"Available in English for the first time, the latest astonishing, bestselling, and award-winning book by Annie Ernaux. The Years is a personal narrative of the period 1941 to 2006 told through the lens of memory, impressions past and present -- even projections into the future -- photos, books, songs, radio, television and decades of advertising, headlines, contrasted with intimate conflicts and writing notes from six decades of diaries. Local dialect,...

"In Portrait of the Artist as a Young Woman, Annie Ernaux revisits the night 50 years earlier when she found herself submerged and controlled by another person's desire and willpower. It is the summer of 1958, the year she turned 18. And then the man she gave herself to moves on. She has submitted her will to his, and now she finds that she is a slave without a master. Now, fifty years later, she realizes she can obliterate the intervening years and...

"The Confessions of Jean-Jacques Rousseau" is a one-of-a-kind autobiography. Up until its publication in 1782, only two autobiographies had ever been written, and both were written by devout religious saints. Highly scandalous yet witty in nature, calling Rousseau's work an "autobiography" is a loose categorization of the text, as many of the stories and tales have been proven false, yet Rousseau told the truth about the spirit of his life through...

"A Woman’s Story is Annie Ernaux’s "deeply affecting account of mothers and daughters, youth and age, and dreams and reality" (Kirkus Reviews). Upon her mother’s death from Alzheimer’s, Ernaux embarks on a daunting journey back through time, as she seeks to "capture the real woman, the one who existed independently from me, born on the outskirts of a small Normandy town, and who died in the geriatric ward of a hospital...

"A book that will leave no one indifferent, and no one affected in quite the same way." -New York Times A superb autobiography by one of the great literary figures of the twentieth century Simone de Beauvoir's Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter offers an intimate picture of growing up in a bourgeois French family, rebelling as an adolescent against the conventional expectations of her class, and striking out on her own with an intellectual and existential...

The Confessions is an autobiographical work of Jean-Jacques Rousseau which initiated modern autobiography. Covering the first fifty-three years of Rousseau's life the book provides an account of the experiences that shaped his personality and ideas.

"The Young Man is Annie Ernaux's account of her passionate love affair with A., a man some 30 years younger, when she was in her fifties. The relationship pulls her back to memories of her own youth and at the same time leaves her feeling ageless, outside of time- together with a sense that she is living her life backwards. Amidst talk of having a child together, she feels time running its course, and menopause approaching. The Young Man recalls Ernaux...

"My father tried to kill my mother one Sunday in June, in the early afternoon," begins Shame, the probing story of the twelve-year-old girl who will become the author herself, and the single traumatic memory that will echo and resonate throughout her life. With the emotionally rich voice of great fiction and the diamond-sharp analytical eye of a scientist, Annie Ernaux provides a powerful reflection on experience and the power of violent memory to...

When Albert Camus died in a car crash in January 1960 he was only 46 years old already a winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature and a world figure author of the enigmatic The Stranger, the fable called The Plague, but also of the combative The Rebel which attacked the 'politically correct' among his con-temporaries. Thanks to his early literary achievement, his work for the under-ground newspaper Combat and his editorship of that daily in its Post-Liberation...

Extrait : "A tue-tête et massacrant le latin avec une frénésie de sauvage, Aldebert, le vieux chantre, en réponse au prêtre qui vient d'entonner le Credo, hurle : "Patrem omnipotentem creatorem..." J'étais parti en voyage, par la pensée. J'étais déjà loin, très loin. Je reviens. Je suis à ma place du dimanche. J'assiste à la messe paroissiale dans la vieille église d'Albas, mon village natal..."