Engelska

Epigrams, aphorisms, and other bon mots gathered from the celebrated wit's plays, essays, and conversation offer an entertaining selection of observations both comic and profound. Organized by category, the nearly 400 quotes range in subject from human nature, morals, and society to art, politics, history, and more.

Considered by many to be the iconic French memoirist's defining work, <em>The Years </em>is a narrative of the period 1941 to 2006 told through the lens of memory, impressions past and present, cultural habits, language, photos, books, songs, radio, television, advertising and news headlines. Annie Ernaux invents a form that is subjective and impersonal, private and communal, and a new genre - the collective autobiography - in order to capture the passing of time. At the confluence of autofiction and sociology, <em>The Years</em> is 'a <em>Remembrance of Things Past </em>for our age of media domination and consumerism' (<em>New York Times</em>), a monumental account of twentieth-century French history as refracted through the life of one woman.

In 1963, Annie Ernaux, 23 and unattached, realizes she is pregnant. Shame arises in her like a plague: understanding that her pregnancy will mark her and her family as social failures, she knows she cannot keep that child. This is the story, written forty years later, of a trauma Ernaux never overcame. In a France where abortion was illegal, she attempted, in vain, to self-administer the abortion with a knitting needle. Fearful and desperate, she finally located an abortionist, and ends up in a hospital emergency ward where she nearly dies. In <i>Happening</i>, Ernaux sifts through her memories and her journal entries dating from those days. Clearly, cleanly, she gleans the meanings of her experience.

On the 70th anniversary of George Orwell&apos;s death, a new collection of his brilliant essays written during the Second World War Fascism and Democracy collects five brilliant examples of Orwell&apos;s writing during the darkest days of World War Two. Grappling with the principles of democracy and the potential of reform, the meaning of literature and free speech in times of violence, and the sustainability of objective truth, Orwell offers a compelling portrayal of a nation where norms and ideals can no longer be taken for granted. Like the best of Orwell&apos;s writing, these essays also serve as timeless reminders of the fragility of freedom.