For forty years Charles Alavoine has sleepwalked through his life. Growing up as a good boy in the grip of a domineering mother, he trains as a doctor, marries, opens a medical practice in a quiet country town, and settles into an existence of impeccable
Set in a modern, urban Paris, the prose pieces in this volume constitute a further exploration of the terrain Baudelaire had covered in his verse masterpiece, The Flowers of Evil: the city and its squalor and inequalities, the pressures of time and mortal
"This book is an exploration. By means of words, signs, drawings. Mescaline, the subject explored." In Miserable Miracle, the great French poet and artist Henri Michaux, a confirmed teetotaler, tells of his life-transforming first encounters with a powerf
Dirty, drunk, unloved, and unloving, Hector Loursat has been a bitter recluse for eighteen long years—ever since his wife abandoned him and their newborn child to run off with another man. Once a successful lawyer, Loursat now guzzles burgundy and burie
Maigret, accompanying his physician on an emergency call, is drawn into one of his most stubborn cases yet. The victim, a son of a wealthy perfume manufacturer, had been enjoying an odd hobby before his death: collecting human voices with a tape recorder,
Nineteen-year-old Frank Friedmaier lives in a country under occupation. Most people struggle to get by; Frank takes it easy in his mother's whorehouse, which caters to members of the occupying forces. But Frank is restless. He is a pimp, a thug, a petty t
Paisiblement retirA(c) A Meung-sur-Loire, le commissaire Maigret se laisse convaincre par un tout jeune homme, Jean Maura, de l'accompagner A New York. Maura s'inquiA]te pour son pA]re, un homme d'affaires d'origine franAaise, qui semble en proie A de gra
