Dreamers Rise

When I first read this 1978 novel by Georges Perec in David Bellos's translation years ago I recall being entertained but also perhaps a...

Four years ago I posted the above image, dated 1887, of a young French woman named Alexandra Marie Fulton de Lipowski. Thanks to a message ...

Until relatively recently, the availability of foreign-language reading material in the US was a bit hit-or-miss, unless you happened to liv...

Like many in my generation, I grew up knowing the works of Jules Verne primarily through Hollywood adaptations — mostly bad ones — and comic...

I'm in the early stages of a long slow re-read of Cortázar's Hopscotch, and this time I'm making a point of annotating some of ...

In the eleventh chapter of Jules Verne's Vingt mille lieues sous les mers , the narrator, the noted natural historian Professor Pierre A...

There are two detailed primary sources, as well as a number of supporting documents, on the prosecution of Ernest de Lipowski (see previou...

Here's as much as I've been able to piece together of the story of Ernest de Lipowski, the father of the young girl whose 1887 photo...

Note: This post has been updated (September 2019) based on new information from the family. See new post for a photo of Alexandra's s...

Demain, dès l’aube, à l’heure où blanchit la campagne, Je partirai. Vois-tu, je sais que tu m’attends. J’irai par la forêt, j’irai par la ...

Rabelais: Bacbuc threw something into the fountain, and suddenly the water began to boil fiercely, as the great cauldron at Bourgueil does w...

'So you come from Paris,' said Pantagruel. 'And how do you spend your time, you gentlemen students at this same Paris?' ...

THE GRAND PRIEST People of Argos, I say to you that this woman is committing sacrilege. Unhappiness be upon her and on any among you who ...

This 1913 novel by Roger Martin du Gard may come across today as a somewhat curious project, a book that is not only a "novel of idea...

Without really intending to, I seem to be following the course of the French novel in reverse chronological order, which, if you ignore th...

Hard on the heels of his 2012 CD Le fou , (which is currently up for a Grammy), the Louisiana singer and songwriter Zachary Richard ...

Dora Knowlton Ranous's English version of Flaubert's L'Éducation sentimentale doesn't have much to recommend it (other th...

Today is the 99th anniversary of the assassination of Jean Jaurès, the French socialist leader and parliamentarian who had struggled, vali...

It's February 1848, and Frédéric Moreau, the idle young hero of Flaubert's Sentimental Education , paces up and down the sidewalk,...

One of Roger Martin du Gard's first published works was a dissertation on the ruins of the abbey of Jumièges in Normandy, and it's ...