European Fiction

From a variety of masterfully rendered perspectives, these six stories depict people at painful odds with the world around them. A wife can only surrender to a desert night by betraying her husband. An artist struggles to honor his own aspirations as well as society's expectations of him. A missionary brutally converted to the worship of a tribal fetish is left with but an echo of his identity. Whether set in North Africa, Paris, or Brazil, the stories in Exile and the Kingdom are probing portraits of spiritual exile, and man's perpetual search for an inner kingdom.

Améliorez votre anglais en écoutant de la littérature !C'est notre promesse, notre engagement. Retrouvez 5 aventures du plus célèbre des voyous au grand cœur, le célèbre Arsène Lupin. Chaque histoire est interprétée d'abord en version française, puis elle est suivie à chaque fois de la même histoire interprétée en anglais : L'arrestation d'Arsène Lupin/The arrest of Arsène Lupin ; Arsène Lupin en prison/Arsène Lupin in prison ; L'Évasion d'Arsène Lupin/The escape of Arsène Lupin ; Le Mystérieux voyageur/The mysterious traveller.

"Les Rêvries du promeneur solitaire" de Jean-Jacques Rousseau, promenades un à cinq : "L'habitude de rentrer en moi-même me fit perdre le sentiment et presque le souvenir de mes maux, j'appris ainsi par ma propre expérience que la source du vrai bonheur est en nous, et qu'il ne dépend pas des hommes de rendre vraiment misérable celui qui sait vouoir être heureux."

This is the hauntingly romantic story of Marguerite Gautier, a Parisian courtesan who falls in love with a young man of modest means. Set in the glittering mid-19th century of the French Empire, it evokes scenes of sumptuous feasts and riotous entertainments amid the swirling milieu of sophisticated Parisian society. The story begins when the narrator, Armand Duval, tells how he met the beautiful young temptress at a theatrical performance.

Agnes, una muchacha peculiar que parece no rendir cuentas a nadie y que es capaz de crear misteriosos remedios con sencillas combinaciones de plantas, es la comidilla de Stratford, un pequeño pueblo de Inglaterra. Cuando conoce a un joven preceptor de latín igual de extraordinario que ella, se da cuenta enseguida de que están llamados a formar una familia. Pero su matrimonio se verá puesto a prueba, primero por sus parientes y después por una inesperada desgracia.

Arthur Ransome (1884-1967) wrote Old Peter's Russian Tales while he was in Russia during the First World War, prior to becoming a war correspondent for The Manchester Guardian. There are 22 stories in all and are told by Old Peter at the behest of his grandchildren, Ivan and Maroosia, in a cozy log cabin in the middle of the forest. These are delightful re-tellings in Ransome's own words of Russian folk tales, and include stories such as "The Little Snow Girl", "Baba Yaga", "Frost", and "Salt".

“I speak from my difference,” wrote Pedro Lemebel, an openly queer writer and artist living through Chile’s AIDS epidemic and the collapse of the Pinochet dictatorship. In brilliantly innovative essays—known as crónicas—that combine memoir, reportage, fiction, history, and poetry, he brought visibility and dignity to sexual minorities, the poor, and the powerless.

One of the best-known collections of W. B. Yeats' prose, The Celtic Twilight explores the old connection between the Irish people and the magical world of fairies. Yeats, by traveling the land in the early 20th century and talking to the common people about their experiences with the creatures, yielded a colorful overview of Celtic fairy folklore.

In the years leading up to 1606, since the death of Queen Elizabeth and the arrival in England of her successor, King James of Scotland, Shakespeare's great productivity had ebbed, and it may have seemed to some that his prolific genius was a thing of the past. But that year, at age 42, he found his footing again, finishing a play he had begun the previous autumn - King Lear - then writing two other great tragedies, Macbeth and Antony and Cleopatra.

Sept jours d'idylle... Il aura suffi d'une semaine pour que s'inverse le cours de l'existence monotone de Sarah. Depuis qu'elle a rencontré Eddie sur une petite route de campagne anglaise, la jeune femme est certaine qu'un bonheur sans nuages les attend. Sa vie débute enfin. Le jour où il lui annonce qu'il doit s'absenter pour un voyage prévu de longue date, Sarah n'a aucune inquiétude. Mais le temps passe et Eddie ne revient pas. La laisse sans nouvelles. Ne répond plus à ses messages. Rien.

"The Ingenious Gentleman Don Quixote of La Mancha", or more simply "Don Quixote", is one of the most influential works of literature from a Spanish author. It is one of the earliest canonical novels, and is regularly cited as the best work of fiction ever published. A nameless hidalgo read so many chivalric romances that he loses his sanity and decides to set out into the world as a knight, to bring justice under the name Don Quixote. The delusional hidalgo then recruits a simple farmer, Sancho Panza, whose unique wit proves a marvelous addition to Don Quixote's idealistic bouts.

Leo Vincey is haunted by a goddess. In a nighttime vision, she appears to him, revealing her location deep in the mountains of Central Asia. Determined to discover his lost love, he searches for 16 years, finally discovering a lost civilization, ruled by an ambitious queen of unearthly beauty. Could this be his Ayesha reborn? And if so, will the secret of immortality bind them together for eternity?

Byron's exuberant masterpiece tells of the adventures of Don Juan, a handsome and charming young man naturally gifted with the ladies. After his first illicit love affair at the age of 16 in his native Spain, he is exiled to Italy. Following a dramatic shipwreck, his exploits take him to Greece, where he is sold as a slave, and to Russia, where he becomes a favorite of the Empress Catherine, who sends him on to England.

Guy de Maupassant a marqué la littérature française par ses romans mais surtout par ses nouvelles comme "Le Horla" (1887). Ces œuvres retiennent l'attention par leur force réaliste et par le pessimisme qui s'en dégage le plus souvent. La carrière littéraire de Maupassant se limite à une décennie avant qu'il ne sombre peu à peu dans la folie et ne meure peu avant ses quarante-trois ans. La syphilis, qui sera fatale à Maupassant, concerne une prostituée sur trois.

The Count of Monte Cristo (French: Le Comte de Monte-Cristo) is an adventure novel written by French author Alexandre Dumas (père) completed in 1844. It is one of the author's most popular works, along with The Three Musketeers. Like many of his novels, it was expanded from plot outlines suggested by his collaborating ghostwriter Auguste Maquet. The story takes place in France, Italy, and islands in the Mediterranean during the historical events of 1815–1839: the era of the Bourbon Restoration through the reign of Louis-Philippe of France.

The Man of Property, the first novel in Galsworthy's epic social satire The Forsyte Saga, introduces us to Soames Forsyte, a solicitor and prominent man of his important family. Accustomed to getting whatever he wants, he sets his sights with absolute determination on the beautiful Irene in spite of her pennilessness and her indifference to him.

When two children happen across an ancient shrine, they unintentionally summon an impish sprite named Puck, also known as Robin Goodfellow. To their wonderment, the fairy conjures up the past, taking them on ten magical adventures: They visit Roman Britain and the legion guarding Hadrian's Wall, the thirteenth-century court of King John, and Old England from the time of William the Conqueror.

"Je forme une entreprise qui n'eut jamais d'exemple, et dont l'exécution n'aura point d'imitateur. Je veux montrer à mes semblables un homme dans toute la vérité de la nature ; et cet homme, ce sera moi. (...) Que la trompette du jugement dernier sonne quand elle voudra, je viendrai, ce livre à la main, me présenter devant le souverain juge. Je dirai hautement : Voilà ce que j'ai fait, ce que j'ai pensé, ce que je fus."

Lord Dawlish is a well-liked and generous man. But he is poor, the poorest of his rank in the British Isles. His fiancée will not marry a man of modest means, so Dawlish decides to make his fortune any way possible. Romance, golf, the theater, and mad monkeys are all part of this merry mix-up that has more witty remarks and sharp retorts in one minute than most people could dream up in a lifetime.

Drei Kriminalromane, drei Mal Meistersprecher Hans Korte. In "Der Verdacht" liegt Kommissär Bärlach im Krankenhaus...