The Temptation of St. Antony
10 best books like The Temptation of St. Antony (Gustave Flaubert): The Vice-Consul, Under Fire, Monsieur Teste, A Harlot High and Low, Mademoiselle de Maupin, Là-Bas, Under Satan's Sun, Albigenses, Castle Richmond, Ormond
Author | Marguerite Duras |
ISBN | 0394750268 |
The Vice-Consul is a bleak, enigmatic novel. Set in the steamy monsoon heat of Calcutta, it brings together three suffering characters. There is Anne-Marie Stretter, beautiful wife of the French ambassador, seeking the love of younger men as if desperate for a carefree youth she never had. One of those...
Author | Henri Barbusse |
ISBN | 0143039040 |
Based on his own experience of the Great War, Henri Barbusse's novel is a powerful account of one of the greatest horrors mankind has ever inflicted on itself.
For the group of ordinary men in the French Sixth Battalion, thrown together from all over France and longing for home, war is simply...
Author | Paul Valéry |
ISBN | 2070279138 |
The famous opening line of Monsieur Teste -- "Stupidity is not my strong suit" -- is typical of Monsieur Teste, and of Valery as well. Although not autobiographical in any usual sense, the book is profoundly personal. Valery said he could not imagine the existence of the novel, vet he could not resist...
Author | Honoré de Balzac |
ISBN | 0140442324 |
Why should anyone care about Esther, a prostitute from a young age, a harlot with powers over men? Why should anyone care about a spoiled feeble individual such as Lucien, the poet whose ambitions are to secure a noble title and live in luxury for the rest of his life? The same Lucien who, by the way, in Lost...
Author | Théophile Gautier |
ISBN | 0140448136 |
A woman uses her incredible beauty to captivate both d'Albert, a young poet, and disguised as a man, his mistress, Rosette.
In this shocking tale of sexual deception, Gautier draws readers into the bedrooms and boudoirs of a French château in a compelling exploration of desire and sexual...
Author | Joris-Karl Huysmans |
ISBN | 0486228371 |
La-bas (English Down There)--with its explicit account of child sex-murders and its detailed description of a black mass—may benefit from its transgressive reputation but also suffers from it too. Readers who come to it seeking thrills and horrors will be alternately bored and disappointed,...
Author | Georges Bernanos |
ISBN | 0803261802 |
This new translation marks the seventy-fifth anniversary of Georges Bernanos's first novel, Under Satan's Sun, a powerful account of intense spiritual struggle that reflects the author's deeply-felt religion. The work develops a theme that persistently inspired Bernanos: the existence of evil...
Author | Charles Robert Maturin |
Un gran novelón gótico. Con Maturin ya sabes que te puedes esperar: páginas y páginas de historias que se entremezclan entre sí y que están tan bien narradas que son capaces de llevarte al tiempo y lugar donde sucedieron. Las descripciones del autor son muy precisas y al igual que con Melmoth la...
Author | Anthony Trollope |
ISBN | 1406930245 |
Castle Richmond, one of Trollope’s standalone novels, is the story of two families―the Fitzgeralds of Castle Richmond of the title and the Desmonds of Desmond Court, set in the backdrop of the Irish famine. The story opens with Owen Fizgerald, a cousin of the Castle Richmond Fitzgeralds, falling...
Author | Maria Edgeworth |
ISBN | 0140436448 |
A great early nineteenth-century episodic novel of an orphan boy's rise to the upper classes, in the tradition of Tom Jones, Joseph Andrews et al. The eponymous Harry Ormand is raised side-by-side with the son of the local lord, Sir Ulick O'Shane; his low-birth, however, keeps him from developing the...
With the growth of his militant egoism, there had developed in Godwin Peak an excess of nervous sensibility which threatened to deprive his character of the initiative rightly belonging to it. Self-assertion is the practical complement of self-esteem. To be largely endowed with the latter quality,...
Author | Walter Scott |
ISBN | 1406932531 |
Set on the eve of the Protestant Reformation in Scotland, The Monastery is full of supernatural events, theological conflict, and humor. Located in the lawless Scottish Borders, the novel depicts the monastery of Kennaquhair (a thinly disguised Melrose Abbey, whose ruins are still to be seen near...
Author | Walter Pater |
ISBN | 0140432361 |
It was as a critic and a humanist that Pater (1839-1894), professor at Oxford, became a powerful influence on his own and succeeding generations, claiming disciples as diverse as Virginia Woolf and Ezra Pound. This has been described as "the most highly finished of all his works and the expression of...
Author | Ivan Turgenev |
ISBN | 0548019274 |
1916. Turgenieff (Turgenev), novelist, poet, and playwright, known for his detailed descriptions about everyday live in Russia in the 19th century, he portrayed realistically the peasantry and the rising intelligentsia in its attempt to move the country into a new age. Two of Turgenieff's smaller...
Author | Pierre Louÿs |
ISBN | 2070385329 |
Alexandrie, Ier siècle avant Jésus-Christ : un sculpteur en vogue, amant de la reine, tombe amoureux de la belle courtisane Chrysis, qui exige de lui trois gages. Il commet trois crimes. Puis il rêve que son désir est assouvi. Il exige alors de Chrysis qu'elle aille déposer les trois objets sur...
Author | Émile Zola |
ISBN | 1414275897 |
Emile Zola's novel Le Rêve (1888) is a love idyll concerning a poor embroideress, Angelique, and the son of a wealthy aristocratic family, set against the backdrop of a sleepy cathedral town in northern France.
A far cry from the seething, teeming world evoked in Zola's best-known novels,...
Gerard de Nerval (1808-1855), a contemporary of Poe, De Quincey, Gogol, and Heine, introduced into French literature a mode of writing rooted in German romanticism yet already recognizably modernist in its explorations of the uncertain borderlines between dream and reality, irony and madness,...
Author | Anatole France |
ISBN | 1587158558 |
In those days the hermits of the desert lived in huts on the banks of the Nile, where they lived abstemious lives, taking no food till after sunset, and eating nothing but bread with a little salt and hyssop.They lived in temperance and chastity, they wore a hair shirt and a hood, slept on the bare ground...
Author | Guy de Maupassant |
ISBN | 0543898466 |
Pierre, médecin, ne comprend pas pourquoi un ami de sa famille a légué sa fortune à Jean, son frère cadet. Au terme d'une véritable enquête policière, il mettra au jour un terrible secret. Le quatrième roman de Maupassant (1850-1893), publié en 1888, est sans doute le meilleur. Le récit,...
Told in a series of first-person accounts, L'Abbé C is a startling narrative about the intense and terrifying relationship between twin brothers. Charles is a modern libertine, dedicated to vice and depravity, while Robert is a priest so devout that he is nicknamed L'Abbé'. When the sexually wild...