La Bâtarde
10 best books like La Bâtarde (Violette Leduc): An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, Against Nature, The History of Sexuality, Volume 1: An Introduction, The Unknown Masterpiece, Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror, Geography III, The Mooring of Starting Out, Brief Lives, The Carrier of Ladders, Desire in Language: A Semiotic Approach to Literature and Art
An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding
| Author | David Hume |
| ISBN | 1420926993 |
I had seen so many references to Hume's Enquiry that I almost thought I had read it; but, when I actually got around to opening the book, I found as usual that things were not quite as I had imagined. I was not surprised by his relentless scepticism, or by his insistence on basing all reasoning on empirical...
| Author | Joris-Karl Huysmans |
| ISBN | 0140447636 |
With a title translated either as Against Nature or as Against The Grain, this wildly original fin-de-siècle novel follows its sole character, Des Esseintes, a decadent, ailing aristocrat who retreats to an isolated villa where he indulges his taste for luxury and excess. Veering between nervous...
The History of Sexuality, Volume 1: An Introduction
| Author | Michel Foucault |
| ISBN | 0679724699 |
This is a perfect example of the kind of writing characterised by Clive James as prose that ‘scorns the earth for fear of a puncture’. Foucault may be able to think – it's not easy to tell – but he certainly can't write.
Everywhere there is an apparent desire to render a simple thought impenetrable....
| Author | Honoré de Balzac |
| ISBN | 0940322749 |
One of Honore de Balzac's most celebrated tales, "The Unknown Masterpiece" is the story of a painter who, depending on one's perspective, is either an abject failure or a transcendental genius--or both. The story, which has served as an inspiration to artists as various as Cezanne, Henry James, Picasso,...
| Author | John Ashbery |
| ISBN | 0140586687 |
Well, I mean, GOD. You know? So beautiful. But also Ashbery sizing up the same kind of moral question over and over a dozen times in the space of a poem, and with dozens of poems (including the formidable and exhausting kind of index of ideas in the title poem) it just wrung me utterly dry.
I could...
| Author | Elizabeth Bishop |
| ISBN | 0374514402 |
Second read. I haven’t the faintest recollection of writing the below review in 2014. .
| Author | John Ashbery |
| ISBN | 0880015470 |
Most critics would agree that John Ashbery is one of 20th-century American poetry's finest voices. Perhaps his most admired book is Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror, a culmination of themes, styles, and forms with which the poet experimented over the course of two decades. Now, the poet's devoted...
| Author | John Aubrey |
| ISBN | 0140435891 |
Compiled as material for Anthony Wood's histories of Oxford University, this text contributes to the oral history of Elizabethan and Stuart England. It parades statesmen, poets, philosopers and scientists, Raleigh and Bacon, Shakespeare and Milton, and Boyle and Halley. They, together with less...
| Author | W.S. Merwin |
| ISBN | 0689103433 |
Reading Merwin is like reading a puzzle and it´s usually worth the mental effort to get to the heart of his logic. It reminds me of reading the Edda kennings from the old Icelanders, who wrote of objects in a roundabout, playful manner (frozen wave = mountain, etc...). But here, Merwin applies something...
| Author | Julia Kristeva |
| ISBN | 0231048076 |
Desire in Language traces the path of an investigation, extending over a period of ten years, into the semiotics of literature and the arts. But the essays of Julia Kristeva in this volume, though they often deal with literature and art, do not amount to either "literary criticism" or "art criticism."...
| Author | Ludwig Wittgenstein |
| ISBN | 0631116419 |
This book comprises material on colour which was written by Wittgenstein in the last eighteen months of his life. It is one of the few documents which shows him concentratedly at work on a single philosophical issue. The principal theme is the features of different colours, of different kinds of colour...
Rien ne s'oppose à la nuit
| Author | Delphine de Vigan |
| ISBN | 2709635798 |
La douleur de Lucile, ma mère, a fait partie de notre enfance et plus tard de notre vie d’adulte, la douleur de Lucile sans doute nous constitue, ma sœur et moi, mais toute tentative d’explication est vouée à l’échec. L’écriture n’y peut rien, tout au plus me permet-elle de poser les...
