Showing results by author "ciesse" in All Categories

Ce n'était pas une petite tâche que de peindre les deux ou trois mille figures saillantes d'une époque, car telle est, en définitif, la somme des types que présente chaque génération et que La Comédie Humaine comportera. Ce nombre de figures, de caractères, cette multitude d'existences exigeaient des cadres, et, qu'on me pardonne cette expression, des galeries. De là, les divisions si naturelles, déjà connues, de mon ouvrage en Scènes de la vie privée, de province, parisienne, politique, militaire et de campagne. Dans ces six livres sont classées toutes les Études de mœurs qui...

This is book 1 of 5. An ex-convict breaks parole and starts a new life as a righteous man, but is pursued by a police inspector. Along the way, the ex-convict joins a revolution, adopts a daughter, and beats people up. Hooray. (Summary by smileyman457)

In three parts, this modern classic explores the life of an English family, the Ramsays, at their Scottish summer house both before and after The Great War. Difficult to categorize and including elements of feminist and psychological literature as well as stream of consciousness, Woolf's novel reads, at times, almost like a prose poem. At its heart, it examines what it means to be a woman and an artist at the start of the 20th century. (Summary by WendyKatzHiller)

This work was originally a four-act play written by Maurice Leblanc and Francis de Croisset, later novelized by Leblanc himself, translated by detective fiction writer Edgar Jepson and published in English, in 1909, under the simple title of Arsène Lupin. In the story, the young and snobbish daughter of a millionaire is about to marry the Duke of Charmerace, recently returned from a trip to the South Pole. However, things won't go as smoothly as expected for the spoiled girl and her faithful servant, mainly when Arsène Lupin, the famous gentleman-burglar appears where he is least expected! (...

The novel centres, in a very ambiguous way, around the life story of the protagonist Jacob Flanders, and is presented entirely by the impressions other characters have of Jacob [except for those times when we do indeed get Jacob's perspective]. Thus, although it could be said that the book is primarily a character study and has little in the way of plot or background, the narrative is constructed as a void in place of the central character, if indeed the novel can be said to have a 'protagonist' in conventional terms. Motifs of emptiness and absence haunt the novel and establish its elegiac ...

Virginia Woolf's most successful novel recounts the extraordinary biography of Orlando from his youth in the reign of Elizabeth I to her life as a successful author and mother in 1928, the year of the book's publication. Over the 350 years of his/her life, Orlando loves and is betrayed by a Russian princess, serves as British ambassador to Constantinople, changes sex, lives among gypsies, narrowly escapes marriage to the Archduchess Harriet/Archduke Harry, enjoys the society of Addison, Dryden and Pope, and finally marries Marmaduke Bonthrop Shelmardine with whom she has a child. Over the same...

"Mrs. Dalloway" recounts a day in the life of Clarissa Dalloway in the middle of June 1923. Clarissa Dalloway is a high society London lady. On that day, she is hosting a party, meeting people, going to the park, and reflecting on her choices. Where would she have been if she married Peter Walsh and not Richard Dalloway? What if she would not invite this or that person to her party? Her feelings about Peter Walsh grow because on that particular day he returns from India to settle some affairs in London. Other people also reflect on their choices. Mr. Smith who cannot move on from the horrors ...

Adeline Virginia Woolf was an English author, essayist, publisher, and writer of short stories, regarded as one of the foremost modernist literary figures of the twentieth century. During the interwar period, Woolf was a significant figure in London literary society and a member of the Bloomsbury Group. Her most famous works include the novels Mrs. Dalloway (1925), To the Lighthouse (1927), and Orlando (1928), and the book-length essay A Room of One's Own (1929), with its famous dictum, "A woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction."The slim book Monday or Tuesday ...

Virginia Woolf’s third novel lacks a conventional narrative style and some say even a plot. It follows Jacob from his childhood, through his education at Cambridge and finally to his death in World War I. The prose repeatedly shifts its point of view and the reader is challenged to find connections between the narrative fragments. Largely from the comments of others we come to know the sequence and some moments of Jacob’s life but we never fully learn who Jacob is. The literary experimentation in Jacob’s Room is used even more successfully in Woolf’s later novels. (Summary by DaveC)

Virginia Woolf's classic modernist novel explores the lives and thoughts of the Ramsays and their guests at the family's summer home on the Isle of Skye. The book is divided into three parts, described by Woolf as 'two blocks joined by a corridor'. The first and last parts tell of two days, ten years, and a world war apart. The 'corridor' describes the decay and renovation of the house over the intervening period, punctuated by marriages and deaths among the Ramsays and their friends. To the Lighthouse remains noteworthy for its use of multiple perspectives to reveal complexities of perception...

Virginia Woolf's groundbreaking satire of British culture, customs, literature, philosophy, and politics from the Elizabethan era to the author's present-day 1928, as experienced by her famously long-lived and genderfluid protagonist. - Summary by Nicole J. LeBoeuf

A fictional biography following the adventures of Orlando: initially a gentleman, later a lady — always a poet — who romps through British history, living an unusually long and full life…. (summary by Cori)This recording was originally published on Legamus.eu and was later released on Librivox when US copyright permitted.

The story of an exciting test of wits between world-class thief Arsène Lupin and master detective Herlock Sholmes. Translated from the French. - Summary by Andy Harrington

This great and terrifying poem about the final weeks of a long war fought between the Greeks and the Trojans before the city of Troy (here rendered into prose by Samuel Butler, himself a major nineteenth century English novelist) is at once violently graphic, emotionally searing and strikingly contemporary in its understanding of the extremities to which rage may drive men, even as they understand full well that they are pursuing their own doom. Nearly three thousand years before the advent of cinema, the author(s) of The Iliad had already mastered many of the tropes the Hollywood blockbuster ...

Viele der Märchen von Charles Perrault sind sehr bekannt - allerdings unter dem Namen der Brüder Grimm, die sie vielleicht von der berühmten Viehmännin, einer Kaufmannsfrau mit hugenottischen Wurzeln, erzählt bekommen haben. Perraults Versionen sind gut 100 Jahre älter und auch sie gehen auf ältere Quellen zurück. Eine Ausgabe der "Blauen Bibliothek aller Nationen", aus der diese Übersetzung von 1790 stammt, stand auch in der Bibliothek der Grimms. - Zusammenfassung von Hokuspokus

"It must equally be considered a splendid performance; and for the present we have no hesitation in saying that it is by far the best representation of Homer's Iliad in the English language." - London Times, 1865"The merits of Lord Derby's translation may be summed up in one word, it is eminently attractive; it is instinct with life; it may be read with fervent interest; it is immeasurably nearer than Pope to the text of the original. Lord Derby has given a version far more closely allied to the original, and superior to any that has yet been attempted in the blank verse of our language." - ...

J'aurais pu rendre mes Contes plus agréables en y mêlant certaines choses un peu libres dont on a accoutumé de les égayer; mais le désir de plaire ne m'a jamais assez tenté pour violer une loi que je me suis imposée de ne rien écrire qui pût blesser ou la pudeur ou la bienséance. Voici un Madrigal qu'une jeune Demoiselle de beaucoup d'esprit a composé sur ce sujet, et qu'elle a écrit au-dessous du Conte de Peau d'Ane que je lui avais envoyé.Le Conte de Peau d'Ane est ici racontéAvec tant de naïveté,Qu'il ne m'a pas moins divertie,Que quand auprès du feu ma Nourrice ou ma ...

Cette édition de 1742 nous rapporte les contes de ma mère l'Oye adaptés par Charles Perrault et agrémentés de moralités.Pleines d'enseignements, ces histoires du temps passé, contées, en France, depuis le Moyen Âge, nous ferons encore rêver ou frissonner avec leurs jeunes filles et jeunes gens dans l'adversité, leurs princesses et leurs princes et, bien sûr, leurs fées.Retrouvons donc le petit Chaperon rouge, Cendrillon, le Chat botté, ... et redécouvrons d'où nous vient ce « Anne, ma soeur Anne, ne vois-tu rien venir ? »In this book, published in 1742, Charles Perrault ...

This book is an early collection of ten well-known fairy tales. It is thought to have begun the genre of fairy tales.(Summary by A.L. Gramour)

Homer’s Iliad is the first great work of Western literature. Composed in twenty-four books of Greek hexameter poetry, it portrays the events of the last year of the Trojan War. Its translation into rhyming couplets by Alexander Pope is considered by some the greatest act of translation in English. Its power sweeps the reader along through an epic tale that begins with the wrath of Achilles and ends with the burial of Hector, breaker of horses. (Introduction by Steve Perkins)