'Beautiful and deep ... a sumptuous treat for any book lover' The Independent 'Food for short story lovers everywhere' Irish Times *A major celebration of the French short story and Spectator Book of the Year* The short story has a rich tradition in French literature. This feast of an anthology celebrates its most famous practitioners, as well as newly translated writers ready for rediscovery. The first volume spans four hundred years, taking the reader from the sixteenth century to the 'golden age' of the fin de siècle. Its pages are populated by lovers, phantoms, cardinals, labourers, enchanted statues, gentleman burglars, retired bureaucrats, panthers and parrots, in a cacophony of styles and voices. From the affairs of Madame de Lafayette to the polemic realism of Victor Hugo, the supernatural mystery of Guy de Maupassant to the dark sensuality of Rachilde, this is the place to start for lovers of French literature, new and old. Edited and with an introduction by Patrick McGuinness, academic, writer and translator.

'Beautiful and deep ... a sumptuous treat for any book lover' The Independent 'Food for short story lovers everywhere' Irish Times *A major celebration of the French short story and Spectator Book of the Year* The short story has a rich tradition in French literature. This feast of an anthology celebrates its most famous practitioners, as well as newly translated writers ready for rediscovery. The second volume takes the reader through the tumultuous twentieth century in the company of writers including Simone de Beauvoir and Maryse Condé, Patrick Modiano and Virginie Despentes, covering world wars, revolutions, and the horrors of the motorway service station. Along the way we meet electronic brains, she-wolves, a sadistic Cinderella, ancestors, infidels, dissatisfied housewives and lonely ambassadors, all clamouring to be heard. Funny, devastating and fresh at every turn, this is the place to start for lovers of French literature, new and old. Edited and with an introduction by Patrick McGuinness, academic, writer and translator.

Real Oxford shows that there's more than dreaming spires and bicycles to the city. The grand buildings of the university are here, but Patrick McGuinness charts a personal history of the place which radiates into the suburbs and into the everyday of people's lives, past and present. Surprising, quirky, Real Oxford presents the city anew.

'Like an artist working an empty sky into a busy cityscape, or an empty chair into a crowded family portrait, Joyce creates spaces where the reader is left to themselves' Patrick McGuinness, from his Preface to Dubliners. Set in the late 19th and early 20th-century, Dubliners is made up of fifteen stories, which all sit within the realm of realism, with easily identifiable streets and a cartographic identity of the city. Alike Joyce's other works, the collection was repeatedly rejected by publishers and he received accusations of obscurity and obscenity before it finally appeared in print on 15 June 1914. This was five years after a contract was signed, six weeks before the outbreak of World War One, and at a time when Ireland was under British Home Rule. We find an intricate account of the lives of the city's inhabitants in Joyce's haunted and bleak vision of Dublin. Discover these stories for the first time here, or read them afresh, and marvel at the unique stories that Joyce was able to capture, and make timeless, for us all.

In this intimate, confiding poetry collection, McGuinness shows how identity is layered, permeable, always in motion - how we are always actor and audience to ourselves. In Blood Feather, a book of doubling and displacement, we see time in a new way: the past, personal and collective, lingering as an ever-present ghost - while lost beyond recall. The first section, 'Squeeze the Day' - a series of deeply moving poems about the author's mother, displaced between languages - investigates her illness and death; how being bilingual is like having a double, a second self; how each self haunts the other. 'The Noises Things Make When They Leave' elegises today's post-industrial landscapes, their people and professions: sidelined by literature, bypassed by globalisation. The final sequence, 'After the Flood', links the book's themes, seeking a way of seeing things for the first time and the last time simultaneously. Exploring the gaps between languages and between our selves in language, Patrick McGuinness dreams of a new tense in which the world's losses are redeemed: 'It's the anniversary of my mother's death, and it's my mother's birthday - the day she short-circuited the tenses, made the current flow both ways.' A clear-sighted, intimate new poetry collection from the prizewinning author of Other People's Countries and Throw me to the Wolves.

'It is not that Ulysses excludes us; it is, rather, that it includes us in ways that no other work prepares us for. The question is not 'what is a novel?', but what can a novel be? Ulysses is the answer' Patrick McGuinness from his preface to Ulysses: The Restored Text Initially rejected by several printers in Dublin and London for containing 'obscene' content, Ulysses was first published in book form in a limited-edition printing of 1000 copies by Shakespeare and Company in Paris in 1922. A subsequent printing was impounded by US customs and for a period the novel was famed for its notoriety rather than its literary achievement. Like its author, Ulysses exists in a complicated push-pull relationship with its language - English - and its setting - Ireland. Joyce returns to the themes that had preoccupied him in previous works, including nationalism and empire, religion, identity and sex in a novel which gloriously brings Dublin on June 16th 1904 to the page. This edition of Ulysses: The Restored Text includes the revisions that Joyce made to the novel during his lifetime.

A SPECTATOR BOOK OF THE YEAR 2022 'Beautiful and deep ... a sumptuous treat for any book lover' The Independent 'There is so much to discover in these stories - both history and food for short story lovers everywhere' Irish Times A major new celebration of the French short story The short story has a rich tradition in French literature. This feast of an anthology celebrates its most famous practitioners, as well as newly translated writers ready for rediscovery. Here are decadent tales, 'bloody tales', fairy tales, detective stories and war stories. They are stories about the self and the other, husbands, wives and lovers, country and city, rich and poor. The first volume spans four hundred years, taking the reader from the sixteenth century to the 'golden age' of the fin de siecle. Its pages are populated by lovers, phantoms, cardinals, labourers, enchanted statues, gentleman burglars, retired bureaucrats, panthers and parrots, in a cacophony of styles and voices. From the affairs of Madame de Lafayette to the polemic realism of Victor Hugo, the supernatural mystery of Guy de Maupassant to the dark sensuality of Rachilde, this is the place to start for lovers of French literature, new and old. Edited and with an introduction by Patrick McGuinness, academic, writer and translator.

A SPECTATOR BOOK OF THE YEAR 2022 'Beautiful and deep ... a sumptuous treat for any book lover' The Independent 'There is so much to discover in these stories - both history and food for short story lovers everywhere' Irish Times A major new celebration of the French short story across the twentieth century The short story has a rich tradition in French literature. This feast of an anthology celebrates its most famous practitioners, as well as newly translated writers ready for rediscovery. Here are fables, puzzles, fairy tales, war stories and family histories, testing and expanding the boundaries of the form. They are stories about the self and the other, the centre and the periphery, experimental and existential, real and surreal. The second volume takes the reader through the tumultuous twentieth century in the company of writers including Simone de Beauvoir and Maryse Conde, Patrick Modiano and Virginie Despentes, covering world wars, revolutions, and the horrors of the motorway service station. Along the way we meet electronic brains, she-wolves, a sadistic Cinderella, ancestors, infidels, dissatisfied housewives and lonely ambassadors, all clamouring to be heard. Funny, devastating and fresh at every turn, this is the place to start for lovers of French literature, new and old. Edited and with an introduction by Patrick McGuinness, academic, writer and translator.

Patrick McGuinness found fame with friend and co-star Peter Kay in 'Phoenix Nights' and 'Max and Paddy's Road to Nowhere'. He has now turned his hand to stand-up comedy. Join the Bolton man for some very definitely adult orientated comedy.

An important study of the work of Felix Vallotton, a prominent member of Les Nabis and a contemporary of Bonnard and Vuillard. Published to accompany exhibitions at the Royal Academy of Arts, London, 30 June - 29 September 2019, and The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, 29 October 2019 - 26 January 2020. The Swiss artist Felix Vallotton (1865-1925) was born in Lausanne, but spent much of his working life in France. Closely associated with Pierre Bonnard and Edouard Vuillard, and a fellow member of the avant-garde group Les Nabis, Vallotton has nonetheless sometimes been overshadowed by his more famous contemporaries. Although he produced some of his most important work in Paris in the 1890s, his original and innovative approach persisted throughout his career. Texts by leading authorities look at Vallotton's life, work and reception. Generously illustrated throughout with the finest exemplars of the artist's paintings and prints, this book accompanies a new presentation of Vallotton's oeuvre that aims to re-evaluate his output and legacy, and includes works never seen in public before. Exhibition organised by the Royal Academy of Arts, London, and The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, in collaboration with Fondation Felix Vallotton, Lausanne.

‘He drank this liquid perfume from cups of that oriental porcelain known as egg-shell china, it is so delicate and diaphanous’

A wildly original fin de siècle novel, Against Nature contains only one character. De Esseinte is a decadent, ailing aristocrat who retreats to an isolated villa where he indulges his taste for luxury and excess.  Veering between nervous excitability and debilitating ennui he gluts his aesthetic appetites with classical literature and art, exotic jewels (with which he fatally encrusts the shell of his tortoise), rich perfumes and a kaleidoscope of sensual experiences. Against Nature, in the words of the author exploded ‘like a grenade’ and has a cult following to this day.

This revised edition of Robert Baldick’s lucid translation, features a new introduction, a chronology and reproduces Huysman’s original 1903 preface as well as a selection of reviews from writers including Mallarme, Zola and Wilde.

The relationship between the made and the found is one of the most important themes in modern French literature. This collection of critical and creative writing explores how the interplay between the given and the imagined, the real and the virtual, the world as we find it and the world as we make it, functions as a generative matrix for literary experimentation. Each contributor considers the question of attention, and explores how attending to something - a text, a place, a moment, a detail - creates and transforms both perceiver and perceived. Drawing together analyses of diverse literary movements - Surrealism, new autobiographical forms, le nouveau roman, the everyday, contemporary poetics, anthropology, urbanism and flanerie - this volume invites us to make new connections between many well-established themes. Critical thinking by renowned scholars appears alongside poetry and prose by leading writers from France and Britain, forging new relationships between scholarly and creative practices, and challenging us to cross the border between the two.

Coplas a la muerte de su padre by Jorge Manrique (c.1440–79) is one of the most celebrated poems in the Spanish language. Written shortly before the poet’s death, it is a dignified elegy that speaks not just of a personal loss, that of the poet’s father Rodrigo Manrique (d.1476), but of the evanescence of all things. Its popularity is aided by memorable lines, not least the two opening metaphors: man’s life is a river meandering unto the sea of death, and this world is the road to the next, the lasting dwelling place. The poem replicates these reflections in its wending form. Its forty stanzas each comprise four tercets; each tercet is made up of two longer octosyllabic verses combined with one four-syllable half-line known as pie quebrado. These regular broken lines, like beats of a heart, invest the poem with a resonant quality befitting the injunction at the opening of the poem to awaken one’s slumbering soul to the passage of time.

'These beautifully wrought poems are meditations on time. Whatever the subject Patrick McGuinness captures that sense, as he so brilliantly puts it, that Somewhere the Angel of Oblivion, radiant, leans his face into the wind/that turns our pages.' - Vicki FeaverA winner in The Poetry Business Book & Pamphlet Competition 2006

This anthology showcases sixty poets writing in twenty-five languages from countries across Europe. A feat of European intercultural exchange, it is also a fitting celebration of the Versopolis ethos: an extraordinary variety of themes, styles, and subjects finding common ground in a shared idea of what poetry - and a poetry community - can be. This anthology is published in collaboration with Beletrina Academic Press, Slovenia, part of the Versopolis project.

Winner of the 2014 Duff Cooper Prize Winner of the 2015 Welsh Book of the Year Award Shortlisted for the 2015 James Tait Black Memorial Prize Shortlisted for the 2015 PEN Ackerley prize Longlisted for the 2014 Thwaites Wainwright Prize Let me take you down the thin cobblestoned streets of the Belgian border town of Bouillon. Let me take you down the alleys that lead into its past. To a town peopled with eccentrics, full of charm, menace and wonder. To the days before television, to Marie Bodard's sweetshop, to the Nazi occupation and unexpected collaborators. To a place where one neighbour murders another over the misfortune of pigs and potatoes. To the hotel where the French poet Verlaine his lover Rimbaud, holed up whilst on the run from family, creditors and the law. This exquisite meditation on place, time and memory is an illicit peek into other people's countries, into the spaces they have populated with their memories, and might just make you revisit your own in a new and surprising way.

'Abbe Faujas has arrived '
The arrival of Abbe Faujas in the provincial town of Plassans has profound consequences for the community, and for the family of Francois Mouret in particular. Faujas and his mother come to lodge with Francois, his wife Marthe, and their three children, and Marthe quickly falls under the influence of the priest. Ambitious and unscrupulous, Faujas gradually infiltrates into all quarters of the town, intent on political as well as religious conquest. Intrigue, slander, and insinuation tear the townsfolk apart, creating suspicion and distrust, and driving the Mourets to ever more extreme actions.
The fourth novel in Zola's Rougon-Macquart sequence, The Conquest of Plassans returns to the fictional Provencal town from which the family sprang in The Fortune of the Rougons. In one of the most psychological of his novels, Zola links small-town politics to the greater political and national dramas of the Second Empire.
The first modern translation for more than fifty years and the first critical edition, features a fascinating introduction and helpful notes by Man Booker Prize nominated novelist and poet Patrick McGuinness.

ABOUT THE SERIES: For over 100 years Oxford World's Classics has made available the widest range of literature from around the globe. Each affordable volume reflects Oxford's commitment to scholarship, providing the most accurate text plus a wealth of other valuable features, including expert introductions by leading authorities, helpful notes to clarify the text, up-to-date bibliographies for further study, and much more."

From short lyric pieces to long poetic sequences, moving elegies to playful translations, this collection explores how a sense of place and displacement are often unexpectedly connected. The poems, written both formally and in free verse, move from old and new Europe to the open spaces of North America and the urban frenzy of its cities, traveling in dreamlike journeys and vivid treks around the world. With versions of great European poets--such as Rilke, Baudelaire, and Rimbaud--and the first English translation of the Romanian dissident Liviu Campanu, this highly accomplished offering is about places and nonspaces--and whatever lies in between.

From the troubadours of the Middle Ages to the titans of modern poetry, from Rabelais and Ronsard to Jacques Reda and Yves Bonnefoy, French Poetry offers English-speaking readers a one-volume introduction to a rich and varied tradition. Here are today's rising stars mingling with the great writers of past centuries: La Fontaine, Villon, du Bellay, Christine de Pisan, Marguerite de Navarre, Louise Labe, Hugo, Baudelaire, Rimbaud, Verlaine, Mallarme, Apollinaire, and many more. Here, too, are representatives of the modern francophone world, encompassing Lebanese, Tunisian, Senegalese and Belgian poets, including such notable writers as Leopold Senghor, Venus Khoury-Ghata and Hedi Kaddour. Finally, this anthology showcases a wide range of the English language's finest translators - including such renowned poet-translators as Ezra Pound, John Ashbery, Marianne Moore and Derek Mahon - in a dazzling tribute to the splendours of French poetry.

Poetry and Radical Politics in fin de siecle France explores the relations between poetry and politics in France in the last decade of the nineteenth century. The period covers the most important developments in modern French poetry: from the post-Commune climate that spawned the 'decadent' movement, through to the (allegedly) ivory-towered aestheticism of Mallarme and the Symbolists. In terms of French politics, history, and culture, the period was no less dramatic, with the legacy of the Commune, the political and financial instability that followed, the anarchist campaigns, the Dreyfus affair, and the growth of Action francaise. This study demonstrates the connections between the anti-Symbolist reaction of the ecole romane of 1891 (in which Charles Maurras first made his name) and the far-right cultural politics of Action francaise in the early twentieth century. It also redefines many of the debates about late nineteenth-century French poetry by complicating the political engagement of the Symbolists in an era when the French 'intellectuel' as a national icon was being forged. McGuinness insists on profound continuities between the end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth in terms of cultural politics, literary debate, and poetic theory, and shows how politics is to be found in unexpected ways in the least political-seeming literature of the period. The famous line by Peguy, that everything begins in mysticism and ends in politics, has an appealing sweep and grace. This book has its own more modest and specific version of a similar journey: it begins in Mallarme and ends in Maurras.

A distinguished list of contributors explores a variety of perspectives on the artistic culture of France and surrounding countries during the period 1870 to 1914. Aspects of dance, cinema, theater, poetry, prose, painting, social and political science, history, and medicine are covered in interdisciplinary essays that are both useful to researchers and accessible to students.

The first part of the book, which concentrates on France, assembles essays on the prose, poetry, and painting of Symbolism and Decadence, in particular Mallarme and Moreau; on avant-garde dance and performance; on women's writing; and on early cinema from Lumiere, Villiers, and Verne.

The second part explores the relations between France and several cultures. These cross-cultural investigations range from studies of the Anglo-Celtic "Rhymers' Club" to the Italian Crepusculari and include discussions of Belgian Symbolism and the Franco-Anglo-American Axis. The essays consistently point beyond the late nineteenth century and into the twentieth as they explore the multiple beginnings -- as well as the false starts -- that characterize the period.