Paris

This is the best book of Philadelphia I have seen in years. It captures the city in a way that you don't see in other photo books of the city. It makes a great coffee table book. You will love this book.

The quality of photography in this book astounded me. Each of the 9 children live in different areas of Paris and, through their photographs and accompanying commentary, one really gets to know Paris.

While I have not read this book, I do know the author and was wondering if I could contact her? Jeff Grinspan (License041@aol.com)

Whoever Anne Marie Villefranche is she has created a series of profoundly sexy novels without ever using a rude or improper word while describing, so far as my semi - indepth reading is concerned,every possible aspect of human sexuality. Whilst taking note of the forbidden and shameful feelings & emotions associated M. Villefranche has succeeded in portraying sexual relations as most profoundly enjoyable and utterly loveless.The writing is deeply arousing to read and exquisitely written. One wishes though that the author would reveal just a little of her real self. The absence of gentle human sympathy is palpable. Even so I think A.M.Villefranche is the finest writer of erotic prose - for me - I have ever read.

One of the best books on theatre I have ever read. George Plimpton has compiled the difinitive interviews with some of the centuries most intriuging playwrights including Edward Ablee, Harold Pinter, Sam Shepard and Tennesee Williams. The questions are indepth and utterly facinating. We hear from the playwrights themselves on process, craft and thier candid opinons on the state of modern theatre. Undoubtedly the most comprehensive guide ever written into the mind of the dramatist and a must-read for anyone who has an interest in theatrical studies. Other playwrights interviewed are David Mamet, Arthur Miller, Tom Stoppard, John Guare, August Wilson, Niel Simon and retrospective into the work of Samuel Beckett.

For lovers of Nick Bantock (Griffin & Sabine,), and Karen Elizabeth Gordon, (Deluxe Trasitive Vampire, and Paris Out of Hand,) this small volume is a time capsule of a young girl's year growing up in Paris. Told via her stamp collection, (1 colorful French stamp and one life-vignette per page,) it traces her year with her family and school friends until the end, when they must leave Paris to come back to the United States.

Inspires anyone interested in collage, (although there are no collages in the book per se, I loved it anyway,) Parisian life, and stamp collecting.

The only thing I wanted was more. Where is the author now? How did her stamp collection become this book? Why is this book out of print?? Alas.

This historical view of the relationship between popular culture and surrealism is a welcome contribution to debates on the avant-garde and mass culture. Walz presents four case studies - tourist guidebooks, popular novels, sensational journalism, and suicide - which impacted on the surrealist imagination. Aragon's Le Paysan de Paris is the motivating subject of the first chapter. Through a history gleaned from contemporary French and American tourist guides and newspaper reports of its planned destruction, Walz examines Aragon's creative play with the people and spaces of the Opera Passageway (part of Walter Benjamin's beloved Parisian arcades). Following this, Walz exhumes a mass popular figure embodying crimes unmentionable, tortures and brutalities ever unpunished, Fantomas. As an arch-criminal who appeared in 32 novels between 1911-13, Fantomas's phantasmagoric mayhem and murder provides ample evidence as to why he should appear in an array of surrealist poetry and imagery. Turning to the apparently more mundane case of the serial killer Henri Landru, the Bluebeard of the Gambais. This utterly bourgeois and apparently vacuous murderer provided the blank screen for wild and melodramatic projections of journalist fancy in the popular press. Landru was highly placed on the Paris dada group's literary charts of March 1921. Finally, Walz's attention is focused upon the tabloid press's reportage of suicides and their afterlife that are subsequently reprinted in the first issue of La Revolution Surrealiste (1924).

Rich in research and theory, Pulp Surrealism is accessible, literate, illuminating, often very funny and is everything Surrealism: Desire Unbound at the Tate Modern (2001) is not. The latter is an example of the curator's bent to reduce the avant-garde to the re-presentation of readily identifiable artefacts with additional humourless commentary -- about as interesting, and as contemporaneously relevant, as the mystery posed by a John Doe toe-tag attached to a cadaver in a morgue in some re-run of a 'seventies American TV detective series broadcast on a satellite channel no one will ever watch. Mummified culture. As Walz writes at the conclusion of his study, 'With surrealism set firmly within official culture, the tasks of invoking the marvellous and the transformation of everyday life have returned to the realms of popular culture.' But not just any old popular culture can be enlisted in this project.

Walz does not simply wish to fill in the gaps left by earlier scholars of surrealism with the dead weight of even more arcane facts and theories. Instead, his purpose is to enlist the service of the surrealists to direct him towards 'caches of mass culture that display affinities with surrealism'. It is 'precisely this connection that wrests a popular dynamism out of what is otherwise merely commercial mass culture.' Certainly, all of his case studies continue to find resonance in today's culture: the imaginative construction of urban spaces, sensational reportage of murder cases, the public exploitation of private misery, and the popular imaginary of arch-criminals/terrorists. It is impossible to read the chapter on Fantomas without thinking about the destruction of the World Trade towers and the identification of Bin Laden as the mastermind behind this act. How about this as an exchange of dialogue between Bush and Blair?
"Fantomas."
"What did you say?"
"I said . . . Fantomas."
"What does that mean?"
"Nothing . . . and everything."
"Still, what is it?"
"Nobody . . . yet nevertheless somebody!"
"For the last time, what does this somebody do?"
"Spreads terror!!!"

As such, 'pulp' more closely represents the 'real' than any analysis provided by media officials. Despite the title's anachronistic use and cultural misplacing of the Americanism 'pulp' to define low French culture (enabling, one presumes, the publisher's easy exploitation of the book over the internet through keyword searches), the potential to seduce readers like myself who first encountered the book while searching for studies of hard-boiled fiction, is promising. And, as Sean McCann in his brilliant study Gumshoe America (2000) reveals, avant-garde tendencies inscribed into a popular vernacular had long been part of the draw of American detective and mystery stories. But that is by-the-by, except, I expect this excellent volume to be a frequent entry in bibliographies that have nothing whatsoever to do with surrealism and everything to do with giving name and value to insolent popular cultures that have not yet been ossified by museum curators.

I think the book that Yvette writes is truly a book that takes you in the world of the Stripworld and how Yvette and her family coped with that world and her life in it.it is an excellent read with lots of beautiful photographs and a stunning color cover of this Marilyn Monroe lookalike.

Victor Hugo christened 1870-71 as the "Terrible Year". During that long year, France experienced the destruction of two armies at Metz and Sedan, the Siege of Paris and the unsucessful attempts to relive the city and finally the bloody Paris Commune.

In the years following these disasters the French people tried to put a positive spin on this series of catastrophies. Artists like Detaille and De Nueville painted canvasses of noble soldiers defending the nation. Writers and historians tried to find positive stories and lessons from the Defeat.

Leonce Patry's memoirs were written 25 years after the war. His goal was to tell his story with as much honesty and frankness as was possible. His memoirs are a reaction to the false sugar coating that had been taking place during the previous 25 years.

Patry began the war as a young naive lieutenant and finished it as battle hardened captain. He led troops in the initial battles of the War. He was trapped during the siege of Metz and was there when Bezaine surrendered. Patry escaped Prussian imprisonment and fled to northern France where he took up arms again with Faidherbe's Army of the North. He endured the final battles of the War and then led his troops against the Paris Communards.

If one is looking for a general history of the Franco Prussian War, one should immediately go to Michael Howard's classic study of the war. Patry's well told story is about war as seen by lieutenants and captains. Patry writes well and is very unassuming.

Finally, the translator Douglas Fermer has produced a wonderful translation. His foot notes, Forward, bibliography and
appendices are simply amazing! This translation was obviously a work of love by a very gifted writer and scholar. This book is a must buy for every serious student of the Franco Prussian War.

This book talks about the french "Commune de Paris" and how Louise Michel took part in it fighting for the poor and the abandonned people , and how she was sent to Noumea in French Caledonia after being arrested for her implication in the Commune