Alex Andriesse

The third part of the epic autobiography of Chateaubriand, the aristocratic Frenchman who lived through the beginning of the French Revolution and who would become the founder of the Romantic movement in Europe, now in a new, unabridged English translation--the first in a century. In 1815--with Bonaparte on the isle of Elba and the Napoleonic era at an end--Fran ois-Ren de Chateaubriand seemed poised, like the Bourbon royal family he'd so long supported, to wield unprecedented power in France. Already one of the country's most celebrated writers, he now became an ambassador (with posts in Berlin, London, and Rome) and, for a time, minister of foreign affairs. Yet as passionate as Chateaubriand was about the cause of the Bourbons in theory, in reality he was a recalcitrant subject. Part liberal, part ultraconservative, a warmonger with his head in the clouds, he quarreled with both Louis XVIII and Charles X and eventually tendered his resignation altogether, just in time for the July Revolution, which brought the Restoration to a close and allowed Chateaubriand to go back to praising the Bourbons, now safely exiled in the realm of the ideal. As always in Memoirs from Beyond the Grave, Chateaubriand narrates the events of his era unforgettably. His accounts of international politics, and the papal conclave, and the revolutionary strife of 1830 (so different from the revolutionary strife of his youth) are gripping. His digressions, however, are the main event, and readers will be glad to find him wandering around Paris and Rome, reflecting on storms and ruins, moonlight and mortality.

Thrilling, stylish essays about everything from flying carpets and Doctor Zhivago to God and Shakespeare, by a rediscovered Italian writer. Cristina Campo was one of the most distinctive European essayists of the twentieth century. Although well known to readers in Italy and abroad--including Alejandra Pizarnik, with whom she had a long correspondence--Campo was a devout perfectionist, disdainful of the literary limelight, and published only two short books of prose in her lifetime: Fairy Tale and Mystery (1962) and The Flute and the Carpet (1971). The Unforgivable collects both of these books, along with several of her essays on writers (Simone Weil, John Donne, Katherine Mansfield, Shakespeare) and an autobiographical short story--offering readers of English the first full-length portrait of an unforgettable stylist whose interests encompass both the familiar and the outlandish. Her fondness for William Carlos Williams, Marianne Moore, and T. S. Eliot makes her a modernist, but like these American counterparts, she was a modernist preoccupied by the deep past. Her subjects range from the canonical to the esoteric--from Doctor Zhivago to flying carpets, from the intricacies of sprezzatura to the theophagic history of the Latin liturgy. No matter what her subject, she is as stylish as she is self-effacing--as one might expect of a writer who once said of herself, "I have written little and would like to have written less."

Now in a new translation, a classic nineteenth-century defense for the cause of idleness by a revolutionary writer and activist (and Karl Marx's son-in law) that reshaped European ideas of labor and production. Exuberant, provocative, and as controversial as when it first appeared in 1880, Paul Lafargue's The Right to Be Lazy is a call for the workers of the world to unite--and stop working so much Lafargue, Karl Marx's son-in-law (about whom Marx once said, "If he is a Marxist, then I am clearly not") wrote his pamphlet on the virtues of laziness while in prison for giving a socialist speech. At once a timely argument for a three-hour workday and a classical defense of leisure, The Right to Be Lazy shifted the course of European thought, going through seventeen editions in Russia during the Revolution of 1905 and helping shape John Maynard Keynes's ideas about overproduction. Published here with a selection of Lafargue's other writings--including an essay on Victor Hugo and a memoir of Marx--The Right to Be Lazy reminds us that the urge to work is not always beneficial, let alone necessary. It can also be a "strange madness" consuming human lives.

Written over the course of four decades, Fran ois-Ren de Chateaubriand's epic autobiography has drawn the admiration of Baudelaire, Flaubert, Proust, Barthes, and Sebald. Here, in the first books of his massive Memoirs, spanning the years 1768 to 1800, Chateaubriand looks back on the already bygone world of his youth. He recounts the history of his aristocratic family and the first rumblings of the French Revolution. He recalls playing games on the beaches of Saint-Malo, wandering in the woods near his father's castle in Combourg, hunting with King Louis XVI at Versailles, witnessing the first heads carried on pikes through the streets of Paris, meeting with George Washington in Philadelphia, and falling hopelessly in love with a young woman named Charlotte in the small Suffolk town of Bungay. The volume ends with Chateaubriand's return to France after seven years of exile in England. In this new edition (the first unabridged English translation of any portion of the Memoirs to be published in more than a century), Chateaubriand emerges as a writer of great wit and clarity, a self deprecating egotist whose meditations on the meaning of history, memory, and morality are leavened with a mixture of high whimsy and memorable gloom.