BIOGRAPHY · CRITICISM AND INTERPRETATION
Pierre Brunel
Not to be confused with literary critic, Pierre Brunel (1939-) Amazon bio - "Pierre Brunel, born in Montreal in 1931, obtained a B.Sc. in biology from the Université de Montréal in 1962. His study of amphipod Crustacea in Baie des Chaleurs, started in 1954, led to an M.A. from the University of Toronto, then to employment by the Station de Biologie marine de Grande-Rivière (Gaspé) (Quebec Department of Fisheries). In 1966 he moved to teaching in the Department of Biological Sciences of the University of Montreal and obtained his Ph.D. in 1968 from McGill University. In 1970 he joined ex-colleagues from McGill University to establish the Groupe interuniversitaire de Recherches océanographiques du Québec (GIROQ), where he sat on the executive board until 1989. His research has dealt mostly with the ecology of marine bottom communities, mostly in the Gulf and Estuary of the St. Lawrence, but also in the Saguenay Fjord, the Bay of Fundy, and Hudson Bay, as well as amphipod taxonomy and cod feeding and migrations. Since 1990 he has redirected his activities more toward biodiversity and saving research collections, especially through the establishment with colleagues of the Québec Biodiversity Network."
DU CROISY. Seigneur La Grange... LA GRANGE. Yes? DU CROISY. A word with you; if you can speak without laughing.
— from Don Juan, 1978
Most acclaimed
Hugo
Hugo, the son of a charcoal maker, is an independent little fellow who lives deep in the woods. When he isn’t learning from spiders, he goes to school and promptly visits with each pupil asking about their families. After that, he settles down – to a nap. One day, he and his friend Josephine decide to earn some money and come up with ingenious schemes ranging from mushroom harvests to delivering mail on a towering antique bicycle. Into their cheerful world comes a strange, aloof girl whose icy manner is resented by her classmates. How Hugo and Josephine finally recognize her pathetic loneliness and draw her out of her shell makes a profound and touching story. - From Back Cover
Rimbaud
1985
"The enfant terrible of French letters, Jean-Nicholas-Arthur Rimbaud (1854-91) was a defiant and precocious youth who wrote some of the most remarkable prose and poetry of the nineteenth century, all before leaving the world of verse by the age of twenty-one. More than a century after his death, the young rebel-poet continues to appeal to modern readers as much for his turbulent life as for his poetry; his stormy affair with fellow poet Paul Verlaine and his nomadic adventures in eastern Africa are as iconic as his hallucinatory poems and symbolist prose. The first translation of the poet's complete works when it was published in 1966, Rimbaud: Complete Works, Selected Letters introduced a new generation of Americans to the alienated genius - among them the Doors's lead singer Jim Morrison, who wrote to translator Wallace Fowlie to thank him for rendering the poems accessible to those who "don't read French that easily." Forty years later, the book remains the only side-by-side bilingual edition of Rimbaud's complete poetic works. Thoroughly revising Fowlie's edition, Seth Whidden has made changes on virtually every page, correcting errors, reordering poems, adding previously omitted versions of poems and some letters, and updating the text to reflect current scholarship; left in place are Fowlie's literal and respectful translations of Rimbaud's complex and nontraditional verse. Whidden also provides a foreword that considers the heritage of Fowlie's edition and adds a bibliography that acknowledges relevant books that have appeared since the original publication. On its fortieth anniversary, Rimbaud remains the most authoritative - and now, completely up-to-date - edition of the young master's entire poetic ouvre."
Don Juan
1978
"In Don Juan, Peter Handke offers his unique take on history's best-known lover. Don Juan's story - "his own version"--Is filtered through the consciousness of an anonymous narrator, a failed innkeeper and chef, into whose solitude Don Juan bursts one day. On each day of the week that follows, Don Juan describes the adventures he experienced on that same day a week earlier. The adventures are erotic, but Handke's Don Juan is more pursued than pursuer. What makes his accounts riveting are the remarkable evocations of places and people, and the nature of his narration. This is, above all, a book about storytelling and its ability to burst the ordinary boundaries of time and space." "In this brief and wry volume, Peter Handke conjures images and depicts the subtleties of human interaction with an unforgettable vividness. Along the way, he offers a sharp commentary on many features of contemporary life."--Jacket.