When Patrick Modiano was awarded the 2014 Nobel Prize for Literature he was praised for using the 'art of memory' to bring to life the Occupation of Paris during the Second World War. Born in 1945, Modiano's brilliant, angry writings burst onto the Parisian literary scene and caused a storm. His first, ferociously satirical novel, La Place de l'Etoile, was remarkable in seriously questioning both Nazi collaboration in France and the myths of the Gaullist era. The Night Watch tells the story of a man caught between his work for the French Gestapo and for a Resistance cell. Ring Roads recounts a son's search for his Jewish father, who disappeared ten years previously. These brilliant, almost hallucinatory, evocations of the Occupation attempt to exorcise the past by exploring the morally ambiguous worlds of collaboration and resistance.

When Patrick Modiano was awarded the 2014 Nobel Prize for LIterature he was praised for using the 'art of memory' to bring to life the Occupation of Paris during the Second World War. The Night Watch is his second novel and tells the story of a young man of limited means, caught between his work for the French Gestapo informing on the Resistance, and his work for a Resistance cell informing on the police and the black market dealers whose seedy milieu of nightclubs, prostitutes and spivs he shares. Under pressure from both sides to inform and bring things to a crisis, he finds himself driven towards an act of self-sacrifice as the only way to escape an impossible situation and the question that haunts him – how to be a traitor without being a traitor. In this astonishing, cruel and tender book, Modiano attempts to exorcise the past by leading his characters out on a fantasmagoric patrol during one fatal night of the Occupation.

Modiano's debut novel is a sardonic, often grotesque satire of France during the Nazi occupation. We are immediately plunged into the hallucinatory imagination of Raphael Schlemilovitch, a young Jewish man, torn between self-aggrandisement and self-loathing, who may be the heir to a Venezuelan fortune, may have lived during the Nazi Occupation, may have rubbed shoulders with the most notorious collaborators and anti-Semites of the time, may even have been the lover of Eva Braun… or he may have been none of these things. But at the centre of this vortex is 'La Place de l'Etoile' - the Place of the Star - which is both the geographical and moral centre of Paris, and that place next the heart where French Jews were compelled to wear the yellow star, the symbol of their persecution.

A fascinating mix of autobiographical episodes and extraordinary Egyptian theology, Burroughs's final novel is poignant and melancholic. Blending war films and pornography, and referencing Kafka and Mailer, The Western Lands confirms his status as one of America's greatest writers. The final novel of the trilogy containing Cities of the Red Night and The Place of Dead Roads, this is a profound meditation on morality, loneliness, life and death.

Part of the "Night Watch" trilogy, this book follows Anton, a young Other owing allegiance to the Light. As a Night Watch agent he must patrol the streets and metro of the city, protecting ordinary people from the vampires and magicians of the Dark. Until he becomes involved in events that threaten the uneasy truce, and the whole city.

A major new celebration of the French short story across the twentieth century The short story has a rich tradition in French literature. This feast of an anthology celebrates its most famous practitioners, as well as newly translated writers ready for rediscovery. Here are fables, puzzles, fairy tales, war stories and family histories, testing and expanding the boundaries of the form. They are stories about the self and the other, the centre and the periphery, experimental and existential, real and surreal. The second volume takes the reader through the tumultuous twentieth century in the company of writers including Simone de Beauvoir and Maryse Conde, Patrick Modiano and Virginie Despentes, covering world wars, revolutions, and the horrors of the motorway service station. Along the way we meet electronic brains, she-wolves, a sadistic Cinderella, ancestors, infidels, dissatisfied housewives and lonely ambassadors, all clamouring to be heard. Funny, devastating and fresh at every turn, this is the place to start for lovers of French literature, new and old. Edited and with an introduction by Patrick McGuinness, academic, writer and translator.

Dan Boothby had been drifting for more than twenty years, without the pontoons of family, friends or a steady occupation. He was looking for but never finding the perfect place to land. Finally, unexpectedly, an opportunity presented itself. After a lifelong obsession with Gavin Maxwell's Ring of Bright Water trilogy, Boothby was given the chance to move to Maxwell's former home, a tiny island on the western seaboard of the Highlands of Scotland. Island of Dreams is about Boothby's time living there, and about the natural and human history that surrounded him; it's about the people he meets and the stories they tell, and about his engagement with this remote landscape, including the otters that inhabit it. Interspersed with Boothby's own story is a quest to better understand the mysterious Gavin Maxwell. Beautifully written and frequently leavened with a dry wit, Island of Dreams is a charming celebration of the particularities of place.

In the eighteenth century, Laurence Sterne explores the temptations of the French capital in a teasing study of foreign mores and Restif de la Bretonne provides an eye-witness account of the Revolution. From the 1800s, Hugo, Balzac, Flaubert, and Zola offer fascinating portraits of the city's teeming humanity; the Goncourt brothers chronicle the explosion of artistic talent; Huysmans describes an evening at the Folies Bergere. Colette chronicles the pitfalls for a young girl in the decadent city of the early twentieth century; F. Scott Fitzgerald revels in the city's glamour; Jean Rhys's lost heroines wander from cafe to cafe; James Baldwin celebrates its sexual freedoms; and Raymond Queneau gleefully reinvents the language of the street. In our time, Michel Tournier's North African immigrant walks a camel along the boulevards, while Nobel Laureate Patrick Modiano brilliantly maps the city's many arrondissements. The alluring power of Paris has never dimmed and it is richly captured in all its facets in these compelling and seductive tales.

An opium addict is lost in the jungle; young men wage war against an empire of mutants; a handsome young pirate faces his execution; and the world's population is infected with a radioactive epidemic. These stories are woven together in a single tale of mayhem and chaos. In the first novel of the trilogy continued in The Place of Dead Roads and The Western Lands, William Burroughs sharply satirizes modern society in a poetic and shocking story of sex, drugs, disease and adventure.

A beautifully illustrated collection of nonfiction stories featuring the many wonders that exist in the night sky. Beginning with a sunset and ending at dawn, Through the Night Sky shines a light on the magical events taking place in the darkness above. Unlike an astronomy book that focuses on eye-popping facts and figures about the universe, Through the Night Sky features a series of incredible stories that take place in the sky at night. Track a colony of bats as they fly through the twilight to pollinate the flowers of the mysterious baobab tree, follow a family into the wilderness to gaze at the constellations, watch whales swimming through chilly Arctic waters under the gentle glow of the Northern Lights, then chart the journey of a ship navigating by the stars. Through the Night Sky is a beautiful book that spans a wide range of subjects, including everything from nocturnal animals or revelers watching fireworks illuminate the night, to celestial objects such as the moon, planets, stars, and meteor showers--all under the vast night sky.

A new novel from Angela Cervantes now available in Spanish! Paloma Marquez is traveling to Mexico City, birthplace of her deceased father. She's hoping that spending time in Mexico will help her unlock memories of the too-brief time they spent together. While in Mexico, Paloma meets Lizzie and Gael. The siblings want her to help them find a valuable ring that once belonged to beloved Mexican artist Frida Kahlo. Finding the ring means a big reward -- and the thanks of all Mexico. But the brother and sister have a secret. Do they really want to return the ring, or are they after something else entirely? ?Una novela en espanol de Angela Cervantes! Paloma Marquez viaja a la Ciudad de Mexico, de donde era su padre. Tiene la esperanza de que eso la ayudara a recordar el tiempo que pasaron juntos. Mientras esta alli, conoce a unos hermanos que buscan un valioso anillo de la pintora Frida Kahlo. ?Pero es eso lo que realmente buscan los hermanos? .

A new novel from Angela Cervantes now available in Spanish! Paloma Marquez is traveling to Mexico City, birthplace of her deceased father. She's hoping that spending time in Mexico will help her unlock memories of the too-brief time they spent together. While in Mexico, Paloma meets Lizzie and Gael. The siblings want her to help them find a valuable ring that once belonged to beloved Mexican artist Frida Kahlo. Finding the ring means a big reward -- and the thanks of all Mexico. But the brother and sister have a secret. Do they really want to return the ring, or are they after something else entirely? ?Una novela en espanol de Angela Cervantes! Paloma Marquez viaja a la Ciudad de Mexico, de donde era su padre. Tiene la esperanza de que eso la ayudara a recordar el tiempo que pasaron juntos. Mientras esta alli, conoce a unos hermanos que buscan un valioso anillo de la pintora Frida Kahlo. ?Pero es eso lo que realmente buscan los hermanos? .

Haunted by the fate of Dora Bruder – a fifteen-year-old girl listed as missing in an old December 1941 issue of Paris Soir – Nobel Prize-winning author Patrick Modiano sets out to find all he can about her. From her name on a list of deportees to Auschwitz to the fragments he is able to uncover about the Bruder family, Modiano delivers a moving survey of a decade-long investigation that revived for him the sights, sounds and sorrowful rhythms of occupied Paris. And in seeking to exhume Dora Bruder's fate, he in turn faces his own family history.

Set in the Montparnasse district of Paris, the author, Jean, retraces his nocturnal footsteps around the left bank during France's period of decolonisation during the 1960's. He tries to remember what brought him into contact with a gang that frequented the hotel Unic in the area. His quest through seedy cafes and cheap hotels becomes an enquiry into a woman, Dannie, whom Jean loved and who once tried to admit to a terrible crime. Over the course of several voyages between past and present, we meet various shady characters, and discover that Dannie may have killed "someone". As his memories overlap with the discovery of an old vice squad dossier, Jean re-investigates the closed case of a crime where he could well be the last remaining witness.

Paris: city of love, food and fashion. Paris: the city that played host to major historical and cultural dramas. Paris: a modern metropolis. Paris is all of these, all at once, all the time. There is a unique fusion of past and present in this purposefully grand and well-planned city. The Triumphal Way, which runs straight from the Louvre through the Tuileries Gardens, across the Place de la Concorde - where the guillotine once stood - through the Arc de Triomphe towards the Arche de la Defense and into the modern business district is just one example of the many eras that remain present. Famously a city for walkers, Paris has echoes of its history at every turn. Wandering through Montmartre, you will discover the birthplace of the energetic cancan at the Moulin Rouge; stroll around Montparnasse and see the haunts of American writer Ernest Hemingway; observe the striking new Opera de la Bastille, which stands in the same place as the notorious prison. To walk in Paris is to walk in history. Cecil Jenkins recounts the often turbulent history with due attention to social conditions and cultural development as well as to the political events that shaped the city. It is the colourful story of a city emerging to modernity through repeated conflicts, both internal and regional: a struggle between piety and passion, prince and peasant, against competing countries in Europe.

Monterrey is known as ‘the city of the mountains’, in refer­ence to its privileged location at the foothills of the Sierra Madre. The city, founded in 1596, remained dormant until the turn of the 20th century, when it went through a period of rapid industrial growth that transformed it into a prosperous city. Today, Monterrey is an important metropolis brimming with culture, education, and business. This book explores how architecture contributed to the transformation of this city. It presents Monterrey’s colonial origins – ever present in the Barrio Antiguo – and the breweries and foundries that played a central role in the city’s industrial­isation. The book also explores how the spirit of modernity is reflected in the works of several famous ­Mexican architects – such as Mario Pani, Enrique de la Mora, and Luis Barragan – and finally arrives at the rapid growth of residential, corporate, and commercial developments currently taking place, with designs by internationally renowned architects such as ­Nicholas Grimshaw, Tadao Ando, Norman Foster, Zaha Hadid, and Alejandro Aravena. Monterrey es conocida como «la ciudad de las montanas» en referencia a su privilegiada ubicacion en las faldas de la Sierra Madre. La ciudad fue fundada en 1596 y permanecio dormida hasta finales del siglo XIX y principios del XX, cuando experimento un gran desarrollo industrial que la convirtio en una prospera urbe. Hoy en dia, Monterrey es una importante metropolis cultural, educativa y de negocios. Este libro desea mostrar la contribucion de la arquitectura a la transformacion de esta ciudad, comenzando por sus origenes coloniales —aun presentes en el Barrio Antiguo— y las fundiciones y cervecerias protagonistas de la transforma­cion industrial. Se muestra tambien el reflejo de la modernidad en las obras de algunos celebres arquitectos mexicanos —Mario Pani, Enrique de la Mora y Luis Barragan, entre otros— y finalmente el rapido crecimiento de los actuales desarrollos residenciales, corporativos y comerciales, con disenos de varios arquitectos de talla internacional como Nicholas Grimshaw, Tadao Ando, Norman Foster, Zaha Hadid y Alejandro Aravena.