Winner of the Venice Film Festival's Golden Lion Award for 1987, Louis Malle's Au revoir les enfants has been acclaimed as a masterpiece wherever it has been shown. One of the great filmmakers of our time, Malle both wrote and directed this delicate and heartbreaking portrait of a friendship -- between Julian, a Catholic boy, and his schoolmate Jean, one of several Jewish children being sheltered at a boarding school during the Nazi occupation of France. It is once a moving, unforgettable story and an evocation of a deeply personal formative experience in Malle's life.

" This collection] displays Vian's range from gallows humor to verbal fireworks, and happily serves to give visibility to this important writer."- Publishers Weekly. "Ultimately, Blues for a Black Cat is a collection of moral fables, albeit fables told in a cynical, mocking voice and set in a skewed version of the real world. Under the surface absurdity and verbal play, they offer serious indictments of human weakness and pretensions. Further, they reveal the spiritual emptiness just beneath our civilized faade. Vian's blues are not only for a black cat, but for a society without meaning."- Manoa. " Blues for a Black Cat] brings back the nimble Vian in a collection of his short fiction, initially published as Les Fourmis in 1949. The work has the unmistakable flavor of the time and place, Claude Abadie's jazz band, the coded and absurdist messages of rebellion, the wistful fables, verbal riffs and goofy anarchic encounters; the mise-en-scene includes an expiring jazzman who sells his sweat, a cat with a British accent and a piano that mixes a cocktail when "Mood Indigo" is played."-Boston Globe. Boris Vian (1920-59), a trained engineer and jazz trumpet player, was a major literary figure in World War II France. Julia Older is the author or editor of many works. Her stories, translations, and poems have appeared in New Directions, the New Yorker, and many other journals.