"Writing," one of Marguerite Duras's last works, is a meditation on the process of writing and on her need for solitude in order to do it. In the five short pieces collected in this volume, she explores experiences that had an emotional impact on her and that inspired her to write. These vary from the death of a pilot in World War II, to the death of a fly, to an art exhibition. Two of the pieces were made into documentary films, and one was originally a short film. Both autobiographical and fictional, like much of her work, "Writing" displays Duras's unique worldview and sensitive insight in her simple and poetic prose.

Marguerite Duras, the Elena Ferrante of French literature, rose to global stardom with her erotic masterpiece The Lover, which won the prestigious Prix Goncourt, has over a million copies in print in English, has been translated into forty-three languages, and was adapted into a canonical film in 1992. While almost all of Duras's novels have been translated into English, her debut The Impudent Ones (Les Impudents) has been a glaring exception until now. Fans of Duras will be thrilled to discover the germ of her bold, vital prose and signature blend of memoir and fiction in this intense and mournful story of the Taneran family, which introduces Duras's classic themes of familial conflict, illicit romance, and scandal in the sleepy suburbs and southwest provinces of postwar France. With storytelling that evokes in equal parts beauty and brutality, Duras depicts the scalding effect of seduction and disrepute on the soul of a young French girl. Duras's great gift was her ability to bring to vivid and passionate life characters with whom society may not have sympathized, but with whom readers certainly do. Through its striking prose and strong feminist themes, The Impudent Ones will delight established Duras fans and a new generation of readers alike.

An international bestseller with more than one million copies in print and a winner of France's Prix Goncourt, The Lover" has been acclaimed by critics all over the world since its first publication in 1984. Set in the pre-war Indochina of Marguerite Duras' childhood, this is the haunting tale of a tumultuous affair between an adolescent French girl and her Chinese lover. In spare yet luminous prose, Duras evokes life on the margins of Saigon in the waning days of France's colonial empire, and its representation in the passionate relationship between two unforgettable outcasts.

'One of the 20th century's greatest thinkers and prose stylists' New York Times 'A novel of the disquieting contours of family, and of the mind, and of life unceasing even in the midst of death by one of the most important, visionary writers of all time' Amina Cain, author of Indelicacy WITH A FOREWORD BY KATE ZAMBRENO There's nothing to do about boredom, I'm bored, but one day I won't be bored anymore. Soon I'll know that it's not even worth the trouble. We'll have the easy life. Twenty-five-year-old Francine Veyrenattes, confined to the family farm, already feels that life is passing her by. But after Francine lets slip a terrible secret, culminating in the violent deaths of her brother and uncle, her world is shattered. Fleeing the farm for the seaside, Francine finds herself disintegrating. Lying in the sun with her toes in the sand, she restlessly wishes for things to be somehow easier, to have a life worth living. But then the calm and quiet is broken yet again - by another tragedy and a senseless death, in which Francine finds herself implicated. Cast out of paradise, and stranded between her home and the rest of the world, she must confront her rapidly dissolving sense of self if she is to find a way to survive. 'It's a masterpiece, and a little known, if not unknown, masterpiece ... Any serious reader of this author's work must begin with this novel' YVES BERGER

A controversial figure of the postwar French literary and cultural scene, Marguerite Duras has exerted a powerful hold on readers around the world. This volume of interviews--hailed on its French publication as Duras's "secret confession"--offers readers a rich vein of new insight into her work, opinions, life, and relationships. The interviews that make up the book were conducted in 1987, when Italian journalist Leopoldina Pallotta della Torre met the seventy-three-year-old Duras at her Paris flat and convinced her to sit for a series of conversations. The resulting book was published in Italian in 1989, but it somehow failed to attract a French publisher, and it was quickly forgotten. Nearly a quarter of a century later, however, the book was rediscovered and translated into French, and, it has now become a sensation. In its revealing pages, Duras speaks with extraordinary freedom about her life as a writer, her relationship to cinema, her friendship with Mitterand, her love of Chekhov and football, and, perhaps most significantly, her childhood in pre-war Vietnam, the experiences that propelled her most famous novel, The Lover. A true literary event, finally available in English, The Suspended Passion is a remarkable document of an extraordinary literary life.

In this classic novel by the best-selling author of The Lover, erotic intrigue masks a chillingly deceptive form of madness. Elisabeth Alione is convalescing in a hotel in rural France when she meets two men and another woman. The sophisticated dalliance among the four serves to obscure an underlying violence, which, when the curtain of civilization is drawn aside, reveals in her fellow guests a very contemporary, perhaps even new, form of insanity. Like many of Duras's novels, Destroy, She Said owes much to cinema, displaying a skillful interplay of dialogue and description. There are recurring moods and motifs from the Duras repertoire: eroticism, lassitude, stifled desire, a beautiful woman, a mysterious forest, a desolate provincial hotel. Included in this volume is an in-depth interview with Duras by Jacques Rivette and Jean Narboni.

For fans of Duras’s enduring bestseller The Lover, an evocative and intimate exploration of the drama and power of adolescence, in a remarkable blend of fiction and memoir Far more daring and truthful than any of her other novels, The North China Lover is a fascinating retelling of the dramatic experiences of Duras's adolescence that shaped her most famous work. Initially conceived as notes toward a screenplay for The Lover, this later novel, written toward the end of her life, emphasizes the tougher aspects of her youth in Indochina and possesses the intimate feel of a documentary. Both shocking and enthralling, the story Duras tells is "so powerfully imagined (or remembered) that it . . . lingers like a strong perfume" (Publishers Weekly). Hailed by the French critics as a return to "the Duras of the great books and the great days," it is a mature and complex rendering of a formative period in the author's life.

A man hires a woman to spend several weeks with him by the sea. The woman is no one in particular, a "she," a warm, moist body with a beating heart-the enigma of Other. Skilled in the mechanics of sex, he desires through her to penetrate a different mystery: he wants to learn love. It isn't a matter of will, she tells him. Still, he wants to learn to try . . .This beautifully wrought erotic novel is an extended haiku on the meaning of love, "perhaps a sudden lapse in the logic of the universe," and of its absence, "the malady of death." "The whole tragedy of the inability to love is in this work, thanks to Duras' unparalleled art of reinventing the most familiar words, of weighing their meaning." - Le Monde; "Deceptively simple and Racinian in its purity, condensed to the essential." - Translation Review.

"It's the women who upset the applecart. Between themselves they talk only about the practicalities of life", declares Duras in this collection of her transcribed conversations with friend Jerome Beaujour. Some of her free-ranging meditations are short and deceptively simple, while many are autobiographical and reveal her most intimate thoughts about motherhood, her struggle with alcohol, her love for a young man, and more.

Marguerite Duras was one of the leading intellectuals and novelist of post-war France, but her wartime writings were not published in full until after her death. The Wartime Notebooks trace Duras's formative experiences - including her difficult childhood in Indochina and her harrowing wait for her husband's return from Nazi internment - revealing the personal history behind her bestselling novels. The Lover is the best known of these; set in pre-war Indochina, its haunting tale of a tumultuous affair between an adolescent French girl and her wealthy Chinese lover is based on her own life. In spare and luminous prose, Duras evokes life on the margins in the waning days of France's colonial empire, and the passionate relationship between two unforgettable outcasts. Practicalities is a collection of small and intensely personal pieces Duras dictated near the end of her life. These deceptively simple meditations on motherhood, domesticity, sex, love, alcohol, writing, and more are witty, earthy, outspoken and surprisingly fresh and relevant to the same issues today.

A controversial figure of the postwar French literary and cultural scene, Marguerite Duras has exerted a powerful hold on readers around the world. This volume of interviews--hailed on its French publication as Duras's "secret confession"--offers readers a rich vein of new insight into her work, opinions, life, and relationships. The interviews that make up the book were conducted in 1987, when Italian journalist Leopoldina Pallotta della Torre met the seventy-three-year-old Duras at her Paris flat and convinced her to sit for a series of conversations. The resulting book was published in Italian in 1989, but it somehow failed to attract a French publisher, and it was quickly forgotten. Nearly a quarter of a century later, however, the book was rediscovered and translated into French, and, it has now become a sensation. In its revealing pages, Duras speaks with extraordinary freedom about her life as a writer, her relationship to cinema, her friendship with Mitterand, her love of Chekhov and football, and, perhaps most significantly, her childhood in pre-war Vietnam, the experiences that propelled her most famous novel, The Lover. A true literary event, finally available in English, The Suspended Passion is a remarkable document of an extraordinary literary life.

From the bestselling author of The Lover, Marguerite Duras's haunting memoir of suffering and survival in a time when Europe was torn asunder Written in 1944 and first published in 1985, Duras's riveting account of life in Paris during the Nazi occupation and the first months of liberation depicts the harrowing realities of World War II-era France "with a rich conviction enhanced by [a] spare, almost arid, technique" (Julian Barnes, The Washington Post Book World ). Duras, by then married and part of a French resistance network headed by Francois Mitterand, tells of nursing her starving husband back to health after his return from Bergen-Belsen, interrogating a suspected collaborator, and playing a game of cat and mouse with a Gestapo officer who was attracted to her. The result is "more than one woman's diary . . . [it is] a haunting portrait of a time and a place and also a state of mind" (The New York Times).

Yves Saint Laurent: Icons of Fashion Design, acclaimed by the critics as an "intoxicating book" remains the most attractive homage to the uncrowned king of haute couture. Pictures taken by the world's leading fashion photographers trace the success of Saint Laurent's designs, which, since conquering the fashion world five decades ago, have caused sensation after sensation each year. The book also constitutes

a high-quality review of fashion photography over a period of forty years, collecting 135 YSL dresses in images created by fashion photography's greatest 20th century heroes.

Yves Saint Laurent was equipped with an infallible instinct for reading the aesthetic signs of the times, and this enabled him to have a profound effect on fashion in the second half of the 20th century.

In this volume of four short novels, Duras demonstrates her remarkable ability to create an emotional intensity and unity by focusing on the intimate details of the relationships among only a few cental characters: from the park bench couple in The Square (1955) to the double love triangle in 10:30 on a Summer Night (1960), each novel probes the depths and complexities of human emotion, of love and of despair. Exceptional for their range in mood and situation, these four novels are unparalleled exhibitions of a poetic beauty that is uniquely Duras.

Escribe Marguerite Duras: B+ Cuando, en 1990, supe que el amante chino de El amante habia muerto hacia ya muchos anos] abandone el trabajo que estaba haciendo. Escribi la historia del amante de la China del Norte y de la nina. (b&) Escribi este libro en la enloquecida felicidad de escribirlo. Permaneci un ano en esta novela, encerrada en aquel ano de amorB; . Y si Marguerite Duras vuelve a esta historia extraordinaria es porque, como veremos, al revivirla reaparecen de pronto, con una nitidez y una precision hasta ahora ineditas, no solo los personajes de Thanh, el huerfano de las montanas de Siam, o del adorado hermano pequeno, el nino B+diferenteB; , incestuoso, o de la madre, ligeramente alelada, o de Helg-% Lagonelle, esa amistad B+raraB; , o del terrible hermano mayor, sino tambien, con detalles hasta ahora no contados, la trama de las extranas relaciones entre ellos. Aqui todos ellos hablan, B+se explicanB; , ocupan su lugar en la historia.

A young woman, working as a childminder for a living, takes her charge out to play in a Parisian garden square. Sitting on a bench, she starts talking to a stranger, a travelling salesman, and their conversation gradually turns into an exchange of confidences, as she speaks of her desire for a more stable future and he of his feelings of rootlessness and disillusionment. As the afternoon wears on, the two sense an increasing connection between them. Understated and impressionistic, and consisting almost entirely of dialogue, The Garden Square is one of Marguerite Duras's finest novels, which she also adapted to the stage.