Jules Renard

Louise Bogan

Elizabeth Roget

"Directly, or indirectly, Renard is at the origin of contemporary literature."--Jean-Paul Sartre Spanning from 1887 to a month before his death in 1910, The Journal of Jules Renard is a unique autobiographical masterpiece that, though celebrated abroad, is largely undiscovered in the United States.

The Journal of Jules Renard

Une mère méchante et comédienne, un père inattentif et absent, tel est le foyer dans lequel Poil de Carotte vit une enfance tourmentée. Mais le héros de Jules Renard n'est pas seulement un enfant martyr, il est aussi victime de sa trop grande sensibilité, de son orgueil, de son défaitisme précoce à l'égard des rapports humains. Le style de l'auteur est à la fois rafraÎchissant et cruel. Adoptant le point de vue apparemment naïf de l'enfant, il brosse un tableau insolent des relations familiales.

Poil de Carotte

Yazmak Üzerine Notlar

Sarah Manguso

Throughout his journal, Renard develops not only his artistic convictions but also his humanity as he reflects on the nineteenth-century French literary and art scene, and on the emergence of his position as an important novelist and playwright in that world. Through a mix of aphorisms and observations, short scenes, gossip, jokes, and meditations on life and art, Renard portrays the details of his personal life—his love interests, his position as a socialist mayor of Chitry, the suicide of his father—that often appear in his work. In recent years, the fragmented memoir has grown in popularity, and there’s been a resurgence of diary as an artistic form. Once again, Jean Paul Sartre’s assessment that “directly, or indirectly, Renard is at the origin of contemporary literature” rings true. In a new introduction, Sarah Manguso—whose groundbreaking nonfiction incorporates elements of diary and aphorism—both contextualizes and celebrates Renard’s seminal journal.

Diario 1887-1910

Félix Vallotton

seguito dalla, Commedia omonima

Pel di carota

Carrot Top

Jules Renard’s Nature Stories is a deliciously whimsical classic from the era of the great French Postimpressionist painters. Renard mingles wonder and humor in a series of miniature portraits of subjects drawn from the natural world: dogs, cats, pigs, roses, snails, trees and birds of all sorts, humans of course, and even a humble potato. Ranging from a sentence to several pages, Renard’s sketches are masterpieces of compression and description, capturing both appearance and behavior through a choice of details that makes the familiar unfamiliar and yet surprisingly true to life. Renard’s animals not only feel but speak, and one species, the swallow, even writes Hebrew. These creatures fascinate Renard, who in turn makes them fascinating to us, instilling us with the sense that everything that has a life and grows in the hand of nature is to be respected, and that every creature and being is as individual as it is interrelated. In Douglas Parmée’s inspired new translation, Renard’s wonderful evocations of the natural world come to life as never before in English.

Nature Stories

Home-made Bread, Comedy by Jules Renard - Translated by L. A. Loiseaux

Solomon Alhadef Rhodes

Abram Taffel

Edited, with Exercises, Notes and Vocabulary

Jules Renard's Poil de Carotte

Poil De Carotte

Carrots, by jules renard

Natural History [of] Jules Renard

Spanning 1887 to a month before his death in 1910, The Journal of Jules Renard is a unique autobiographical masterpiece that, though celebrated abroad and cited as a principle influence by writers as varying as Somerset Maugham and Donald Barthelme, remains more of a cult object in the United States. Throughout his journal, Renard develops not only his artistic convictions but also his humanity as he reflects on the nineteenth-century French literary and art scene, and on the emergence of his position as an important novelist and playwright in that world. Through a mix of aphorisms and observations, short scenes, gossip, jokes, and meditations on life and art, Renard portrays the details of his personal life?his love interests, his position as a socialist mayor of Chitry, the suicide of his father?that often appear in his work. In recent years, the fragmented memoir has grown in popularity, and there’s been a resurgence of diary as an artistic form. Once again, Jean Paul Sartre’s assessment that “directly, or indirectly, Renard is at the origin of contemporary literature” rings true. In a new introduction, Sarah Manguso—whose groundbreaking nonfiction incorporates elements of diary and aphorism—both contextualizes and celebrates Renard’s seminal journal.

A delightful variation on the long tradition of bestiary writing, Jules Renard's short verse and prose poems have captured the imagination of readers and artists since they were originally written in 1894, with Ravel famously setting five of them to music. Presented in a new version by acclaimed translator Richard Stokes, this sumptuously produced volume will captivate and enchant new generations of readers the world over.

Histoires Naturelles

The natural world in all its richness, glimpsed variously in the house, the barnyard, and the garden, in ponds and streams, and at large in the woods and the fields, including old friends like the dog, the cat, the cow, and the pig, along with more unusual and sometimes alarming characters such as the weasel, the dragonfly, snakes of several sorts, and even a whale, not to mention ants in their seeming infinitude and a single humble potato—all these and more are the subjects of what may well be the most deft and delightful book of literary miniatures ever written. In Jules Renard’s world, plants and animals not only feel but speak (one species, the swallow, appears to write Hebrew), and yet, for all the anthropomorphic wit and whimsy the author indulges in, they guard their mystery too. Sly, funny, and touching, Nature Stories, here beautifully rendered into English by Douglas Parmée and accompanied by the wonderful ink-brush images of Pierre Bonnard with which the book was originally published, is a literary classic of inexhaustible freshness.

Pierre Hoy

Pierre Hoy dévoile dans ce livre la galerie de ses animaux " malades " de la ferme. C'est par la sculpture qu'il aborda son travail d'aquarelliste, s'inspirant des plus grands tels Pompon, Bugatti et autre Barry. Alors pour notre plaisir, défilent sous nos yeux, lapins, poules, vaches, moutons et dindes, chiens et chats, ânes et chevaux... Et comme tous, semblent complices, ils se montrent tout en nous observant, ce qui fit écrire un jour à Elias Canetti : " Chaque fois qu'on observe un animal, on a l'impression qu'il y a là un être humain en train de se foutre de nous ". Les textes de Jules Renard apportent une douce musique, à ces illustrations si vivantes.

Jules Renard

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