Full AspenCat Catalog

" ... Cousin Bette is the story of a Vosges peasant who rebels against her scornful upper-class relatives, skillfully turning their selfish obsessions against them. The novel exemplifies what Henry James described as Balzac's 'huge, all-compassing, all-desiring, all-devouring love of reality'"--Page 4 of cover. "'Bette is a wronged soul; and when her passion does break, it is, as Balzac says, sublime and terrifying,' wrote V. S. Pritchett. A late...

"Violette Toussaint is the caretaker at a cemetery in a small town in Bourgogne. Casual mourners, regular visitors, and sundry colleagues--gravediggers, groundskeepers, and a priest--visit her to warm themselves in her lodge, where laughter, companionship, and occasional tears mix with the coffee she offers them. Her life is lived to the rhythms of their funny, moving confidences. Violette's routine is disrupted one day by the arrival of Julien Sole--local...

1986: Adrien, Etienne and Nina are 10 years old when they meet at school and quickly become inseparable. They promise each other they will one day leave their provincial backwater, move to Paris, and never part. 2017: A car is pulled up from the bottom of the lake, a body inside. Virginie, a local journalist with an enigmatic past reports on the case while also reflecting on the relationship between the three friends, who were unusually close when...

"Deemed too intimate to publish during Simone de Beauvoir's life, Inseparable offers fresh insight into the groundbreaking feminist's own coming-of-age; her transformative, tragic friendship with her childhood friend Zaza Lacoin; and how her youthful relationships shaped her philosophy. Sandra Smith's vibrant translation of the novel will be long cherished by de Beauvoir devotees and first-time readers alike"--

"Yahweh, is it not your will that our bodies should grow beyond childhood? That we should become men and women, each with our own breath, our own strength, the joy of our own senses? Is it not your will that a man's caress should delight a woman? Is it not your law that a sister should find other eyes to love than those of her brother, another voice to hear and admire other than that of her brother? Is it not your teaching that a woman should choose...

Adèle appears to have the perfect life: She is a successful journalist in Paris who lives in a beautiful apartment with her surgeon husband and their young son. But underneath the surface, she is bored--and consumed by an insatiable need for sex. Driven less by pleasure than compulsion, Adèle organizes her day around her extramarital affairs, arriving late to work and lying to her husband about where she's been, until she becomes ensnared in a trap...

Alex Prevost -- kidnapped, savagely beaten, suspended from the ceiling of an abandoned warehouse in a tiny wooden cage -- is running out of time. Her abductor appears to want only to watch her die. Will hunger, thirst, or the rats get her first? Apart from a shaky eyewitness report of the abduction, Police Commandant Camille Verhoeven has nothing to go on: no suspect, no leads, and no family or friends anxious to find a missing loved one. The diminutive...

These three long stories draw us into the lives of three women, all past their first youth, all facing unexpected crises. In the title story, the heroine's serenity is shattered when she learns that her husband is having an affair. In "The Age of Discretion," a successful, happily married professor finds herself increasingly distressed by her son's absorption in his young wife and her worldly values. In "The Monologue," a rich, spoiled woman, home...

"A Woman's Story is Annie Ernaux's "deeply affecting account of mothers and daughters, youth and age, and dreams and reality" (Kirkus Reviews). Upon her mother's death from Alzheimer's, Ernaux embarks on a daunting journey back through time, as she seeks to "capture the real woman, the one who existed independently from me, born on the outskirts of a small Normandy town, and who died in the geriatric ward of a hospital in the suburbs of Paris." She...

"Getting Lost is the diary Annie Ernaux kept during the year and a half she had a secret love affair with a younger, married man, a Russian diplomat. Her novel, Simple Passion, was based on this affair, but here her writing is immediate, unfiltered. In these diaries it is 1989 and Annie is divorced with two grown sons, living outside of Paris and nearing fifty. Her lover escapes the city to see her there and Ernaux seems to survive only in expectation...