Most of Andre Gide's richly-varied literary output has long been available to American readers. Only one aspect of his protean career has been lacking in translation: the essays, the publication of which will go far to explain why Gide holds in France such high rank as a critic. Many of the essays in Pretexts: Reflections on Literature and Morality were provoked by events in the cultural and political world of twentieth-century France, a turbulent setting that produced a lasting literature. These essays are vintage Gide, informed by his characteristic spirit his hard brilliance, pointed honesty, and the enduring relevance of his concerns. Readers of his Journals will be prepared for the style, intelligence, and marksmanship that Gide brings to bear in these forty-two articles on life as well as on letters. His range, as always, is broad: a long and moving memoir of his encounters with Oscar Wilde; a series of combats against reactionary nationalists and self-appointed purifiers of morals; estimates of Mallarme, Baudelaire, Proust, Gautier, and Valery, among others; letters to Jacques Riviere, Jean Cocteau, and Francis Jammes; and general essays on art, literature, the theater, and politics. Justin O'Brien, famous for his studies in modern French literature, has written that Gide is "related to La Fontaine and Racine by his essential conciseness and crystalline style, to Montaigne and Goethe by his inquiring mind which reconciled unrest and serenity, to Baudelaire by his lucid, prophetic criticism." O'Brien, who has done so much to bring contemporary French literature to America, supervised the translations in Pretexts: Reflections on Literature and Morality, prepared several of them himself, and contributes an informative general introduction and additional commentary to preface the various sections of this major book.

Most of Andre Gide's richly-varied literary output has long been available to American readers. Only one aspect of his protean career has been lacking in translation: the essays, the publication of which will go far to explain why Gide holds in France such high rank as a critic. Many of the essays in "Pretexts: Reflections on Literature and Morality" were provoked by events in the cultural and political world of twentieth-century France, a turbulent setting that produced a lasting literature. These essays are vintage Gide, informed by his characteristic spirit--his hard brilliance, pointed honesty, and the enduring relevance of his concerns. Readers of his "Journals "will be prepared for the style, intelligence, and marksmanship that Gide brings to bear in these forty-two articles on life as well as on letters. His range, as always, is broad: a long and moving memoir of his encounters with Oscar Wilde; a series of combats against reactionary nationalists and self-appointed purifiers of morals; estimates of Mallarme, Baudelaire, Proust, Gautier, and Valery, among others; letters to Jacques Riviere, Jean Cocteau, and Francis Jammes; and general essays on art, literature, the theater, and politics. Justin O'Brien, famous for his studies in modern French literature, has written that Gide is "related to La Fontaine and Racine by his essential conciseness and crystalline style, to Montaigne and Goethe by his inquiring mind which reconciled unrest and serenity, to Baudelaire by his lucid, prophetic criticism." O'Brien, who has done so much to bring contemporary French literature to America, supervised the translations in "Pretexts: Reflections on Literature and Morality," " "prepared several of them himself, and contributes an informative general introduction and additional commentary to preface the various sections of this major book.

Madeleine is the story of a great writer's marriage, a deeply disturbing account of Andre Gide's feelings towards his beloved and long-suffering wife. It was a relationship which Gide exalted-he termed it the central drama of his existence-yet deliberately shrouded in mystery. This was no ordinary marriage. Madeleine Rondeaux, two years older than her cousin Andre Gide, became his wife after Gide's first visit to Algeria. In his Journal, Gide refers to her as Emmanuele or as Em. Only in this book, published a few months after his death, does Gide call her by her real name and painfully reveal the nature of their life together. All of Gide's vast work may be viewed as a confession, impelled by his need to write what he believed to be true about himself. In Madeleine this act of confession reaches a crowning point. It is a complex tale by a complex man about a complex relationship. "Ranks among the masterpieces of Gide's vibrating prose. It is also the most tragic personal document to have emanated from Gide's pen."-New York Times.

"Strait is the Gate," first published in 1909 in France as "La Porte etroite," is a novel about the failure of love in the face of the narrowness of the moral philosophy of Protestantism. --- Andre Gide (1869 - 1951) was a French author and winner of the Nobel Prize in literature in 1947. Gide's career spanned from the symbolist movement to the advent of anticolonialism in between the two World Wars. Gide's work can be seen as an investigation of freedom and empowerment in the face of moralistic and puritan constraints, and gravitates around his continuous effort to achieve intellectual honesty. His self-exploratory texts reflect his search of how to be fully oneself, without at the same time betraying one's values... --- "For Gide was very different from the picture most people had of him. He was the very reverse of an aesthete, and, as a writer, had nothing in common with the doctrine of art for art's sake. He was a man deeply involved in a specific struggle, a specific fight, who never wrote a line which he did not think was of service to the cause he had at heart." (Francois Mauriac)

During the author's travels, he meets Menalcas, a caricature of Oscar Wilde, who relates his fantastic life story. But for all his brilliance, Menalcas is only Gide's yesterday self, a discarded wraith who leaves Gide free to stop exalting the ego and embrace bodily and spiritual joy. Later Fruits of the Earth, written in 1935 during Gide's short-lived spell of communism, reaffirms the doctrine of the earlier book. But now he sees happiness not as freedom, but a submission to heroism. In a series of 'Encounters', Gide describes a Negro tramp, a drowned child, a lunatic and other casualties of life. These reconcile him to suffering, death and religion, causing him to insist that 'today's Utopia' be 'tomorrow's reality'.

'It's only after our death that we shall really be able to hear' The measured tone of hopeless nihilism that pervades The Counterfeiters quickly shatters any image of André Gide as the querulous and impious Buddha to a quarter-century of intellectuals. In sharp and brilliant prose a seedy, cynical and gratuitously alarming narrative is developed, involving a wide range of otherwise harmless and mainly middle-to-upper-class Parisians. But the setting could be anywhere. From puberty through adolescence to death, The Counterfeiters is a rare encyclopedia of human disorder, weakness and despair.

This debut work lays bare the early brilliance and philosophical conflicts of Andre Gide, a towering figure in French literature. Andre Gide, one of the masters of French literature, captures the essence of the philosophical Romantic in this profoundly personal first novel, completed when he was just twenty years old. Drawing heavily on his religious upbringing and private journals, The Notebooks of Andre Walter with its white and black halves tells the story of a young man pining for his forbidden love, cousin Emmanuelle. But his evocative memories and devoted yearnings, carefully crafted through quotations and diary excerpts, lead only to madness and death. Annotated with footnotes from translator and scholar Wade Baskin, this story within a story offers a unique portrait of the artist as a young man, as it reveals the key themes of self-analysis and moral conscience that Gide explores in his mature works.

Michel knows nothing about love when he marries the gentle Marceline out of duty to his father. They travel to Tunisia for their honeymoon, where Michel becomes very ill. During his recovery, he meets a young Arab boy, whose radiant health and beauty captivate him. This is an awakening for him both sexually and morally and, in seeking to live according to his own desires, Michel discovers a new freedom. But, as he also finds, freedom can be a burden.

Set in the 1890s, Andre Gide's famous satire centres around a group of ingenious fraudsters ('The Millipede') who convince their wealthy victims that the pontiff has been imprisoned in the Vatican cellars, and a false Pope has been enthroned in his place. Posing as clergy, they con money by promising to obtain the true Pope's release and restoration. The book features one of Gide's most memorable creations: the amoral Lafcadio, who in pushing a man from a moving train commits the ultimate motiveless crime. Unavailable in the UK for 25 years, this scandalous, funny and highly original novel has been re-translated to mark the centenary of its publication. Supported by English PEN.

This is a new release of the original 1925 edition.

First published nearly one hundred years ago, Andre Gide's masterpiece, translated from the original French by Pulitzer Prize winner Richard Howard, draws from the disciplines of biology, philosophy, and history to support the author's assertion that homosexuality is a natural human trait At the time of his death in 1951, having won the Nobel Prize in Literature only four years prior, Andre Gide was considered one of the most important literary minds of the twentieth century. In Corydon, initially released anonymously in installments between 1911 and 1920, Gide speaks his most subversive and provocative truth. Citing myriad examples that span thousands of years, Gide's Socratic dialogues argue that homosexuality is natural--in fact, far more so than the social construct of exclusive heterosexuality, the act of systematically banning or ostracizing same-sex relationships. Corydon, named for the pederast character in Virgil's Eclogues, caused its author "all kinds of trouble," according to his friends, but he regarded it as his most important work. The courage, intelligence, and prescience of Gide's argument make it all the more impressive today.

This is a new release of the original 1949 edition.

This is a new release of the original 1949 edition.

Kessinger Publishing is the place to find hundreds of thousands of rare and hard-to-find books with something of interest for everyone

Kessinger Publishing is the place to find hundreds of thousands of rare and hard-to-find books with something of interest for everyone!

1925. French writer, humanist, and moralist who received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1947. Gide's search for self, the underlying theme of his several works, remained essentially religious. Throughout his career Gide used his writings to examine moral questions. He is as well known for his influence as a moralist and a thinker as for his contributions to literature. Lafcadio Wluiki is one of the original creations in modern fiction. Gide's preoccupation with the gratuitous action, the unmotivated crime-it has a place in more than one of his books-here receives its most extended treatment, and Lafcadio is the instrument. With characteristic irony, Gide leads the police to a solution wherein the wrong man is apprehended and punished for the crime, while the charmingly perverse Lafcadio goes free. The action passes with cinematographic speed, chiefly in the capitals of Europe. The actors, other than Lafcadio, are noblemen, saints, adventurers and pickpockets. See other titles by this author available from Kessinger Publishing.

1925. French writer, humanist, and moralist who received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1947. Gide's search for self, the underlying theme of his several works, remained essentially religious. Throughout his career Gide used his writings to examine moral questions. He is as well known for his influence as a moralist and a thinker as for his contributions to literature. Lafcadio Wluiki is one of the original creations in modern fiction. Gide's preoccupation with the gratuitous action, the unmotivated crime-it has a place in more than one of his books-here receives its most extended treatment, and Lafcadio is the instrument. With characteristic irony, Gide leads the police to a solution wherein the wrong man is apprehended and punished for the crime, while the charmingly perverse Lafcadio goes free. The action passes with cinematographic speed, chiefly in the capitals of Europe. The actors, other than Lafcadio, are noblemen, saints, adventurers and pickpockets. See other titles by this author available from Kessinger Publishing.