Cette uvre (edition relie) fait partie de la serie TREDITION CLASSICS. La maison d'edition tredition, basee a Hambourg, a publie dans la serie TREDITION CLASSICS des ouvrages anciens de plus de deux millenaires. Ils etaient pour la plupart epuises ou uniquement disponible chez les bouquinistes. La serie est destinee a preserver la litterature et a promouvoir la culture. Avec sa serie TREDITION CLASSICS, tredition a comme but de mettre a disposition des milliers de classiques de la litterature mondiale dans differentes langues et de les diffuser dans le monde entier.

Cette uvre (edition relie) fait partie de la serie TREDITION CLASSICS. La maison d'edition tredition, basee a Hambourg, a publie dans la serie TREDITION CLASSICS des ouvrages anciens de plus de deux millenaires. Ils etaient pour la plupart epuises ou uniquement disponible chez les bouquinistes. La serie est destinee a preserver la litterature et a promouvoir la culture. Avec sa serie TREDITION CLASSICS, tredition a comme but de mettre a disposition des milliers de classiques de la litterature mondiale dans differentes langues et de les diffuser dans le monde entier.

Cette uvre (edition relie) fait partie de la serie TREDITION CLASSICS. La maison d'edition tredition, basee a Hambourg, a publie dans la serie TREDITION CLASSICS des ouvrages anciens de plus de deux millenaires. Ils etaient pour la plupart epuises ou uniquement disponible chez les bouquinistes. La serie est destinee a preserver la litterature et a promouvoir la culture. Avec sa serie TREDITION CLASSICS, tredition a comme but de mettre a disposition des milliers de classiques de la litterature mondiale dans differentes langues et de les diffuser dans le monde entier.

Jules Renard's Nature Stories is a deliciously whimsical classic from the era of the great French Postimpressionist painters. Renard mingles wonder and humour in a series of miniature portraits of subjects drawn from the natural world: dogs, cats, pigs, roses, snails, trees and birds of all sorts, humans of course, and even a humble potato. Ranging from a sentence to several pages, Renard's sketches are masterpieces of compression and description, capturing both appearance and behavior through a choice of details that makes the familiar unfamiliar and yet surprisingly true to life. Renard's animals not only feel but speak, and one species, the swallow, even writes Hebrew. These creatures fascinate Renard, who in turn makes them fascinating to us, instilling us with the sense that everything that has a life and grows in the hand of nature is to be respected, and that every creature and being is as individual as it is interrelated. In Douglas Parmee's inspired new translation, Renard's wonderful evocations of the natural world come to life as never before in English.

A delightful variation on the long tradition of bestiary writing, Jules Renard's short verse and prose poems have captured the imagination of readers and artists since they were originally written in 1894, with Ravel famously setting five of them to music. Presented in a new version by acclaimed translator Richard Stokes, this sumptuously produced volume will captivate and enchant new generations of readers the world over.

'As a mayor, I am responsible for the upkeep of rural roads; as poet, I prefer to see them neglected.' Jules Renard was a French literary figure of the late nineteenth century. Not a Parisian but a committed countryman, he was elected mayor in 1904 of the tiny village of Citry-le-Mines in a remote part of northern Burgundy. He had the soul of a rustic bourgeois but the ambition of a metropolitan, and his wife's money allowed him to move in elevated circles, though he seemed an awkward customer, a badger, and looked like one. He wrote fiction, journalism and drama, very successfully, but the Journal is Renard's masterpiece, the least categorizable work of the French fin de siecle. The Journal constitutes a profusion of entries, without stitching or pattern: mordant reflections on style, literature and theatre; portraits of family, friends and the Parisian literary scene; quasi-ethnographical observations on village life and notations of the natural world which are unlike anything except themselves. Samuel Beckett spoke of Renard in the same breath as Proust and Celine, wrote of the Journal that 'for me it is as inexhaustible as Boswell ' and believed his style was learnt from despair. Gide said the Journal was 'not a river but a distillery'. Sartre wrote that 'He invented the literature of silence'. But above all it is a moving and splintery piece of self-scrutiny. Julian Barnes has admired the Journal for many years and has made this new selection from the twelve hundred page Pleiade edition. Theo Cuffe's translation will help bring this fierce judge of human foibles to a new generation of readers.

'As a mayor, I am responsible for the upkeep of rural roads; as poet, I prefer to see them neglected.' Jules Renard was a French literary figure of the late nineteenth century. Not a Parisian but a committed countryman, he was elected mayor in 1904 of the tiny village of Citry-le-Mines in a remote part of northern Burgundy. He had the soul of a rustic bourgeois but the ambition of a metropolitan, and his wife's money allowed him to move in elevated circles, though he seemed an awkward customer, a badger, and looked like one. He wrote fiction, journalism and drama, very successfully, but the Journal is Renard's masterpiece, the least categorizable work of the French fin de siecle. The Journal constitutes a profusion of entries, without stitching or pattern: mordant reflections on style, literature and theatre; portraits of family, friends and the Parisian literary scene; quasi-ethnographical observations on village life and notations of the natural world which are unlike anything except themselves. Samuel Beckett spoke of Renard in the same breath as Proust and Celine, wrote of the Journal that 'for me it is as inexhaustible as Boswell ' and believed his style was learnt from despair. Gide said the Journal was 'not a river but a distillery'. Sartre wrote that 'He invented the literature of silence'. But above all it is a moving and splintery piece of self-scrutiny. Julian Barnes has admired the Journal for many years and has made this new selection from the twelve hundred page Pleiade edition. Theo Cuffe's translation will help bring this fierce judge of human foibles to a new generation of readers.