitiful. Maybe he'll send them money from abroad, for a while. He reminds me of the father that takes his kid out for baseball games until the fade out is complete, no more visits. The great wide world is another family. What, she was going to magically possess flattering clothes the meanly poor family couldn't afford? I hated Jacob a bit when he tells their mother (as he's leaving!) that Alberta sold her heavy chain to make up the (to them) enormous sum Jacob owed to a shop owner. He's fleeing to be himself, save himself. Was he that oblivious to what it was like for Alberta? Alberta remembers the father of her youth who talked to her about unsettled things. Probably because she was too young to be considered an intruder on really talking to himself. Jacob couldn't have ever have had that with him as their SON, the hope. I don't buy that brother and sister were all that close. Make them happy Jacob, so I don't have to be me. Make them happy Alberta, so I don't have to think about making the choice to be me. I wish I had seen Jacob without Alberta. I wouldn't want to see Alberta without him. She sees him ashamed of his skin, a pretty boy. They are backed into corners. The selves that are squirreling away pieces of themselves. If you looked into schools, work places and the like, there are all kinds of windows like these. Steps in the real world and hopeful mental flights. Alberta remembers the little boy who did the wrong thing and gave away his coat to a poor boy. To her he is open to everything. I just don't know that, if you are yourself only without interference, but it is a bright image far away from the please don't leave me wrong thing. It was easier to love Alberta. Her secret Alberta, a dream story. She's never alone because there is another Alberta, the right Alberta. She walks with her in the cold streets. I wonder if the right Alberta would be so great if she were real. Maybe if she passed muster of the town she would be as mean as a sea of faces. I have a bad feeling she would be. Alberta is not generous about their maid. She works for this destitute family so it can't be a good life. Yet she steals coal and coffee regularly and leaves the poor servant open to suspicion and shame. Albera stores up judgement and revulsion, hoping for gossip, sometimes for glimpses of the outskirters of village. The loose women and the mentally ill and the penitentiary prostitutes. Mrs. Selmer plays her music again when her husband is not home. Sits over letters from the past and look at where they are now. Alberta loves her father but come on, does he have to spend their money on booze when they are unwarmed in the arctic circle in dead winter? I felt for Mrs. Selmer if Alberta was afraid to (if she gives in to tenderness it will be that much harder when everything about Alberta is wrong again). There isn't a crime Mrs. Selmer is guilty of that Alberta, Jacob and the Magistrate don't inflict themselves. Alberta isn't religious herself, will do anything to avoid church, but wishes her father was sitting in the front row with the correct people of town. There is a provincial beating in her drum too, make no mistake. At least there was Beda. I never loved Alberta more than when she stores up her unselfish love for the reckless Beda. Beda who doesn't walk in step. She doesn't need Beda to do anything for Alberta so it meant more to me that she wants her to be Beda.Alberta reminded me too much of my worst days. My mother tortured me over the same ugly clothes (yeah, if you make your daughter wear hand-me-downs they are probably going to be ill fitting and unattractive in the bargain). I know looking for the signals of moods, which better days could sour when you didn't escape from view quickly enough. No food in the house so us girls wouldn't get fat. I was waiting for the promised rebellion of the book jacket description to take place. It isn't like that, though. The omen winds of others offer the kind of rewards that don't often enough feel like rewards. Watching people that closely is learning a language of nothing to do with you beyond her home life preservation. It's sickening to be that afraid, and Alberta misses a lot by her self imposed silence. But she also picks up new signals in her flight. The other people in town exist like in and out real selves. The town appointed comedian, making or breaking events if his stories are on. The lucky and wealthy young women, disappointed sisters lasting as long as they can before deciding on marriage. Not seeing another kind of life either, in darkness together. Alberta herself is torn between sides of the home where there is nothing to do but drink and mourn the setting of the midnight sun. Cemetery streets of people you know too well to hope. I would hate to be them so much. Marriage or have sex (and no way were any of these men going to bother in giving pleasure so what was the point?) and then what? Who needs their judgement? The secondhand view from above tantalizes and torments Alberta. The gleeful art school students who refrain that this summer home with the folks lasts too long (the summer Alberta lives and longs for). I don't have the second or third Alberta books yet but I know she does make it out of there to Paris. There are kindred lost spirits in Paris. In everywhere, under beautiful trees with suggestions between, in other worlds in shells littering horizons. (I've seen some butt fucking ugly towns, though. Maybe they would wait until night and go by star.) You could be dreading the return of the human burden you don't have the courage for it to get bad enough to leave anywhere. Maybe if it were possible to be Alberta's Jacob, and you had yourself. I loved Alberta. She has herself and then loses her. It's scabs on picking scabs. So true. The words that come to her, a poem to make it all right. Abandoned in outside inspiration. It's so so hard to make it live. Making it seem enough when she does have herself is the trick. Sandel is great. She managed to breathe that won't get under lid. How awful it felt when my older sister (frequently) announced she was going to one day start her own family and never see any of us again. Like not having a family at all. Sandel nailed the orphan feeling of having a family. There's a time Alberta is warm in Beda's house and there's a bona fide smorgasbord. She makes herself feel guilty for her family in the starving cold and rushes back. They were there the whole time without her like there was never an Alberta at all. Damn right. Nothing could be bluer than the sky to the east of the river bend, thought Alberta. Nothing could be bluer, southern skies, the Mediterranean, nothing. And yet it seemed to grow bluer every day. Blue and bottomless. To look into it for long was like sailing out and sinking into infinity. You lost the feeling of solid ground under your feet, turned giddy, had to sit down in the snow so as not to fall.

One of the most important and controversial writers of the 20th century, Knut Hamsun made literary history with the publication in 1890 of this powerful, autobiographical novel recounting the abject poverty, hunger and despair of a young writer struggling to achieve self-discovery and its ultimate artistic expression. The book brilliantly probes the psychodynamics of alienation, obsession, and self-destruction, painting an unforgettable portrait of a man driven by forces beyond his control to the edge of the abyss. Hamsun influenced many of the major 20th-century writers who followed him, including Kafka, Joyce and Henry Miller. Required reading in world literature courses, the highly influential, landmark novel will also find a wide audience among lovers of books that probe the "unexplored crannies in the human soul" (George Egerton).

With spare simplicity, Vesaas' novel tells the tale of Mattis, a mentally disabled man cared for by his lonely older sister, Hege. Their routine, isolated existence is interrupted when a lumberjack arrives at their lakeside cottage and falls in love with Hege, leaving Mattis fearful that he will lose his sister. The careful translation from the Norwegian underscores Vesaas's rare sensitivity in recording Mattis's often insightful view of his world. With a limited understanding of the unpredictable power of nature, Mattis nonetheless turns to the elements to discover the answers—with unsettling results.

I went into the café and sat down in the corner. I prefer to sit there. I took out my book and opened it. After a while, I looked up and saw that one of the waitresses was standing behind me. I realised she had been there for some time. She was a pretty brunette who looked about twenty.- Excuse me, I said. I didn't notice you.- That's okay, she replied and laughed. I didn't want to disturb you. What's that you've got there?- Pan, I said. By Knut Hamsun.- And you can read it? she said. What language is it in?- I suppose Norwegian, I said. Or maybe Danish. - You can't tell the difference? she said and raised her eyebrows. - I expressed myself badly, I said. They were almost the same language in 1894. At least in novels.- But you can read it? she asked again.- Quite easily, I said. If I guess a few words. It's very beautiful. He has a unique way of writing. I wanted to tell her more about Hamsun's style, but she interrupted me.- So what are you doing later today? she asked.- Finishing this book, I said. I like to read a lot. She was standing too close to me. I shifted my position and stretched out my hand, knocking over a glass of water.- I'm terribly sorry, I said. I was so embarrassed by my clumsiness that tears almost came into my eyes.- It doesn't matter, she told me. She fetched a rag and mopped up the mess I'd made. - Now what can I get you, she asked. A coffee? And I'll leave you alone with your book.- A latte, I said. A few minutes later, she came back. She put down the coffee on the table with exaggerated care.- You see, I'm not disturbing you, she said, and she patted my hand.I sat and tried to read Pan, but I was unable to concentrate. I drank my coffee slowly and tried to think how to explain the charm of the writing. I realised that I didn't even know the waitress's name. After a while, I walked over to the counter. She was talking with an older man who looked like her boss.- Coffee okay? she said. That's $4.10. I handed her a five. She gave back me the change. There was a little jar of coins in front of me with a sign saying BEER MONEY. I put my ninety cents in it. - Thanks, she smiled.- You know, I said, speaking a bit too quickly, I believe I can tell you what's special about Hamsun. - Who? she said.- The Norwegian who wrote the book I'm reading, I said.- Oh, right, she said. - It's the way he has of describing people, I explained. What they feel and what they see. You see, he can kind of--- Sorry, she said. I'm in the middle of doing something with Mac here. Why don't you come back and tell me tomorrow?I suddenly hated her. She had only pretended to be interested. I reached into the jar and took back my ninety cents. Her face crumpled as though I'd just slapped her. I immediately regretted what I had done.- Oh, I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm so sorry, I said. I'm sorry. Please forgive me. Can you forgive me?- It's okay, she said after a few seconds. She tried to laugh, but I could see her boss staring at me. I left without saying goodbye.

There I was, feeling the beginnings of a mid-life crisis starting to emerge. . . contemplating the merits of a navel piercing. . . or worse. . . when, suddenly, I spotted a black and white book cover featuring a snarky gal with a cigarette dangling from her mouth. A definite look of devil-may-care sitting snug around the corners of her mouth.The blurb for the book reads something like. . . failed marriage. . . sexual discovery. . . liaisons in France.Hey, I thought, it would be way cheaper to read a story of wanton lasciviousness than to get an infected belly button (and a lot less painful, too).So, I splurged and found myself a lovely first edition of this book, a hardcover which smells like the 1960s, which is just when this novel happened to have been written by Irish author, Edna O'Brian.I was that determined that I'd be living vicariously through the licentious protagonist, Ellen, and I figured we'd be friends for years.Er. . . uh. . . no. No. No!I have only been this wrong about a book, once before, when I thought The Vet's Daughter by Barbara Comyns was a “light romance.” Boy, was that a mistake.This was another mistake.It's not that this wasn't readable. It was. I did keep reading it, for reasons unknown even to me.But this is NOT A SCINTILLATING SEXUAL READ!!!! Let's call it what it is, blurb writer, it's a bleak, depressing tale of a young woman, who has abuse in her background, who can not be in a healthy relationship with. . . well, anyone. The sex here is awkward and sad. . . and very unhealthy. There's also a totally unexpected and where-in-the-hell-did-that-come-from tragedy, that I found unnecessary to the plot and weird.The character of Ellen is so unformed, her hair color keeps changing, and I don't mean because she dyes it. It's like the author didn't even care enough to remember. Her eye color changes, too. What the hell?The dialogue is awful, character development is non-existent, and there is not one worthy sex scene in the book.No post-coital cigarette for me, folks. Anyone want a free book?

Twenty Thousand Streets Under the Sky are the streets of London… And there people meet and part… And there they fall in love.For he was in that mood when he loved all human creatures. He loved Ella because she was a good woman, and he loved the other because she was a bad woman. It was a good world.In brief, because he had given ten shillings to a young prostitute without expecting the usual thing in return he was dreadfully conceited. He was so innocent as to believe the transaction was almost unique. He little suspected cunning mankind’s general awareness of the charms of chivalry. He was in love with himself.And a man successfully in love desires above all things to sing.Twenty Thousand Streets Under the Sky trilogy is the three interconnected moody and beautifully written novellettes of unrequited love.Nevertheless, the gas-lit walls and objects around him were heavy with his own depression – the depression of one who awakes from the excess in the late afternoon. Only at dawn should a man awake from excess – at dawn agleam with red and sorrowful resolve. The late, dark afternoon, with an evening’s toil ahead, affords no such palliation.Love is the most desirable and entrancing thing… But an unanswered love may bring much anguish and sadness.

Faber Stories, a landmark series of individual volumes, presents masters of the short story form at work in a range of genres and styles. Adrienne is living in a puritanical age, when the best compliment a childless woman can get is: 'You'd make a terrific mother'. That's when she goes to her friends' Labor Day picnic and accidentally kills their baby.The shock of this scene is expertly packed into two brief paragraphs. What follows is Adrienne's retreat from life and her attempt to return to it.Her sharp scepticism about the people around her is achingly funny. Yet beyond derision there is forgiveness and something along the lines of love.Bringing together past, present and future in our ninetieth year, Faber Stories is a celebratory compendium of collectable work.

Through his alcoholism and her mental illness, his career highs (and lows) and her institutional confinement, Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald's devotion to each other endured for more than twenty-two years. Now, for the first time, the story of the love of these two glamorous and hugely talented writers can be given in their own letters. Introduced by an extensive narrative of the Fitzgeralds' marriage, the 333 letters - three-quarters of them previously unpublished or out of print - have been edited by noted Fitzgerald scholars, Jackson R. Bryer and Cathy W. Barks. They are illustrated throughout with a generous selection of familiar and unpublished photographs.

So, lately I’ve been in a bit of an aggressive, combative mood... like I’ve been picking fights, or hoping that someone will instigate an argument so I can verbally “cut a bitch.” I’ve even gone so far as to go out in public* with the hope that someone will be rude to me, so I’ll have an excuse to lash out. I know I probably sound like a lunatic, and maybe I am. I probably need to be in Rageaholics Anonymous (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lkQ9uy...) or at the very least, I should be sedated. Anyway, none of my usual victims have been willing to engage with me... so I sought refuge in a trashy book I suspected I probably wasn’t going to like. I hate it when I’m right. (OK, not really, but for once I wanted to be wrong.)This book originally piqued my interest because of its purported similarity to the HBO TV show Girls, and also because Mary Gaitskill is scheduled to appear at a local college in a couple of weeks for a reading/book signing. For these reasons I decided to step outside of my admittedly narrow comfort zone, and give this a try. So, what started out as a mild distaste with a pinch of schadenfruede eventually devolved into a full on hate-read. For the uninitiated, the hate-read, which is analogous to its more ubiquitous and slutty cousin, the hate-fuck, is an activity wherein one disseminates written content with the distinct objective of deriding it. (http://jezebel.com/5876891/the-art-of...) For me, this activity is normally limited to certain websites I peruse on the internet (e.g., xojane, jezebel, the NY Times style section, obscene chewing, the comments in Above the Law). Thus, I have never hate-read an actual book, until this one.So let’s get to a substantive discussion of the stories, shall we? Gaitskill is perhaps best known for her short story Secretary, which is featured in this collection - and was made into a movie starring James Spader and Maggie Gyllenahaal. I don’t have anything to say about that story, because I didn’t actually read it. I got about half way through the collection, and couldn’t escape the feeling of déjà vu. I realized that the same two stories kept repeating themselves interchangeably. Dig it: depressive, college-educated, bohemian, aspiring writer, becomes a prostitute and her favorite client falls in love with her. Hilarity ensues. Then there’s its inverse: depressive, married, middle class, john falls in love with his favorite prostitute. Tragedy ensues. Then there’s also, the depressive, college-educated, bohemian, aspiring writer in an abusive relationship with a total prick, disguised as an S&amp;M relationship. Humiliation ensues. You get the idea. Even in those descriptions, I feel like I’m giving Gaitskill too much credit. The stories were dull, trite, and meaningless. And I feel like the elements of promiscuity, drugs, sex, S&amp;M, were all included merely as a gimmick;** or to provide some shock value as a distraction from what amounts to truly bad writing. To wit: 	“I love you,” said Sara.	“It’s not real,” he said. “It’s puppy love.”	“No. I love you.” She nuzzled his cheek with her nose and lips and her tenderness pierced him.	The image became tiny and unnaturally white, was surrounded by darkness, then faded like the picture on a turned off TV.	Come back.I can’t emphasize enough how contrived the above referenced elements felt. I couldn’t escape the feeling that Gaitskill’s intention in adding the S&amp;M, prostitution, etc. elements, was for attention,*** because few women writers were addressing these kinds of themes at the time (this was published in 1988). Twenty-four years later, these themes fail to raise an eyebrow, (although they did elicit many an eyeroll), leaving the stories feeling flat and meaningless. So I didn’t finish. Not even the shreds of gratification received from hate-reading could save this. These stories left me feeling empty and mean.* a rarity for me -- I rarely leave the house willingly. I find the outside world too depressing.** the entire time I was reading this, this song was in my head on a loop: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gFRSaw...*** and Gaitskill loves attention. Any woman that shows up to read an excerpt from one of her books, braless, is dying for attention. Not that I haven’t done that in the past. But the difference is I was 19 years old when I would pull those cheap stunts. OK... maybe 23. My point is, although some women may be susceptible to stooping to such vulgar bids for attention, most have the sense to grow out of it.

A groundbreaking biography of a psychologically traumatized novelist who forever changed the way we look at women in fiction. Jean Rhys (1890–1979) is best known for her 1966 novel Wide Sargasso Sea. A prequel to Jane Eyre, Rhys’s revolutionary work reimagined the story of Bertha Rochester—the misunderstood “madwoman in the attic” who was driven to insanity by cruelties beyond her control. The Blue Hour performs a similar exhumation of Rhys’s life, which was haunted by demons from within and without. Its examination of Rhys’s pain and loss charts her desperate journey from the jungles of Dominica to a British boarding school, and then into an adult life scarred by three failed marriages, the deaths of her two children, and her long battle with alcoholism.  A mesmerizing evocation of a fragile and brilliant mind, The Blue Hour explores the crucial element that ultimately spared Rhys from the fate of her most famous protagonist: a genius that rescued her, again and again, from the abyss.

Les Enfants Terribles holds an undisputed place among the classics of modern fiction. Written in a French style that long defied successful translation - Cocteau was always a poet no matter what he was writing - the book came into its own for English-language readers in 1955 when the present version was completed by Rosamond Lehmann. It is a masterpiece of the art of translation of which the Times Literary Supplement said: "It has the rare merit of reading as though it were an English original." Miss Lehmann was able to capture the essence of Cocteau's strange, necromantic imagination and to bring fully to life in English his story of a brother and sister, orphaned in adolescence, who build themselves a private world out of one shared room and their own unbridled fantasies. What started in games and laughter became for Paul and Elisabeth a drug too magical to resist. The crime which finally destroyed them has the inevitability of Greek tragedy. Illustrated with twenty of Cocteau's own drawings.

Oh, Julia! Poor old Julia. Sweet Julia. Another sad and lonely and stressed female protagonist with hardly a penny to her name who I couldn't help but fall in love with. Or at least love to pity. My heart was fluttering like a butterfly and sinking like a stone. I wanted nothing more than to offer her a shoulder to cry on, a nice home-cooked meal (as I recall she hardly ate a thing) and a relaxing warm bath with some of those scented candles places around the edges to at least take her troubles away for a while. Make her feel wanted again. From Paris to London and back again, low-spirited and needy Julia Martin who has no home and no friends to call upon is trudging through life with a lead weight tied around an ankle. Stuck in Paris, she has parted from her lover (Mr Mackenzie) and is hiding from the world in a hotel room with a book and a bottle waiting for the sore and unhappy feelings to pass. To make matters worse she is notified by his lawyer stating that her weekly allowance will be discontinued. On a whim, she decides to go back to London, hoping for some kind of enlightenment, where her mother and sister reside. But on return she finds her mother gravely ill, and her sister and other relatives hardly that welcoming, believing she is simply out to scrounge for money. Nobody can put her up, so it's the hotel life again. With just enough to get by. Julia, like other Rhys heroines, is precariously lodged. Going from a shabby hotel in Bloomsbury before moving to a boarding house in Notting Hill. She hides in her room and hardly believes it is worth the effort to look for love and companionship in London. She does eventually have a couple of male admirers, but they only tend to offer her money, albeit not a lot, rather than true affection. It is not a city that is kind to women. Rhys obviously didn't think much of London during her time there, describing it as sinister and soulless, and that comes across in Julia before she travels back to Paris. London sexually, is a hygienic and respectable place, with the action taking place behind the firmly shut doors of family houses, from which Julia is barred, or furtive and under the cover of darkness. Mr Horsfield, one of Julia's temporary lovers, creeps up the stairs of her boarding house at night, tells her ecstatically that she has given him back his youth, but in the morning he is ashamed of his attraction to her and sneaks off leaving a cowardly note. Bastard.I really liked this, it had a simple, easy to read, no excess fat prose similar to Hemingway, and when it comes to tragic female figures in literature, especially the lonely ones who drink alone, and wake up each each day hoping for a change in fortune, I'm just a sucker. Leaving Mr Mackenzie can certainly be seen as the sister piece to 'Good Morning, Midnight' and It's quite easy to be seduced into reading Rhys’s fictions autobiographically, as her protagonists in Good Morning, Midnight and this mirror Rhys to some to some extent. I also only recently found out that Rhys and Ford Maddox Ford had a fling in Paris back in the day, and that he helped in publishing her first collection of stories. Quite the Gentleman. It took me a while to read her again, but so glad I did. Voyage in the Dark is up next.

Aperitifs in smoky Montparnasse cafes, cheap hotel rooms, and Marya Zelli, trying to make of her life something substantial to withstand the unreality which surrounds her. Alone, stranded in Paris after her Polish husband is jailed, Marya is befriended by an English couple who take her home with them. Slowly they overwhelm her with their passions as Marya drifts into an affair with the husband, an affair the wife seems strangely eager to promote. The husband demands, the wife fosters, and Marya is left - as always - to comfort herself.

Not long ago I read 'Tigers Are Better Looking' which was a collection of short stories I really liked, and the first time I'd read Rhys' short fiction. Sleep it off lady I found to be even better, and I now realise Rhys was just as much an accomplished short story writer as she was a novelist. These brilliant sketches move, as she herself did, from the West Indies of her childhood to England to Montparnasse and back again.Here's a taste of what's on offer - The island of Dominica in the 1890's, a sleepy British empire outpost. From England appears Mr. Ramage, a handsome man in tropical kit, white suit, red cummerbund, solar topee. A young girl, Rosalie, falls in love with him, dreams about him, follows every detail of his increasing alienation and madness. He marries a not very nice girl, then retreats to a dilapidated plantation, walks around naked, and threatens a crowd with a shotgun. It doesn't end well for him. Then, there is Captain Cardew, one of those ebullient Victorian gentlemen, a hero of some bygone war. Under the trees in the Botanical Gardens, he caresses the breasts of Lolita aged Phoebe, and rabbits on to her about love and lovers. Nothing comes of it, but it does changes her outlook. Now she knows that there is something else beside collecting your trousseau, getting married, and having three nice children. That being a life of wickedness, and of excitement.'Fishy Waters' is manly about the trial of Jimmy Longa, a befuddled English workman caught while threatening to saw a badly beaten little black girl in two with his carpenter's saw. But, midway in the story, the inferences of guilt begin to shift subtly, in the direction of her rescuer, Mr. Penrice, a respectable, prosperous family man. Then in London in the 1910's and Paris in the 1920's we have Daisie an incredibly beautiful understudy in a musical whose voice and beauty never seem to project across the footlights, where she falls unconscious at even the slightest reverse. 'The Chevalier of the Place Blanche' sees an embezzling clerk in a travel agency who has gentlemanly pretensions—he can, he finds, have Margaret, the English girl, and her money too, until she says the one thing that will cut down his shabby remnant of pride. The last story in the book, 'I Used to Live Here Once' is one of the best in the book. It's a ghost story, and I don't even like ghost stories, so that shows just what an effect it had on me. These are some of the themes and the people, but no thumbnails of plot can transmit the particular twang of Jean Rhys's uncomplicated and engaging style, or her splendid ability to choose what is said and to let the unsaid speak. The fact that the scenes themselves come from the West Indies or London or Paris of past decades has little bearing here, as like some of her novels these are very modern stories written with a quick, young sensibility. Whether in the small hours of the morning or at the fag end of the day, Rhys makes herself truly felt, resulting in a collection of stories that I greatly admired.

\
  As I Lay Dying\
 is Faulkner’s harrowing account of the Bundren family’s odyssey across the Mississippi countryside to bury Addie, their wife and mother. Narrated in turn by each of the family members -- including Addie herself -- as well as others; the novel ranges in mood, from dark comedy to the deepest pathos. Considered one of the most influential novels in American fiction in structure, style, and drama, \
  As I Lay Dying\
 is a true 20th-century classic. This edition reproduces the corrected text of \
  As I Lay Dying\
 as established in 1985 by Noel Polk.

Kate (Charlotte Rampling) and Geoff Mercer (Sir Tom Courtenay) are planning to celebrate their 45th wedding anniversary with dozens of friends. The event is to take place soon in the community hall of Norwich, the town near which they live. A week before the party, Geoff receives a letter which, although he tries to hide it, obviously troubles him. When his wife asks him what is going on, Geoff tells her that the body of Katya, his first great love who disappeared fifty years before in the Alps, has just been found in a melting glacier. From then on, Geoff starts behaving more and more strangely and for the first time after so many years Kate asks herself who the man she married so long ago really is.

In Paris, Alexandre, an unemployed young man with memories of the May 1968 events in France, attempts to persuade his former love, Gilberte, to marry him. Gilberte opts to instead marry another man. Alexandre is involved with a live-in girlfriend called Marie, and is interested in films such as The Working Class Goes to Heaven. One day, after an unsuccessful reconciliation with Gilberte at the highly popular Les Deux Magots café, he meets Veronika, a Polish French twenty-something nurse. In the midst of the sexual revolution, Veronika is highly promiscuous, and begins to make advances on Alexandre. During the summer of 1972, Alexandre and Marie are nude in bed in their apartment when Veronika visits. Marie lets her in and Veronika insults both of them, but acknowledges she is not pure herself. The three begin a ménage à trois and sleep in the same bed, with Veronika assuring Alexandre she and Marie both love him, and telling him to be more happy with his situation and life. Although Marie affirms her indifference to Alexandre's affairs, she quickly changes her mind when she sees how close he becomes to Veronika. This leads to a growing estrangement between her and Alexandre. As the three sit together, Veronika attempts to reassure Marie about her looks and body. Tearfully, Veronika speaks about how she believes no women are truly whores, and how love is meaningless unless it produces a child.

Francois is a young carpenter married with Therese. They have two little children. All goes well, life is beautiful, the sun shines and the birds sing. One day, Francois meets Emilie, they fall in love and become lovers. He still loves his wife and wants to share his new greater happiness with her.

Alvy Singer, a forty year old twice divorced, neurotic, intellectual Jewish New York City stand-up comic, reflects on the demise of his latest relationship, to Annie Hall, an insecure, flighty, Midwestern WASP aspiring nightclub singer. Unlike his previous relationships, Alvy believed he may have worked out all the issues in his life through fifteen years of therapy to make this relationship with Annie last, among those issues being not wanting to date any woman that would want to date him, and thus subconsciously pushing those women away. Alvy not only reviews the many ups and many downs of their relationship, but also reviews the many facets of his makeup that led to him starting to date Annie. Those facets include growing up next to Coney Island in Brooklyn, being attracted to the opposite sex for as long as he can remember, and enduring years of Jewish guilt with his constantly arguing parents.

A French woman and a Japanese man have an affair while she is in Japan making a film about peace and the impact of the atomic bomb on Hiroshima, The man, an architect, lost his family in the bombing. She recalls her lover during the war, a 23 year-old German soldier who later died. Despite the time they spend together, her attachment appears minimal and they go forward into the future.

Three months before her final examinations, the ambitious teachership student Valentine concentrates herself completely on learning. When Jazz musician Edouard wooes her, she agrees on a date though - planning for one night of pleasure only. But when she comes to know him better, she realizes that he isn't as shallow as she thought... so lust turns to love. But between her examination preparations and a tournee with a jazz band almost no time is left to be spent together.

Based on a true story. Liz Murray is a young girl who is taken care of by her loving, but drug-addicted parents. Liz becomes homeless at 15 and after a tragedy comes upon her, she begins her work to finish high school.

Zorg is a handyman working at the seaside in France, maintaining and looking after the wooden bungalows. He lives a quiet and peaceful life, working diligently and writing in his spare time. He is in love with Betty, a young woman who is as beautiful as she is wild and unpredictable. After a dispute with Zorg's boss, they leave and Betty finds a place to stay at her girlfriend's house. The girlfriend's lover owns an Italian restaurant and there they find a job. She is obsessed to try to get one of Zorg's books published, but it is rejected, which makes Betty fly into a rage. Suddenly, Betty's wild manners start to get out of control. Zorg sees the woman he loves slowly going insane. Is his love for Betty strong enough, if even if it comes to the worst?

1986 film directed by Jean-Jacques Beineix

Bored with her husband, bored with her polo-playing lover, will the middle-aged heroine go away with the young man who gave her a lift that day when her car broke down on the way back to her country estate from a weekend with her lover in Paris?

In this talky lighthearted slow-paced melodrama, Jerome, a cultural attache, spends his last summer holidays as a bachelor at Lake Annecy where he meets Aurora, an Italian writer and old friend. She talks him into a flirt with his landlady's teenage daughter, Laura, which he indulges in until he meets and falls for Laura's blonde half-sister Claire and develops a desire to caress her knee. Jerome eventually dares to try his luck with Claire, only to realize that, unlike with Laura, his affections this time are mostly one-sided.

The last of Rohmer's Six Moral Tales. Frederic leads a bourgeois life; he is a partner in a small Paris office and is happily married to Helene, a teacher expecting her second child. In the afternoons, Frederic daydreams about other women, but has no intention of taking any action. One day, Chloe, who had been a mistress of an old friend, begins dropping by his office. They meet as friends, irregularly in the afternoons, till eventually Chloe decides to seduce Frederic, causing him a moral dilemma.

At the beginning of the 20th century, Claude Roc, a young middle-class Frenchman meets in Paris Ann Brown, a young Englishwoman. They become friends and Ann invites him to spend holidays at the house where she lives with her mother and her sister Muriel, for whom she intends Claude. During these holidays, Claude, Ann and Muriel become very close and he gradually falls in love with Muriel. But both families lay down a one-year-long separation without any contact before agreeing to the marriage. So Claude goes back to Paris when he has many love affairs before sending Muriel a break-off letter...

As a man leaves his wife and daughter, a series of brief conversations, observed gestures, chance encounters and impulsive acts, tell the story of the relationships that flounder and thrive in the wake of this decision.

A man and a woman meet by accident on a Sunday evening at their children's boarding school. Slowly the widower and widow reveal themselves to each other, with each revelation hidden by a misperception. They become closer and closer, until she reveals that she can't have a lover because her husband's memory is still far too strong. Much of the film is told wordlessly in actions or through hearing each person's thoughts.

It's night on a Paris bridge. A girl leans over Seine River with tears in her eyes and a violent yearning to drown her sorrows. Out of nowhere someone takes an interest in her. He is Gabor, a knife thrower who needs a human target for his show. The girl, Adele, has never been lucky and nowhere else to go. So she follows him. They travel along the northern bank of the Mediterranean to perform and in the process win a big fortune through gambling. Although both of them continue a platonic relationship, the sex-starved girl attempts to sleep with handsome guys she encounters throughout the journey. Finally, Adele falls in love with a newly-wed groom and both of them elope to Greece, while Gabor is stuck in Turkey. Then Adele is dumped by the groom. Only by now both Gabor and Adele realize that luck isn't with them unless they get together again. But both of them are so broke that they can't even feed themselves, let alone getting back to Paris and reunite...

In Paris in the 1920s, a concert violinist meets and falls in love with a stylish young flapper who's the wife of an old friend. Romaine instigates the affair with Marcel, and carries it forward even as her husband, Pierre, falls ill. She may even be purposely giving Pierre a treatment that adds to his misery. After Marcel returns from a concert tour and Romaine stoops to a new low in abandoning Pierre for an assignation, she reconsiders the affair and takes a drastic step. Three years later, Pierre pays Marcel a visit to demand the truth. Will the jealous and aggrieved Marcel manage a convincing performance?

Paul is young, just demobbed from national service in the French Army, and disillusioned with civilian life. As his girlfriend builds herself a career as a pop singer, Paul becomes more isolated from his friends and peers ('the children of Marx and Coca Cola', as the credits announce) and their social and emotional politics.

A disturbed actress seduces a photographer; they begin an affair. As her mental and physical health deteriorates, important questions are raised on love, caring, relationships, responsibility and moral choice, reaching the inevitable climax.

1968 and 1969 in Paris during and after the student and trade-union revolt. 20-year-old François is a poet dodging military service. He takes to the barricades, but won't throw a Molotov cocktail at the police. He smokes opium and talks about revolution with his friend Antoine, who has an inheritance and a flat where François can stay. François meets Lilie, a sculptor who works at a foundry to support herself, and they fall in love. A year passes; François continues to write, talk, smoke, and be with Lilie. Opportunities come to Lilie: what will she and François do?

Maurice Pialat's portrait of contemporary France mocks prosperity as a substitute for social and sexual revolution. Nelly abandons her bourgeois friends and a steady relationship for the unemployed layabout Loulou, whose charms include focusing his energy into sex.

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