A giant of postwar music and the most powerful figure in the contemporary French music scene, Pierre Boulez is widely known to American and English audiences as both an important composer and as star conductor of the New York Philharmonic, the Cleveland Orchestra, the BBC Symphony Orchestra, and the Chicago Symphony Orchestra. These candid interviews give us vintage Boulez - his bold views, enigmatic wit, practical wisdom, and uncompromising beliefs. Here the eminent composer, who has been called both "a wild man of the avant-garde" and "the last true maestro" (New York Times), talks about being one of the world's most controversial conductors and daring programmers of musical taste. Boulez sometimes locks horns with French author Jean Vermeil, who confronts him with his past and prods him to discuss the future of music and orchestras. Boulez tells how and why he chose his battles and lays out his vision of the conductor's mission. He tells what he learned - and didn't learn - from other conductors, and how he feels about the composers who compromise his repertoire, including Webern, Berg, Schoenberg, Stravinsky, Messiaen (with whom he studied), and, of course, Boulez himself.

The literary adventure of D.A.F. (1740-1814) is unique and paradoxical. He was widely read in the nineteenth century, but his books disappeared almost completely from circulation in the century. Meanwhile the exegesis of Sade poured from the presses of the Western world in a flood of words in which the writer, the novelist, and the exceptional pet disappeared.

In France today, J. J. Pauvert, who considers Sade "the greatest French writer," is publishing a new edition of the complete works with a new introduction by Annie Le Brun. Sade: A Sudden Abyss is the translation of this introduction, which shows Sade as the inventor of an entirely new language through which he fathoms human nature, desire, and relationships of power.

In this fresh and authoritative survey of Sade's work as a whole, Le Brun frees it from such critics as Bataille, Blanchot, Klossowski, and Barthes (who see Sade's language as a metaphor for history, society, or writing itself). She asks, Where is Sade himself in these texts? What exactly does Sade tell us? What is obscured when Sade's writing is placed in a "universe of discourse" rather than understood as a manifestation of a life spent in eleven prisons over twenty-seven years? Like a powerful laser beam, her reflections cut through two centuries of intellectual hide-and-seek and let Sade for the first time be seen and read in his own light.

Annie Le Brun is a French poet and literary theorist. Her books include Lachez tout, a critique of the French neofeminist movement; A distance; and Les chateaux de la subversion, a study of the Gothic tradition.

In 1791, the French femme de lettres Olympe de Gouges wrote that 'as women have the right to take their places on the scaffold, they must also have the right to take their seats in government'. This book explores the issues of female emancipation through the history of female execution, from the burning of Joan of Arc in 1431 to the events of the French revolution.

Concentrating on individual victims, the author addresses the sexual attitudes and prejudices encountered by women condemned to death. She examines the horrific treatment of those denounced as witches and reveals the gruesome reality of death by hanging, burning or the guillotine. In an attempt to uncover the historical truth behind such figures as Joan of Arc, Anne Boleyn, Manon Roland and Charlotte Corday, she goes beyond biography to consider their deaths in symbolic terms. She also considers writers such as Genet, Yourcenar and Brecht and their treatment of the tragic, sacrificial and erotic aspects of female execution.

Statistics-driven thinking is ubiquitous in modern society. In this ambitious and sophisticated study of the history of statistics, which begins with probability theory in the seventeenth century, Alain Desrosieres shows how the evolution of modern statistics has been inextricably bound up with the knowledge and power of governments. He traces the complex reciprocity between modern governments and the mathematical artifacts that both dictate the duties of the state and measure its successes.

No other work, in any language, covers such a broad spectrum--probability, mathematical statistics, psychology, economics, sociology, surveys, public health, medical statistics--in accurately synthesizing the history of statistics, with an emphasis on the conceptual development of social statistics, culminating in twentieth-century applied econometrics.

The Edge of Surrealism is an essential introduction to the writing of French social theorist Roger Caillois. Caillois was part of the Surrealist avant-garde and in the 1930s founded the College of Sociology with Georges Bataille and Michel Leiris. He spent his life exploring issues raised by this famous group and by Surrealism itself. Though his subjects were diverse, Caillois focused on concerns crucial to modern intellectual life, and his essays offer a unique perspective on many of twentieth-century France’s most significant intellectual movements and figures. Including a masterful introductory essay by Claudine Frank situating his work in the context of his life and intellectual milieu, this anthology is the first comprehensive introduction to Caillois’s work to appear in any language. These thirty-two essays with commentaries strike a balance between Caillois’s political and theoretical writings and between his better known works, such as the popular essays on the praying mantis, myth, and mimicry, and his lesser-known pieces. Presenting several new pieces and drawing on interviews and unpublished correspondence, this book reveals Caillois’s consistent effort to reconcile intellectual rigor and imaginative adventure. Perhaps most importantly, The Edge of Surrealism provides an overdue look at how Caillois’s intellectual project intersected with the work of Georges Bataille and others including Breton, Bachelard, Benjamin, Lacan, and Lévi-Strauss.

The Edge of Surrealism is an essential introduction to the writing of French social theorist Roger Caillois. Caillois was part of the Surrealist avant-garde and in the 1930s founded the College of Sociology with Georges Bataille and Michel Leiris. He spent his life exploring issues raised by this famous group and by Surrealism itself. Though his subjects were diverse, Caillois focused on concerns crucial to modern intellectual life, and his essays offer a unique perspective on many of twentieth-century France's most significant intellectual movements and figures. Including a masterful introductory essay by Claudine Frank situating his work in the context of his life and intellectual milieu, this anthology is the first comprehensive introduction to Caillois's work to appear in any language. These thirty-two essays with commentaries strike a balance between Caillois's political and theoretical writings and between his better known works, such as the popular essays on the praying mantis, myth, and mimicry, and his lesser-known pieces. Presenting several new pieces and drawing on interviews and unpublished correspondence, this book reveals Caillois's consistent effort to reconcile intellectual rigor and imaginative adventure. Perhaps most importantly, The Edge of Surrealism provides an overdue look at how Caillois's intellectual project intersected with the work of Georges Bataille and others including Breton, Bachelard, Benjamin, Lacan, and Levi-Strauss.

However swiftly it passes, youth is always with us, a perpetual passing phase, an apprenticeship to the myriad ways of the world, subject of panegyrics and diatribes, romances and cautionary tales from antiquity to our day. This two-volume history is the first to present a comprehensive account of what youth has been in the West and what it has meant through the ages. Brought together by Giovanni Levi and Jean-Claude Schmitt, a company of gifted historians and social scientists traces the changing character and status of young people from the gymnasia of ancient Greece to the lycees of modern France, from the sweatshops of the industrial revolution to the crucibles of Nazi youth.

Monumental in its scope, minute in its attention to detail, "A History of Young People" takes us into the sensational rituals surrounding youth in Roman antiquity (such as the Lupercalia, with its nudity and whipping) and into the chivalric trials awaiting the privileged young of the Middle Ages. Elisabeth Crouzet-Pavan and Michel Pastoureau explore the elusive question of what defines youth, a concept that over time has reached from infancy to the age of forty. Elliott Horowitz and Renata Ago consider the young in the context of the family--within the different worlds of European Judaism and Catholicism through the Renaissance. Sabina Loriga takes us through three centuries of military experience to temper and complicate our assumptions about the youthful face of war. Michelle Perrot focuses on working-class youth, and Jean-Claude Caron on the young at school. The obedient and the rebellious are here, the cherished and the sacrificed, the children catapulted into adult responsibility, the adults whohave yet to forsake the protections of childhood. What emerges in this history as never before is a vast, richly textured picture of youth as a changing constant of culture, society, economics, politics, and art, and as a uniquely complex experience of acculturation in every life.