Charlotte Mandell
1) Zone
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Francis Servain Mirković travels from Milan to Rome with a briefcase holding priceless information about the history of Spain, Algeria, Lebanon, and Italy, and soon learns that someone is willing to kill in order to keep the information secret.
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Exiled from his family for religious transgressions related to his feelings for his cousin, Lakhdar finds himself on the streets of Barcelona, hiding from both the police and the Muslim Group for the Propagation of Koranic Thoughts -- a group he worked in Tangier, Morocco, not long after being thrown out on the streets by his father. Lakhdar's transformations -- from a boy into a man, from a devout Muslim into a sinner -- take place against the backdrop...
3) Compass
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"As night falls over Vienna, Franz Ritter, an insomniac musicologist, takes to his sickbed with an unspecified illness and spends a restless night drifting between dreams and memories, revisiting the important chapters of his life: his ongoing fascination with the Middle East and his numerous travels to Istanbul, Aleppo, Damascus, and Tehran, as well as the various writers, artists, musicians, academics, orientalists, and explorers who populate this...
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"Throughout Proust's life, nine of his short stories remained unseen; the writer never even spoke of them. Perhaps he was not ready to share the early themes he was nurturing for his masterpiece, In Search of Lost Time. Or perhaps, in dealing directly with gay desire, they were too audacious-- too near to life for the censorious society of the time. In these stories, published in English for the first time, we find an intimate portrait of a young...
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Unevenly respected, easily hated, almost always suspected of being inferior to his reputation, Jean Cocteau has often been thought of as a jack-of-all-trades, master of none. In this landmark biography, Claude Arnaud thoroughly contests this characterization, as he celebrates Cocteau's "fragile genius--a combination almost unlivable in art" but in his case so fertile. Arnaud narrates the life of this legendary French novelist, poet, playwright, director,...