Auteur d’une œuvre de premier plan, Michel Chaillou a tenu un journal pendant près d’un quart de siècle. Impressions de lectures, ébauches de romans qu’on voit naître et grandir, doutes et enthousiasmes : comme tout journal d’écrivain, celui-ci ressemble à la visite d’un atelier, créant entre l’auteur et son lecteur une manière de proximité, presque de familiarité. Même quand la notation est lapidaire, la remarque apparemment triviale, le style demeure inimitable, avec ses fulgurances, sa férocité parfois, sa tendresse, son humour, sa poésie. Qu’il croque la silhouette d’un passant, commente Montaigne ou réagisse à l’actualité du jour, il fait entendre sa voix singulière, celle d’un homme habité par la littérature, dont il ne cesse de chercher l’impossible définition. Michel Chaillou a obtenu de nombreuses récompenses, parmi lesquelles le prix des Libraires pour La Croyance des voleurs (Seuil, 1989) et le prix Cazes-Lipp pour La France fugitive (Fayard, 1998). L’ensemble de son œuvre, qui fait désormais l’objet de travaux et colloques universitaires, a été couronné en 2002 par le Prix de la langue française et, en 2007, par le Grand prix de littérature de l'Académie française. Son décès en 2013 a été accueilli avec beaucoup d’émotion par le milieu littéraire, où se sont multipliés les hommages à son « invention stylistique » (Le Monde), à sa phrase « reconnaissable entre toutes » (La Croix), qui ouvre sur « une vision neuve du monde » (L’Humanité).
Je m'appelle Jonathan, j'habite une chambre louée, 50, rue Jacob. Encore deux semaines et une jeune fille se déshabillera dans mes bras. Je parle de choses et d'autres. Les collègues rue Monge ont un bruit d'hommes. Quand je parle beaucoup, je m'excuse d'y revenir, c'est à cause de la nuit, de son fracas. J'entends en fermant les yeux : petites vagues courtes, écume, déferlement. Oui, comme la mer. Une idée à moi. Cela aide mes souvenirs.
The death of God in the West was the prelude to a formidable metaphysical soap opera that continues to this day. Christianity’s masterstroke was to combine a fierce belief in the individual with the promise of eternal participation in the Absolute. When that dream evaporated, various attempts were made to offer the individual a minimum of being. The latest of these attempts is advertising, which seeks to arouse desire and transform the subject into a docile phantom doomed to follow advertising’s every whim. But, like all previous attempts, this skin-deep, superficial participation in the world fails, and unhappiness and depression continue to spread. However, we can all produce a cold revolution in ourselves by stepping outside the flow of information and advertising. We need to take some time out, unplug the television, turn off our iPhones, stop buying stuff, stop wanting to buy stuff, temporarily detach ourselves and adopt an aesthetic attitude to the world. We just need to stay still for a few seconds. This is one of the key themes developed by Michel Houellebecq in this collection of his texts and interviews from the last three decades. Here he explains and elaborates his point of view, discusses his novels and addresses a wide range of topics from politics, religion and literature to suicide, euthanasia and paedophilia. An indispensable book for anyone interested in the work of one of the most widely read and controversial novelists of our time.
In a near-future France, Franocois, a middle-aged academic, is watching his life slowly dwindle to nothing. His sex drive is diminished, his parents are dead, and his lifelong obsession--the ideas and works of the novelist Joris-Karl Huysmans--has led him nowhere. In a late-capitalist society where consumerism has become the new religion, Franocois is spiritually barren, but seeking to fill the vacuum of his existence. And he is not alone. As the 2022 Presidential election approaches, two candidates emerge as favorites: Marine Le Pen of the Front National, and Muhammed Ben Abbes of the nascent Muslim Fraternity. Forming a controversial alliance with the mainstream parties, Ben Abbes sweeps to power, and overnight the country is transformed. Islamic law comes into force: women are veiled, polygamy is encouraged and, for Franocois, life is set on a new course.
The international publishing sensation is now available in the United States—two brilliant, controversial authors confront each other and their enemies in an unforgettable exchange of letters. In one corner, Bernard-Henri Lévy, creator of the classic Barbarism with a Human Face, dismissed by the media as a wealthy, self-promoting, arrogant do-gooder. In the other, Michel Houellebecq, bestselling author of The Elementary Particles, widely derided as a sex-obsessed racist and misogynist. What began as a secret correspondence between bitter enemies evolved into a remarkable joint personal meditation by France’s premier literary and political live wires. An instant international bestseller, Public Enemies has now been translated into English for all lovers of superb insights, scandalous opinions, and iconoclastic ideas. In wicked, wide-ranging, and freewheeling letters, the two self-described “whipping boys” debate whether they crave disgrace or secretly have an insane desire to please. Lévy extols heroism in the face of tyranny; Houellebecq sees himself as one who would “fight little and badly.” Lévy says “life does not ‘live’” unless he can write; Houellebecq bemoans work as leaving him in such “a state of nervous exhaustion that it takes several bottles of alcohol to get out.” There are also touching and intimate exchanges on the existence of God and about their own families. Dazzling, delightful, and provocative, Public Enemies is a death match between literary lions, remarkable men who find common ground, confident that, in the end (as Lévy puts it), “it is we who will come out on top.”
If artist Jed Martin, the main character of this novel, was to tell you his story, he would perhaps begin by telling you that for his new exhibition he has secured the involvement of the great author Michel Houllebecq who has agreed to write the text for the exhibition guide in return for which he will have his portrait painted by Jed.
Michel Houellebecq’s international bestseller— a thrilling, ambitious, and unexpectedly tender chronicle of modern existence. It is 2027. France is in a state of economic decline and moral decay. As the country plunges into a contentious presidential race, the government falls victim to a series of mysterious and unsettling cyberattacks in which videos of brutal decapitations and skillfully crafted deepfakes proliferate on the web. Paul Raison’s own troubles are bound up with those of the country. He is an adviser to the finance minister; his wife, Prudence, is a Treasury official; and his father, Édouard, now retired, spent his career in the security services. Paul, badly overworked, is facing the threat of separation from his wife. When his father suddenly suffers a stroke, Paul must depart Paris for his provincial hometown, where he and his siblings now have the opportunity to repair their strained relationships with Édouard as they determine to free him from the decrepit public nursing home where he is wasting away. Michel Houellebecq’s Annihilation reveals a new dimension of his oeuvre, adding compassion and tenderness to the irony and cutting insight that brought him international fame. Here, we see France’s most celebrated novelist taking stock of his country on the eve of great change—asking how, and whether, a society and its people can change course.
Houellebecq's dazzling new novel, which moves between Paris, Andalucia and Lanzarotte, is a thought provoking, sometimes shocking, and ultimately moving examination of the modern world, the trials of old age and the death of love.
Quelle que soit la quantité de mensonges, de faux souvenirs et de rêves dont on s'entoure au long d'une vie, c'est toujours le même corps qu'on retrouve, au matin, dans l'éprouvante expérience du réveil ; le corps est sans miracle. Quelles que soient les discontinuités, les absurdités, les ruptures qu'on essaie d'introduire dans un roman, le lecteur parvient toujours à reconstituer une histoire ; son expérience de la vie humaine est sans limite. En ce qui concerne la poésie, la situation est moins claire." M.H.
As the 2022 French Presidential election looms, two candidates emerge as favourites: Marine Le Pen of the Front National, and the charismatic Muhammed Ben Abbes of the growing Muslim Fraternity. Forming a controversial alliance with the political left to block the Front National's alarming ascendency, Ben Abbes sweeps to power, and overnight the country is transformed. This proves to be the death knell of French secularism, as Islamic law comes into force: women are veiled, polygamy is encouraged and, for our narrator Fran�ois - misanthropic, middle-aged and alienated - life is set on a new course. Submission is a devastating satire, comic and melancholy by turns, and a profound meditation on faith and meaning in Western society.
Michel Houellebecq’s Serotonin is a caustic, frightening, hilarious, raunchy, offensive, and politically incorrect novel about the decline of Europe, Western civilization, and humanity in general. Deeply depressed by his romantic and professional failures, the aging hedonist and agricultural engineer Florent-Claude Labrouste feels he is “dying of sadness.” He hates his young girlfriend, and the feeling is almost certainly mutual; his career is pretty much over; and he has to keep himself thoroughly medicated to cope with day-to-day life. Suffocating in the rampant loneliness, consumerism, hedonism, and sprawl of the city, Labrouste decides to head for the hills, returning to Normandy, where he once worked promoting regional cheeses and where he was once in love, and even—it now seems—happy. There he finds a countryside devastated by globalization and by European agricultural policies, and encounters farmers longing, like Labrouste himself, for an impossible return to a simpler age. As the farmers prepare for what might be an armed insurrection, it becomes clear that the health of one miserable body and of a suffering body politic are not so different, and that all parties may be rushing toward a catastrophe that a whole drugstore’s worth of antidepressants won’t make bearable.
‘The most interesting novelist of our times’ Evening Standard ‘The most important novelist to have been publishing in all of Europe over the past three decades’ The Sunday Times ‘We have no one to match Houellebecq.’ The Daily Telegraph It is 2027. France is in a state of economic decline and moral decay. As the country plunges into a closely-fought presidential campaign, the French state falls victim to a series of mysterious and unsettling cyberattacks. The sophisticated nature of the attacks leaves the best computer scientists at the DGSI – the French counter-terrorism agency – scrambling for answers. An advisor to the country’s Finance Minister, Paul Raison is close to the heart of government. His wife Prudence is a Treasury official, while his father Édouard, now retired, has spent his career working for the DGSI. When Édouard has a stroke, his children have an opportunity to repair their strained relationships, as they determine to free their father from the medical centre where he is wasting away. Michel Houellebecq’s Annihilation reveals new sides to his writing, adding compassion and tenderness to the emotions of rage, disgust and irony that have powered both him and his earlier works to international fame. Translated from the French by Shaun Whiteside Annihilation was a #1 Livres Hebdo bestseller in France w/c 10/01/2022, and a #1 Spiegel bestseller in Germany w/c 24/01/2022
Despite Heidegger's identifying his own thought with 'ethics' in the most original sense, his understanding of ethics has been criticised both for its supposed ignorance of the role of the other human being and for its relation to politics. This book contends that, in fact, it is Heidegger's own notion of 'being-with' -his rethinking of intersubjectivity- which demonstrates precisely what is wrong with his early work and demands that the place of ethics be rethought. Heidegger and the Place of Ethics shows how this rethinking occurs in Heidegger's own laterwork. In particular, the crossing out of the earlier work in the turn to the later allows us to think 'being-with' as essential to a Heideggerian ethics and to rethink the relationship between ethics and politics which previously issued in Heidegger's engagement with Nazism. This rethinking of ethics and politics in light of the originality of 'being-with' brings us before a hitherto unnoticed proximity between Heidegger's later work and the Lacanian political thought of Slavoj Žižek among others; it thereby opens up the possibility of a politically progressive Heideggerianism, and many unexpected encounters with thinkers generally considered to be separated from Heidegger by an abyss.
From the acclaimed author of Blue, a beautifully illustrated history of yellow from antiquity to the present In this richly illustrated book, Michel Pastoureau—a renowned authority on the history of color and the author of celebrated volumes on blue, black, green, and red—now traces the visual, social, and cultural history of yellow. Focusing on European societies, with comparisons from East Asia, India, Africa, and South America, Yellow tells the intriguing story of the color’s evolving place in art, religion, fashion, literature, and science. In Europe today, yellow is a discreet color, little present in everyday life and rarely carrying great symbolism. This has not always been the case. In antiquity, yellow was almost sacred, a symbol of light, warmth, and prosperity. It became highly ambivalent in medieval Europe: greenish yellow came to signify demonic sulfur and bile, the color of forgers, lawless knights, Judas, and Lucifer—while warm yellow recalled honey and gold, serving as a sign of pleasure and abundance. In Asia, yellow has generally had a positive meaning. In ancient China, yellow clothing was reserved for the emperor, while in India the color is associated with happiness. Above all, yellow is the color of Buddhism, whose temple doors are marked with it. Throughout, Pastoureau illuminates the history of yellow with a wealth of captivating images. With its striking design and compelling text, Yellow is a feast for the eye and mind.
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