In the midst of a violent student uprising in South Korea, a young boy named Dong-ho is shockingly killed. The story of this tragic episode unfolds in a sequence of interconnected chapters as the victims and the bereaved encounter suppression, denial, and the echoing agony of the massacre. From Dong-ho's best friend who meets his own fateful end; to an editor struggling against censorship; to a prisoner and a factory worker, each suffering from traumatic memories; and to Dong-ho's own grief-stricken mother; and through their collective heartbreak and acts of hope is the tale of a brutalized people in search of a voice. An award-winning, controversial bestseller, Human Acts is a timeless, pointillist portrait of an historic event with reverberations still being felt today, by turns tracing the harsh reality of oppression and the resounding, extraordinary poetry of humanity.

Here is Ignatius Reilly: slob extraordinary, a mad Oliver Hardy, a fat Don Quixote, a perverse Thomas Aquinas rolled into one, who is in violent revolt against the entire modern age, lying in his flannel nightshirt in a back bedroom on Constantinople Street in New Orleans, who between gigantic seizures of flatulence and eructations is filling dozens of Big Chief tablets with invective. His mother thinks he needs to go to work. He does, in a succession of jobs. Each job rapidly escalates into a lunatic adventure, a full-blown disaster; yet each has, like Don Quixote's, its own eerie logic. His girlfriend, Myrna Minkoff of the Bronx, thinks he needs sex. Ignatius is an intellectual, ideologue, deadbeat, goof-off, glutton, who should repel the reader with his gargantuan bloats, his thunderous contempt, and one-man war against everybody: Freud, homosexuals, heterosexuals, Protestants, and the assorted excesses of modern times. A tragicomedy, set in New Orleans.

In this uncompromising essay, Jonathan Crary presents the obvious but unsayable reality: our ‘digital age’ is synonymous with the disastrous terminal stage of global capitalism and its financialisation of social existence, mass impoverishment, ecocide, and military terror. Scorched Earth surveys the wrecking of a living world by the internet complex and its devastation of communities and their capacities for mutual support. This polemic by the author of 24/7 dismantles the presumption that social media could be an instrument of radical change and contends that the networks and platforms of transnational corporations are intrinsically incompatible with a habitable earth or with the human interdependence needed to build egalitarian post-capitalist forms of life.

The struggle between Rousseau's yearning for solitude and his need for society is the central theme of the Reveries. In the two years before his death in 1778, Jean-Jacques Rousseau composed the ten meditations of Reveries of the Solitary Walker. Combining philosophical argument with amusing anecdotes and lyrical desriptive passages, they record the great French writer's sense of isolation and alienation from a world which he felt had rejected his work. As he wanders around Paris, gazing at plants and day-dreaming, Rousseau looks back over his life in order to justify his actions and to elaborate on his ideal of a well-structured society fit for the noble and solitary natural man.

The struggle between Rousseau's yearning for solitude and his need for society is the central theme of the Reveries. In the two years before his death in 1778, Jean-Jacques Rousseau composed the ten meditations of Reveries of the Solitary Walker. Combining philosophical argument with amusing anecdotes and lyrical desriptive passages, they record the great French writer's sense of isolation and alienation from a world which he felt had rejected his work. As he wanders around Paris, gazing at plants and day-dreaming, Rousseau looks back over his life in order to justify his actions and to elaborate on his ideal of a well-structured society fit for the noble and solitary natural man.

A Bilingual New York Review Books Original Vivant Denon's No Tomorrow is one of the masterpieces of eighteenth-century French libertine literature, a book to set beside Choderlos de Laclos' Les Liaisons dangereuses, except that where Laclos' icy novel tells of hellish depravity, Denon's ravishing novella is a paradisal diversion. This tale of seduction is itself a seduction, with a plot that could be said to slowly unveil itself before arriving at last at an unexpected consummation. Summoned by Madame de T—— to her country house, the young hero of Deion's novella is taken on a tour of the grounds, only the beginning of a night that not only will be full of unanticipated delights but will give rise to unforeseen, perhaps unanswerable, questions. Lydia Davis's definitive translation of Denon's slim masterpiece is accompanied by the French text. Peter Brooks's illuminating introduction explores the mysteries of No Tomorrow's original publication and the subtleties of Denon's ethics of pleasure.

Œuvre cruciale, Le Neveu de Rameau a permis à Diderot de trouver son propre en se libérant de son rôle un peu guindé de philosophe dans le dialogue qu'il imagine avec ce fou de Jean-François Rameau, musicien raté mais comédien génial, l'écrivain règle bien des comptes avec ses adversaires, fait une satire virulente de la société de son temps et s'interroge sur la postérité. Puzzle truqué à plusieurs figures, inapte à renvoyer une image simple de l'auteur, ce texte bizarre et fulgurant qui éclata comme une bombe au beau milieu de la littérature française, selon l'expression de Goethe, est aussi un manifeste de l'art nouveau.

How much would you give to win the world? Zhu Yuanzhang, the Radiant King, is riding high after her victory that tore southern China from its Mongol masters. Now she burns with a new desire: to seize the throne and crown herself emperor. But Zhu isn’t the only one with imperial ambitions. Her neighbor in the south, the courtesan Madam Zhang, wants the throne for her husband―and she’s strong enough to wipe Zhu off the map. To stay in the game, Zhu will have to gamble everything on a risky alliance with an old enemy: the talented but unstable eunuch general Ouyang, who has already sacrificed everything for a chance at revenge on his father’s killer, the Great Khan. Unbeknownst to the southerners, a new contender is even closer to the throne. The scorned scholar Wang Baoxiang has maneuvered his way into the capital, and his lethal court games threaten to bring the empire to its knees. For Baoxiang also desires revenge: to become the most degenerate Great Khan in history―and in so doing, make a mockery of every value his Mongol warrior family loved more than him. All the contenders are determined to do whatever it takes to win. But when desire is the size of the world, the price could be too much for even the most ruthless heart to bear…

In a famine-stricken village on a dusty yellow plain, two children are given two fates. A boy, greatness. A girl, nothingness… In 1345, China lies under harsh Mongol rule. For the starving peasants of the Central Plains, greatness is something found only in stories. When the Zhu family’s eighth-born son, Zhu Chongba, is given a fate of greatness, everyone is mystified as to how it will come to pass. The fate of nothingness received by the family’s clever and capable second daughter, on the other hand, is only as expected. When a bandit attack orphans the two children, though, it is Zhu Chongba who succumbs to despair and dies. Desperate to escape her own fated death, the girl uses her brother's identity to enter a monastery as a young male novice. There, propelled by her burning desire to survive, Zhu learns she is capable of doing whatever it takes, no matter how callous, to stay hidden from her fate. After her sanctuary is destroyed for supporting the rebellion against Mongol rule, Zhu uses the chance to claim another future altogether: her brother's abandoned greatness. Mulan meets The Song of Achilles; an accomplished, poetic debut of war and destiny, sweeping across an epic alternate China.

Œuvre cruciale, Le Neveu de Rameau a permis à Diderot de trouver son propre en se libérant de son rôle un peu guindé de philosophe dans le dialogue qu'il imagine avec ce fou de Jean-François Rameau, musicien raté mais comédien génial, l'écrivain règle bien des comptes avec ses adversaires, fait une satire virulente de la société de son temps et s'interroge sur la postérité. Puzzle truqué à plusieurs figures, inapte à renvoyer une image simple de l'auteur, ce texte bizarre et fulgurant qui éclata comme une bombe au beau milieu de la littérature française, selon l'expression de Goethe, est aussi un manifeste de l'art nouveau.

Un jeune Huron d’ascendance bretonne débarque à Saint-Malo en 1689. Il découvre un coin de province française, retrouve une famille, reçoit le baptême, s’illustre par un fait d’armes contre les Anglais et, pour finir, tombe amoureux de la belle et dévote Mlle de Saint-Yves. Pour obtenir sa main, il doit revenir de la Cour avec un brevet d’officier. Il gagne donc Versailles. Mais ses éclats naïfs le conduisent à la Bastille...

OEuvre en texte int�gral, suivie d'une anthologie sur le th�me de l'honn�te homme. En lien avec les deux objets d'�tude � La trag�die et la com�die au XVIIe si�cle: le classicisme � et � Genres et formes de l'argumentation: XVIIe et XVIIIe si�cles � du programme de fran�ais en seconde (2de).Le texte - Alceste combat � l'art de plaire � la Cour � et l'hypocrisie des hommes, mais succombe aux charmes de C�lim�ne, une veuve coquette et m�disante. Com�die entre rires et larmes, Le Misanthrope d�nonce la soci�t� mondaine qui pr�f�re les persiflages et l'hypocrisie � l'id�al d'honn�tet� cher au XVIIe si�cle. - La pi�ce est suivie d'une anthologie consacr�e � la figure de l'honn�te homme et � son �volution du XVIe au XIXe si�cle. L'�dition Classiques & Cie lyc�e Une �dition annot�e et comment�e par Laurence Rauline, professeur agr�g�e de lettres modernes, docteur en litt�rature fran�aise de l'�ge classique. Le texte est associ� � un dossier critique, qui comprend: - des rep�res historiques et biographiques; - des fiches permettant de d�gager les principaux axes de lecture de l'oeuvre; 1. Le misanthrope, la coquette et les honn�tes gens. 2. Une pi�ce comique ? 3. Une sagesse de la mod�ration. - deux groupements th�matiques compos�s de textes compl�mentaires et de documents iconographiques en couleurs; - des sujets de type bac, pour l'�crit et pour l'oral. Existe aussi en DVD Copat.