FRANCE AUTHOR · FICTION · TRANSLATIONS INTO ENGLISH
Colette
Also known as: Colette, Sidonie-Gabrielle Colette
Sidonie-Gabrielle Colette was born in Saint-Sauveur-en-Puisaye, Yonne, in the Burgundy Region of France. In 1893 she married Henri Gauthier-Villars, a famous wit known as "Willy", who was 15 years her senior. Her first books, the Claudine series, were published under the pen name of her husband, "Willy". In 1906 she left her husband and lived for a time with the American writer and salonist Natalie Barney. The two had a short affair, and remained friends until Colette's death. She then started working in the music halls of Paris with Mathilde de Morny, the Marquise de Belbeuf, with whom she became romantically involved. In 1907, they performed together in a pantomime entitled Rêve d'Égypte at the Moulin Rouge. Their onstage kiss nearly caused a riot, which the police were called in to suppress. As a result of this scandal, further performances of Rêve d'Égypte were banned and Colette and de Morny were no longer able to openly live together, though their relationship continued a total of five years. She was also involved with the Italian writer Gabriele D'Annunzio during this time. In 1912 she married Henri de Jouvenel, the editor of the newspaper Le Matin. She had one daughter. In 1914, she was asked to write a ballet for the Opéra de Paris, but the composer Maurice Ravel convinced her to rework it into an opera, L'Enfant et les sortilèges, which opened after the war in 1925. During World War I she converted her husband's estate into a hospital for the wounded. After the war, her writing career became more successful after the publication of her novel Chéri (1920). She divorced her husband after having an affair with her stepson. She married Maurice Goudeket in 1935 and changed her name to Sidonie Goudeket. Maurice Goudeket published a book about her called Close to Colette: An Intimate Portrait of a Woman of Genius. She published around 50 novels in total, many with autobiographical elements.
Maria Concepcion walked carefully, keeping to the middle of the white dusty road, where the maguey thorns and the treacherous curved spines of organ cactus had not gathered so profusely.
— from Short stories
Most acclaimed
The other woman
Elizabeth O'Connell has survived one of the worst betrayals a wife can imagine. Finding out that she wasn't the only woman in her husband's life meant the end of her marriage and a year of personal hell. Now she's focusing on her new business and raising her two kids.Carter Hudson isn't part of her plan. When he's introduced to Liz by well-meaning friends, her dislike is instant. But as she spends time with him, Liz realizes she likes having Carter in her life-more than likes it. However, Carter has secrets in his past that he can't seem to escape, secrets that apparently involve a woman. Liz is sure of one thing-she'll never be "the other woman" again!
Short stories
For over three decades, Reynolds Price has been one of America's most distinguished writers, in a career that has been remarkable both for its virtuosity and for the variety of literary forms he has embraced. Now he shows himself as much a master of the story as he is of the novel, in a volume that presents fifty stories, including two early collections - The Names and Faces of Heroes and Permanent Errors - as well as more than two dozen new stories that have never been gathered together before. In his introduction, Mr. Price explains how, after the publication of his first two collections, he wrote no new stories for almost twenty years. "But once I needed - for unknown reasons in a new and radically altered life - to return to the story, it opened before me like a new chance...A collection like this then," he adds, "...will show a writer's pre-occupations in ways the novel severely rations (novels are partly made for that purpose - the release from self, long flights through the Other). John Keats's assertion that 'the excellence of every Art is its intensity' has served as a license and standard for me. From the start my stories were driven by heat - passion and mystery, often passion for the mystery I've found in particular rooms and spaces and the people they threaten or shelter - and my general aim is the transfer of a spell of keen witness, perceived by the reader as warranted in character and act.". There is, indeed, much for the reader to "witness" here of passion and mystery, of character and act. And the variety of stories - many of them set in Reynolds Price's native North Carolina, but a surprising number set in distant parts: Jerusalem in "An Early Christmas," the American Southwest in "Walking Lessons," and a number in Europe - will astonish even his most devoted readers. In short, The Collected Stories of Reynolds Price is as deeply rewarding a book as any he has yet published.
Prentice Hall Literature -- Platinum
A novel is an extended work of narrative fiction usually written in prose and published as a book. The word derives from the Italian: novella for 'new', 'news', or 'short story (of something new)', itself from the Latin: novella, a singular noun use of the neuter plural of novellus, diminutive of novus, meaning 'new'. According to Margaret Doody, the novel has "a continuous and comprehensive history of about two thousand years", with its origins in the Ancient Greek and Roman novel, Medieval chivalric romance, and the tradition of the Italian Renaissance novella. The ancient romance form was revived by Romanticism, in the historical romances of Walter Scott and the Gothic novel. Some novelists, including Nathaniel Hawthorne, Herman Melville, Ann Radcliffe, and John Cowper Powys, preferred the term romance.