Patrick McGuinness

The socialist state is in crisis, the shops are empty and old Bucharest vanishes daily under the onslaught of Ceaucescu's demolition gangs. Paranoia is pervasive and secret service men lurk in the shadows. In this book, Patrick McGuinness creates an absorbing sense of time and place as the city struggles to survive this intense moment in history. He evokes a world of extremity and ravaged beauty from the viewpoint of an outsider uncomfortably, and often dangerously, close to the eye of the storm as the regime of 1980s Romania crumbles to a bloody end.

The Last Hundred Days

"A significant literary achievement that also happens to be a terrific page-turner."- Jonathan Lee In the aftermath of Brexit, the body of a young woman is found by the river Thames, and a neighbor, a retired teacher from Chapleton College, is arrested. An eccentric loner-intellectual, shy, a fastidious dresser with expensive tastes-he is the perfect candidate for a media monstering. In custody he is interviewed by two detectives: the circumspect Ander, and his workaday foil, Gary. Ander is particularly watchful now, because the man across the table is someone he knows-someone he hasn't seen in nearly thirty years. Determined to salvage the truth as ex-pupils and colleagues line up against the accused, he must face a story from decades back, from his own time as a Chapleton student, at the peak of anti-Irish sentiment. With the momentum of classic crime fiction, Throw Me to the Wolves follows two mysteries-one unfolding in the media-saturated present, and the other bubbling up from the abusive past of the 1980s English school system. Beautifully written and psychologically acute, it is a novel about memory and childhood, prescient and piercingly funny, as wise as it is tragic.

Throw Me to the Wolves

Émile Zola

Helen Constantine

An ambitious and unscrupulous priest arrives in the provincial town of Plassans, intent on conquering its political and social life. His arrival has profound consequences for the Mouret family, whose lives are turned upside down. This is the fourth novel in Zola's Rougon-Macquart series, and the first modern translation for more than fifty years.

The Conquest of Plassans

Winner of the 2014 Duff Cooper Prize Winner of the 2015 Welsh Book of the Year Award Shortlisted for the 2015 James Tait Black Memorial Prize Shortlisted for the 2015 PEN Ackerley prize Longlisted for the 2014 Thwaites Wainwright Prize Let me take you down the thin cobblestoned streets of the Belgian border town of Bouillon. Let me take you down the alleys that lead into its past. To a town peopled with eccentrics, full of charm, menace and wonder. To the days before television, to Marie Bodard’s sweetshop, to the Nazi occupation and unexpected collaborators. To a place where one neighbour murders another over the misfortune of pigs and potatoes. To the hotel where the French poet Verlaine his lover Rimbaud, holed up whilst on the run from family, creditors and the law. This exquisite meditation on place, time and memory is an illicit peek into other people’s countries, into the spaces they have populated with their memories, and might just make you revisit your own in a new and surprising way.

A Journey into Memory

Other People's Countries

From Colette to Marie Ndiaye

Penguin Book of French Short Stories : 2

C. H. Sisson

Charlie Louth

Mcguinness Louth

C. H. Sisson Reader

Son 100 Gun

A major new celebration of the French short story across the twentieth century 'A story? No. No stories, never again...' The short story has a rich tradition in French literature. This feast of an anthology celebrates its most famous practitioners, as well as newly translated writers ready for rediscovery. Here are fables, puzzles, fairy tales, war stories and family histories, testing and expanding the boundaries of the form. They are stories about the self and the other, the centre and the periphery, experimental and existential, real and surreal. The second volume takes the reader through the tumultuous twentieth century in the company of writers including Simone de Beauvoir and Maryse Condé, Patrick Modiano and Virginie Despentes, covering world wars, revolutions, and the horrors of the motorway service station. Along the way we meet electronic brains, she-wolves, a sadistic Cinderella, ancestors, infidels, dissatisfied housewives and lonely ambassadors, all clamouring to be heard. Funny, devastating and fresh at every turn, this is the place to start for lovers of French literature, new and old. Edited and with an introduction by Patrick McGuinness, academic, writer and translator.

From Colette to Marie NDiaye

The Penguin Book of French Short Stories: 2

Poetry and Radical Politics in fin de siecle France explores the relations between poetry and politics in France in the last decade of the 19th century. The period covers perhaps the most important developments in modern French poetry: from the post-Commune climate that spawned the 'decadent' movement, through to the (allegedly) ivory-towered aestheticism of Mallarme and the Symbolists. In terms of French politics, history and culture, the period was no less dramatic with the legacy of the Commune, the political and financial instability that followed, the anarchist campaigns, the Dreyfus affair, and the growth of 'Action francaise'. Patrick McGuinness argues that the anarchist politics of many Symbolist poets is a reaction to their own isolation, and to poetry's anxious relations with the public: too 'difficult' be be widely read, Symbolist poets react to the loss of poetry's centrality among the arts by delegating their radicalism to prose: they can call, in prose, for the overthrow of the state and support anarchist bombers, while at the same time writing poems about dribbling fountains and dazzling sunsets for each other. This study demonstrates the connections between the anti-Symbolist reaction of the ecole romane of 1891 (in which Charles Maurras first made his name), and the far-right cultural politics of Action francaise in the early 20th century. It also redefines many of the debates about late 19th-century French poetry by putting an argument forward for the political engagement(s) of the Symbolists while the French 'intellectuel' as a national icon was being forged. McGuinness insists on profound continuities between the end of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th in terms of cultural politics, literary debate, and poetic theory, and shows how politics is to be found in unexpected ways in the least political-seeming literature of the period. The famous line by Peguy, that everything begins in mysticism and ends in politics, has an appealing sweep and grace. This book has its own more modest and specific version of a similar journey: it begins in Mallarme and ends in Maurras.

From Anarchism to Action Française

Poetry and Radical Politics in Fin de Siècle France

This is a comparative and interdisciplinary book exploring a variety of perspectives on the artistic culture of France, and its neighbours, in the period 1870-1914. Part One centres on France, and assembles essays on the prose, poetry and painting of Symbolism and Decadence, on avant-garde dance and performance, on women's writing and on early cinema. Part Two explores the relations between France and several cultures in which the debt to France was amply and originally repaid-ranging from the Anglo-Celtic "Rhymers' Club" to the Italian "Crepusculari". The essays consistently point beyond the late nineteenth-century and into the twentieth, as they explore the multiple beginnings-as well as the false starts-that characterize the period. All foreign language quotations are translated.

French and European Perspectives

Symbolism, Decadence and the Fin de Siècle

"A significant literary achievement that also happens to be a terrific page-turner."- Jonathan Lee "Elegantly written, darkly entertaining."- John Banville "An extraordinary writer of great compassion . . . Stunning."- Denise Mina In the aftermath of Brexit, the body of a young woman is found by the river Thames, and a neighbor, a retired teacher from Chapleton College, is arrested. An eccentric loner-intellectual, shy, a fastidious dresser with expensive tastes-he is the perfect candidate for a media monstering. In custody he is interviewed by two detectives: the circumspect Ander, and his workaday foil, Gary. Ander is particularly watchful now, because the man across the table is someone he knows-someone he hasn't seen in nearly thirty years. Determined to salvage the truth as ex-pupils and colleagues line up against the accused, he must face a story from decades back, from his own time as a Chapleton student, at the peak of anti-Irish sentiment. With the momentum of classic crime fiction, Throw Me to the Wolves follows two mysteries-one unfolding in the media-saturated present, and the other bubbling up from the abusive past of the 1980s English school system. Beautifully written and psychologically acute, it is a novel about memory and childhood, prescient and piercingly funny, as wise as it is tragic.

Once the gleaming "Paris of the East," Bucharest in 1989 is a world of corruption and paranoia, in thrall to the repressive regime of Nicolae Ceau?escu. Old landmarks are falling to demolition crews, grocery shelves are empty, and informants are everywhere. Into this state of crisis, a young British man arrives to take a university post he never interviewed for. He is taken under the wing of Leo O'Heix, a colleague and master of the black market, and falls for the sleek Celia, daughter of a party apparatchik. Yet he soon learns that in this society, friendships are compromised, and loyalty is never absolute. And as the regime's authority falters, he finds himself uncomfortably, then dangerously, close to the eye of the storm. By turns thrilling and satirical, studded with poetry and understated revelation, The Last Hundred Days captures the commonplace terror of Cold War Eastern Europe. Patrick McGuinness's first novel is unforgettable.

A Novel

Real Oxford shows that there's more than dreaming spires and bicycles to the city. The grand buildings of the university are here, but Patrick McGuinness charts a personal history of the place which radiates into the suburbs and into the everyday of people's lives, past and present. Surprising, quirky, Real Oxford presents the city anew.

Real Oxford

Stéphane Mallarmé

In October 1879 Stephane Mallarme's eight-year-old son Anatole died after several months of illness. Mallarme (1842-1898), the great poet of French Symbolism, heir of Baudelaire and one of the founders of modern poetry, made notes towards a poem that was to become the Tombeau d'Anatole - Anatole's Tomb. The poem was never written, and Mallarme makes no reference to the project in his correspondence. When they were first published in French in 1961, the notes revealed a largely unknown side of Mallarme, which even now disturbs the idea of the poet of pristine impersonality and detachment. In the Tombeau d'Anatole he expresses his 'fury against the formless'; the consolations - and inconsolability - of bereavement.

For Anatole's Tomb

From the troubadours of the Middle Ages to the titans of modern poetry, from Rabelais and Ronsard to Jacques R�da and Yves Bonnefoy, French Poetry offers English-speaking readers a one-volume introduction to a rich and varied tradition. Here are today's rising stars mingling with the great writers of past centuries: La Fontaine, Villon, du Bellay, Christine de Pisan, Marguerite de Navarre, Louise Lab�, Hugo, Baudelaire, Rimbaud, Verlaine, Mallarm�, Apollinaire, and many more. Here, too, are representatives of the modern francophone world, encompassing Lebanese, Tunisian, Senegalese and Belgian poets, including such notable writers as L�opold Senghor, V�nus Khoury-Ghata and H�di Kaddour. Finally, this anthology showcases a wide range of the English language's finest translators - including such renowned poet-translators as Ezra Pound, John Ashbery, Marianne Moore and Derek Mahon - in a dazzling tribute to the splendours of French poetry.

From Medieval to Modern Times

French Poetry

Philippe Buttner

Katia Poletti

Christian Rumelin

The Swiss artist Felix Vallotton (1865-1925) was born in Lausanne, but spent much of his working life in France. Closely associated with Pierre Bonnard and Edouard Vuillard, and a fellow member of the avant-garde group Les Nabis, Vallotton has nonetheless sometimes been overshadowed by his more famous contemporaries. Although he produced some of his most important work in Paris in the 1890s, his original and innovative approach persisted throughout his career. Texts by leading authorities on the artist look at his life, work and reception. Generously illustrated throughout with the finest exemplars of the artist's paintings and prints, this book accompanies a new presentation of Vallotton's oeuvre that aims to re-evaluate his output and legacy, and includes some works never seen before. AUTHORS: Dita Amory is curator at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, and author of Madame Cézanne (2014). Philippe Buttner is Keeper of the Collection at the Kunsthaus Zurich. Ann Dumas is curator at the Royal Academy of Arts, London. Patrick McGuinness is a novelist, critic and poet, and Professor of French and Comparative Literature at the University of Oxford. Katia Poletti is Director of the Vallotton Foundation. Christian Rumelin is Keeper of Prints and Drawings at the Cabinet d'arts graphiques du Musee d'art et d'histoire in Geneva. Belinda Thomson is an honorary fellow at the University of Edinburgh and an independent art historian. SELLING POINT: * An important study of the work of Felix Vallotton, a prominent member of Les Nabis and a contemporary of Bonnard and Vuillard 150 colour images

Patrick McGuinness

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