Le Monde's 100 Books of the Century
Top 10 Le Monde's 100 Books of the Century
: Journey to the End of the Night, A Room of One's Own, Waiting for Godot, The Sound and the Fury, Capital of Pain, Moravagine, Asterix the Gaul, The Tartar Steppe, L'Œuvre au noir, Paroles
Journey to the End of the Night
| Author | Louis-Ferdinand Céline |
| ISBN | 0811216543 |
Louis-Ferdinand Celine's revulsion and anger at what he considered the idiocy and hypocrisy of society explodes from nearly every page of this novel. Filled with slang and obscenities and written in raw, colloquial language, Journey to the End of the Night is a literary symphony of violence, cruelty...
| Author | Virginia Woolf |
| ISBN | 0141183535 |
A Room of One's Own is an extended essay by Virginia Woolf. First published on the 24th of October, 1929, the essay was based on a series of lectures she delivered at Newnham College and Girton College, two women's colleges at Cambridge University in October 1928. While this extended essay in fact employs...
The story revolves around two seemingly homeless men simply waiting for someone—or something—named Godot. Vladimir and Estragon wait near a tree, inhabiting a drama spun of their own consciousness. The result is a comical wordplay of poetry, dreamscapes, and nonsense, which has been interpreted...
The Sound and the Fury is the tragedy of the Compson family, featuring some of the most memorable characters in literature: beautiful, rebellious Caddy; the manchild Benjy; haunted, neurotic Quentin; Jason, the brutal cynic; and Dilsey, their black servant. Their lives fragmented and harrowed...
| Author | Paul Éluard |
| ISBN | 0976844966 |
Capital of Pain, is considered one of the key texts of surrealism. This is the first new translation into English of this work in over 30 years and the only edition available in the English language. This edition presents the text in its entirety in a bilingual format, and includes an extensive essay on...
| Author | Blaise Cendrars |
| ISBN | 1590170636 |
At once truly appalling and appallingly funny, Blaise Cendrars's Moravagine bears comparison with Naked Lunch—except that it's a lot more entertaining to read. Heir to an immense aristocratic fortune, mental and physical mutant Moravagine is a monster, a man in pursuit of a theorem that will justify...
| Author | René Goscinny |
| ISBN | 0752866052 |
A kindred spirit...
Family portrait.
Sport/recreation/favorite pastime.
=========
For those not familiar with the Asterix comics, let me give you a bit of background, both personal and general.
Let me start with Julius Caesar.
We...
| Author | Dino Buzzati |
| ISBN | 1567923046 |
Often likened to Kafka's The Castle, The Tartar Steppe is both a scathing critique of military life and a meditation on the human thirst for glory. It tells of young Giovanni Drogo, who is posted to a distant fort overlooking the vast Tartar steppe. Although not intending to stay, Giovanni suddenly finds...
| Author | Marguerite Yourcenar |
En créant le personnage de Zénon, alchimiste et médecin du XVIe siècle, Marguerite Yourcenar, l'auteur des Mémoires d'Hadrien, ne raconte pas seulement le destin tragique d'un homme extraordinaire. C'est toute une époque qui revit dans son infinie richesse, comme aussi dans son âcre et...
| Author | Jacques Prévert |
| ISBN | 2070367622 |
Rappelle-toi Barbara
Il pleuvait sans cesse sur Brest ce jour là
Et tu marchais souriante
Épanouie ravie ruisselante
Sous la pluie
Rappelle-toi Barbara...
Oh Barbara
Quelle connerie la guerre
Qu'es-tu devenue maintenant
Sous cette pluie de fer
De...
Six Characters in Search of an Author
| Author | Luigi Pirandello |
| ISBN | 0486299929 |
One of the major figures of modern theater, Luigi Pirandello (1867–1936) wrote dramas and satires that sparked controversy with their radical departures from conventional theatrical techniques. His most celebrated work, Six Characters in Search of an Author, embodies the Nobel Prize-winning...
| Author | Joseph Conrad |
| ISBN | 1551111721 |
Jim, a young British seaman, becomes first mate on the Patna, a ship full of pilgrims travelling to Mecca for the hajj. When the ship starts rapidly taking on water and disaster seems imminent, Jim joins his captain and other crew members in abandoning the ship and its passengers. A few days later, they...
| Author | André Gide |
| ISBN | 0394718429 |
Originally published in 1925, this book became known for the frank sexuality of its contents and its account of middle class French morality. The themes of the book explore the problem of morals, the problem of society and the problems facing writers. An appendix to this edition (Vintage, 1973) contains...
| Author | Hergé |
| ISBN | 2203001046 |
Alors qu'il est toujours l'hôte du Maharadjah, Tintin reçoit la visited'un chinois qui doit lui dire quelque chose de très important. Mais au moment de parler, le chinois est touché par une fléchette de poison qui rend fou. Avant de sombrer dans la démence, le malheureux à le temps de prononcer...
| Author | Malcolm Lowry |
| ISBN | 0060955228 |
Geoffrey Firmin, a former British consul, has come to Quauhnahuac, Mexico. His debilitating malaise is drinking, an activity that has overshadowed his life. On the most fateful day of the consul's life—the Day of the Dead—his wife, Yvonne, arrives in Quauhnahuac, inspired by a vision of life...
| Author | William Styron |
| ISBN | 0679736379 |
”Mercifully, I was at the age when reading was still a passion and thus, save for a happy marriage, the best state possible in which to keep absolute loneliness at bay. I could not have made it through those evenings otherwise. But I was an abandoned reader and, besides, outlandishly eclectic, with...
The Ravishing of Lol Stein
| Author | Marguerite Duras |
| ISBN | 0394743040 |
so there's this chick Lol Stein, a real blank broad, gets ditched by her cougar-lovin' fiance. bitch goes crazy, but the quiet kinda crazy, the kinda crazy you keep to yourself. girl gets married to some musician type. years later, she's a mother of three, living in her old town, and she gets wrapped up...
The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui
| Author | Bertolt Brecht |
| ISBN | 1559705434 |
The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui, (Der aufhaltsame Aufstieg des Arturo Ui) was written by the great German dramatist Bertolt Brecht over the course of 3 furious weeks in 1941, while a refugee in Helsinki, Finland. A dizzyingly intelligent political satire on the (ir)resistibleness of political thuggery,...
The Origins of Totalitarianism
Hannah Arendt's definitive work on totalitarianism and an essential component of any study of twentieth-century political history
The Origins of Totalitarianism begins with the rise of anti-Semitism in central and western Europe in the 1800s and continues with an examination of European...
Le Secret de l'Espadon - 1
| Author | Edgar P. Jacobs |
| ISBN | 2870970021 |
1947. Alors que dans le monde se multiplient les pactes et les conférences destinées à sauvegarder la paix, le mystérieux « Empire Jaune » de Basam Damdu « l'usurpateur », empereur du Tibet, lance une offensive généralisée. En quelques heures, la gigantesque armada anéantit les principales...
| Author | Louis Aragon |
| ISBN | 2070393682 |
Dans cette chronique parisienne de l'entre-deux guerres, Aragon décrit la toute nouvelle société surréaliste. Aurélien, jeune homme sensible et oisif, fréquente les salons parisiens d'avant-garde, y côtoie les poètes, les actrices, les peintres qui ne sont autres que Picabia ou Cocteau....
| Author | Julien Gracq |
| ISBN | 0002712245 |
The great maritime state of Orsenna has long been lulled by settled peace and prosperity. It is three hundred years since it was actively at war with its traditional enemy two days' sail across the water, the savage land of Farghestan - a slumbering but by no means extinct volcano. The narrator of this...
| Author | André Franquin |
| ISBN | 2800126817 |
Un beau jour de février 1957, un drôle d'hurluberlu fait son entrée dans l'hebdomadaire Spirou. Il est vêtu d'une veste bleue tout ce qu'il y a de classique, affublé d'un noeud papillon, les cheveux lissés et l'air vaguement ahuri. On ne sait pas trop ce qu'il fait là. Au fur et à mesure que les...
| 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 | Paul Claudel |
| ISBN | 2070367746 |
ENGLISH: I read this book years ago in a Spanish version which I did not like. I later discovered that this version had been abridged, to the point that it sometimes became unintelligible. The play is very long, and some cuts are understandable, but they shouldn't affect the comprehension of the work....
| Author | Colette |
| ISBN | 2213617716 |
Lorsqu’en 1908 Colette publie ce recueil de textes brefs - dialogues de bêtes, évocations de la nature, méditations sur l’amour, la solitude, le passage du temp… -, elle s’est séparée de Willy, son premier mari, définitivement résolue à imposer son indépendance d’artiste et...
| Author | Jules Renard |
| ISBN | 0979419875 |
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 and cited as a principle influence by writers as varying as Somerset Maugham and Donald Barthelme, remains largely undiscovered in the United...
