Catherine Texier

A divorced writer and mother of an eight-year old little girl gets involved with a tempestuous thirty-year old Russian illegal immigrant. What starts as a sexy and edgy romance with no strings attached, quickly turns into a darker bond of obsession and compulsion as Yuri constantly pushes the limits sexually and emotionally, driving their relationship to an intense and brutal pitch. Their stormy liaison eventually threatens the narrator's life as her own complicated feelings and vulnerabilities violently conflict with Yuri's desperate pursuit of love and security in the US - just as 9/11 strikes.

Winner of France s 2004 Prix de Flore for his memoir "The Romanian: Story of an Obsession," Bruce Benderson has gained international respect for his controversial opinions and original take on contemporary society. In this collection of essays, Benderson directs his exceptional powers of observation toward some of the most debated, as well as some of the most neglected, issues of our day. In "Sex and Isolation," readers will encounter eccentric street people, Latin American literary geniuses, a French cabaret owner, a transvestite performer, and many other unusual characters; they ll visit subcultures rarely described in writing and be treated to Benderson s iconoclastic opinions about culture in former and contemporary urban society. Whether proposing new theories about the relationship between art, entertainment, and sex, analyzing the rise of the Internet and the disappearance of public space, or considering how religion and sexual identity interact, each essay demonstrates sharp wit, surprising insight and some startling intellectual positions. This is the first American volume of Benderson s collected essays, featuring both new work and some of his best-known writings, including his famous essay Toward the New Degeneracy. Outstanding University Press Book selection, "Foreword Magazine""

In 1899, Victorine Texier abandons her small French village, her husband, and her two young children to follow her lover to Indochina. She has fallen for Antoine, her childhood sweetheart, and when his work sends him to Asia she is compelled to go with him, and to leave everything she knows behind. Their five weeks together onboard the ship to Indochina are a kind of honeymoon, a prelude to their liberation in a sultry new world of frangipani trees and monsoons. Victorine gives herself over completely to this exhilarating new life of colonial extravagance -- that is, until she encounters her youngest sister, who has also been living in Hanoi and Saigon. This reunion, both joyous and tense, reminds Victorine all too painfully of her life and family in France and forces her to confront exactly what she has done. Vividly narrated through a series of flashbacks, Victorine is a richly textured and passionate story of rebellion, guilt, and unruly love.

I will never forgive you. I will never make love with you again. I do not love you anymore. Breakup is the erotically charged chronicle of the tempestuous final months of an eighteen-year romantic and literary partnership, self-destructing in the aftermath of the ultimate betrayal. Fearlessly and courageously, Texier chronicles the end of that love as it is wrecked by infidelity and deceit in a literary tour de force reminiscent by turns of Marguerite Duras and Henry Miller. Texier writes in harrowing detail about the powerful sexual relationship she shared with her husband even during their breakup, how sex between them became a substitute for real intimacy, and how the fabric of a marriage (a shared cup of caf au lait on a yellow table every morning, the memories of giving birth to two glorious daughters, of coediting their own literary magazine) is brutally dissolved. Breakup is unsentimental and unflinching, a journal of love's exquisite torture. Every emotion, including rage, disgust, self-pity, hatred, sympathy, and jealousy, is mined. Heartbreaking, too, is the effect of the breakup on Texier's two children who, sometimes caught in the crossfire of their parents' turmoil, are trapped as the relationship spirals out of control and their once-secure home becomes a battlefield. Ultimately, Breakup is about the risks one great passion involves. It is a journey of the heart in all its wild beating; a courageous diary of a soul laid bare, and the redemptive power of love.