"John Sturrock's new translation of Sodom and Gomorrah will introduce a new generation of American readers to the literary riches of Marcel Proust. the fourth volume in this edition of In Search of Lost Time - the first completely new translation of Proust's masterpiece since the 1920s - brings us a more comic and lucid prose than English readers have previously been able to enjoy." "Sodom and Gomorrah takes up for the first time the theme of homosexual...

One of the great works of Western literature, now in the new definitive French Pleiade edition translated by C.K. Scott Moncrieff and Terence Kilmartin. Volume one includes Swann's way and Within a budding grove.

When a bumbling holy man mistakenly baptizes a colony of penguins, God endows the animals with souls and their formerly peaceful community declines into a maelstrom of violence and sin. This witty allegory lampoons French history from ancient to modern times, taking satirical swipes at socialists, royalists, industrialists, militarists, and even the Dreyfus affair, and concluding with a remarkably prescient view of the future. Indeed, more than a...

The narrator returns to Paris after World War I, and reflects on his past life as the raw material for literature.

After the relative intimacy of the first two volumes of In Search of Lost Time, The Guermantes Way opens up a vast, dazzling landscape of fashionable Parisian life in the late nineteenth century, as the narrator enters the brilliant, shallow world of the literary and aristocratic salons. Both a salute to, and a devastating satire of a time, place, and culture, The Guermantes Way defines the great tradition of novels that follow the initiation of a...

Honore de Balzac is widely considered as one of the most influential writers in the history of French literature. His multi-volume collection of interlinked novels and short stories entitled "The Human Comedy" is his magnum opus. It is an examination of the human experience depicting French society in the period of the Restoration and the July Monarchy. Thirteen of the short stories of Balzac's masterpiece makeup this collection. They include the...

Diane Johnson, critically acclaimed author of Le Mariage, has twice been a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize during her distinguished career. The best-selling Le Divorce, a witty and insightful look at clashing cultures, was a finalist for the National Book Award. Isabel Walker has flown to Paris to offer moral support for Roxy, her pregnant stepsister. Roxy's husband Charles-Henri, favorite son of a powerful French family, is having a love affair....

"The long-awaited final volume in the acclaimed Penguin translation of Marcel Proust's In Search of Lost Time-one of the world's most beloved works of literature. "The greatest literary work of the twentieth century."-The New York Times. Ian Patterson's acclaimed new translation of Finding Time Again introduces a new generation of American readers to the literary riches of Marcel Proust. The seventh and final volume in Penguin Classics' superb new...

A vague jealousy, one of those dormant jealousies which grow up between brothers or sisters and slowly ripen till they burst, on the occasion of a marriage perhaps, or of some good fortune happening to one of them, kept them on the alert in a sort of brotherly and non-aggressive animosity. They were fond of each other, it is true, but they watched each other. Pierre, five years old when Jean was born, had looked with the eyes of a little petted animal...

This novel-within-a-novel depicts the writer Edouard attempting to finish a novel also titled The counterfeiters. Meanwhile a tangled series of relationships emerge amoung his nephew and his schoolmates including homoerotic attractions, a ring of counterfeiters, and the suicide of one young man during a school hazing.