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Philippe Laburthe-Tolra
The Standard of the Prophet
Philippe Laburthe-Tolra presents us with a great ethnographical and historical novel in search of black Islam of the early 1850s. His wandering narrative of love affairs, political intrigue and religious mysticism revives the culture of a people before colonization.
Manès Sperber
And the Bush Became Ashes
Novelist, essayist, and philosopher Manès Sperber is a major witness of the twentieth century. Born in 1905, he became the closest disciple of Adler, a Viennese psychologist known for his rejection of psychoanalysis. Driven from Berlin by the Nazis in 1933, he definitely broke with communism during the 1937 Moscow trials and established himself in the Parisian intellectual circles of Malraux, Camus, Koestler and Aron. Recognized in German countries as a major writer, his work has received many literary prizes. By publishing his three novels in one newly translated volume, Odile Jecob proposes a reference edition of this epic.
Manès Sperber
Being Jewish
A non-practicing Jew, Manès Sperber learned to read the Bible at the age of three and continued to re-read it until the end of his life. Neither religious, nor a militant Zionist, nor an aethiest, nor aligned with any cultural Judaism, he professes as his only faith a "religion of good memory." His is a Judaism lived as humanism and as an ethic, as a refusal of all idolatry, of exclusion of others, and a constant combat against hate of any kind. It is a profound attachment to the Israelite nation and a prudent attitude towards the State of Israel that Sperber illustrates in these brilliant essays prefaced by Elie Weisel, where analysis of Jewish thought and identity walk hand in hand with the eternal question: Why anti-semitism?
André Miquel
Two Stories of Love (Work of the Collège de France) From Majnûn to Tristan
How does absolute passion express itself in Middle-Eastern and in Western societies?
Patrick Lemoine
Right of Sanctuaries
This book is a detailed reconstruction of daily life at the Asile du Vinatier, a psychiatric institution near Lyon, from 1937 to 1945, a period marked by the earliest institutional attempts to treat mental illness. It was also the time when the blindness of administrative rules, the meanness of politicians, and the indifference of society at large resulted in a collective drama: the gradual extermination of mental patients. Patrick Lemoine is a psychiatrist and department head at the Hôpital du Vinatier in Lyon.
Gérard Apfeldorfer
Madness Multiplied by 3
Everything seems to be going smoothly for Doctor Crissie Weil, a dynamic psychiatrist who treats her patients through the Internet -until a mad lawyer moves into her building, steals Crissies husband and tries to sabotage her career. Crissie cannot accept such behaviour without fighting back. Quickly, the two female characters of this psychological thriller are locked in a love-hate relationship, on the very brink of madness. In the novel, we are made to reflect on the future of psychiatry, which is gradually being revolutionised by the Internet. In the United States, Britain and Italy, psychotherapy is now readily available on-line, and such services are also being developed in France. Gérard Apfeldorfer is a psychiatrist and psychotherapist.
Jean-François Peyret, Jean-Didier Vincent
Faust A Natural History
It all began in July 1995, when theatre director Jean-François Peyret met with biologist Jean-Didier Vincent, in the latters lab. The intellectual exchange and friendship that developed from that meeting resulted, several years later, in a theatrical production based on a free adaptation of Goethes Faust, until then deemed unperformable. In this book, they look back on their production of Faust, and take stock of their experience. Their book can be regarded as a novel, a dialogue, a confession, a reinterpretation of Faust, or simply a mind game. Quietly and without ostentation, Peyret offers the reader a brilliant examination of the theatre today, and Vincent upholds his views more freely and strongly than ever before.
Daniel Sibony
Marrakech, Departure Point
During a weekend trip to Marrakech — his hometown — a novelist has a love affair that becomes intertwined with reminiscences of his childhood.
David Ignatius
The Increment
After tackling terrorism in his previous novel, David Ignatius continues to reinvent the contemporary spy thriller.
Antoine Compagnon
Proust, Memory and Literature
“Proust and memory”: a cliché of literary criticism re-examined in a radical new manner.