This collection of Truffaut's letters is an extraordinary portrait of a man of enormous charm, passion, integrity and (sometimes brutal) honesty. The immediacy of his writing makes his voice emanate from these pages. What an enormous privilege it must have been to count oneself among his friends. And what a daunting foe he must have been as well.

An inspiring, invigorating book.

Queneau offers a caleidoscope of satirical views about Paris and the people there, and he populates his novel with truly bizarre guys. Zazie is a perhaps twelve-year old girl that comes to Paris with her mother for some days; the mother visits her lover, and Zazie visits her uncle Gabriel. Gabriel works as a dancer (with a balley costume) in a gays' night-club without being homosexual himself. Some of his friends (a shoemaker, a pub owner, a parakeet, a taxi driver, Gabriel's wife, an almost-rapist) make the scene complete.

Queneau does not forget to fill the book with swearwords and other vulgarities that are common in Paris, and he leaves no opportunity out to make everyone look ridiculous - a bus full of tourists, the "gendarmerie", the Parisian car drivers...

I laughed a lot.

Raymond Queneau's comic cult novel is an unjustly neglected classic that was once distributed by the same French publishing house that handled Burroughs' Naked Lunch and Miller's Tropic Of Cancer when no one else would dare. Zazie is a sweet, sassy, cynical little girl with the mouth of a truck driver. She arrives in Paris to visit her uncle (a female impersonator), but what she really wants is to ride the Metro. Alas, the Metro workers are on strike, so our little heroine goes off on her own in search of adventure, driving her poor uncle nuts in the process. This wonderful book manages to be funny and heartwarming while maintaining a raunchy, satirical edge. A perfect book for a rainy day! Definitely not for children or the easily offended, but great entertainment for young-at-heart adults. Be sure to see Louis Malle's great 1960 movie version, which he directs with the pace and energy of a Roadrunner cartoon!

You see a portrait of your beloved inner-Zazie. Isnt't she just adorable

It's a pleasure to see this book back in print. Although Ciment's analysis is a little heavy on the semiotic side, he does an interesting job of illuminating the various thematic threads in Kubrick's work. Profusely illustrated, the book juxtaposes various stills to show the recurrance of visual motifs in each and every one of Kubrick's films (though he manages to miss my absolute favorite -- the imaculate bathroom). There are roughly two essays in the book, one dealing with Kubrick the modernist and the other on Kubrick's use of the fantastic. However, the real gems of this tome are the various interviews, three conducted with the man himself (four if you count a Q&A conducted by mail) following the releases of Clockwork Orange, Barry Lyndon and The Shining. Somehow the author got Stan to open up in a way, that I've never seen him do in any other interview (the exception being the one for Playboy in '68). This edition also contains some fine interviews, some recently added, with Ken Adam, Jack Nicholson, Malcolm McDowell, Diane Johnson and Marisa Berenson. There is an added chapter on Eyes Wide Shut (which in part explains why it took him so long to do the film) and a memorial essay which gives a fine and tender goodbye to a great director and good friend.

I am glad Mr. Ciment waited until Kubrick's oeuvre was completed before updating what is, indeed, the very last word on this very unique artist's films. Everything is here from the first edition which was out-of-print for quite awhile plus the films that were made after. With Stanley Kubrick's death we now have the very best study of the themes, techniques and recurring visions of a very singular artist. Anyone who wants to understand the evolution of Stanley Kubrick can disregard all the other flawed books out there and put this one on the shelf as a keeper. With detailed analysis and tons of pictures, any serious fan of his films will appreciate this as only the subtitle says it is - the definitive edition.

I have this book. 5,6 years ago, I bought this at second hand book store. So book I have is second handed one, and Japanese special edition. As other reviewers say, it's very very great pity that this book is out of print now. I think some publisher had better make new edition title, added to a visualy wondeful film-Eyes Wide Shut!! If you have found it at bookstore and you are a Kubrician, you must take it, buy it, bring it your home, and enjoy these so many precious fotos or very important his interviews in this book. I have various books about Kubrick, but this Michel Ciment's Kubrick is the best book in published ones ever I think. Do your best for finding one!! All your efforts for this book would not be wasted, EVER!

This is a lovely little book (barely 100 pages, with pictures) by Gilbert Adair, the author of "Love and Death on Long Island," which traces the life story of the Polish boy, Wladyslaw Moes, who served as the muse for Thomas Mann's novella, "Death in Venice." Moes' story, which follows his fortunes through two wars and his death in the 1980s, is fascinating, and along the way Adair finds time to meditate on Visconti's 1970s film of the book, which, when he saw it, first alerted Moes to the fact that he had been the inspiration for Tadzio, as well as on Visconti's own identification with Aschenbach. Adair further speculates on the novel's position as the top gay classic of all time. I especially liked Adair's observation that another Visconti masterpiece, the woefully neglected "Conversation Piece," represents an updating of the Mann story to post-World War II Italy, with Burt Lancaster in the Aschenbach/Visconti role and Helmut Berger as Tadzio/himself. Readers will note that Adair's own "Love and Death" is yet another updating of the same tale. Taken ounce for ounce, a very substantial read.

This is fine writing. I was especially struck by the opening and closing pages in which Mr. Adair looks at Mann's story and Viconti's film and contextualizes them within the world of the real Tadzio. Just what is it that makes "Death in Venice" so remarkable? What are those themes that shake the public and mesmerize gay (and straight) men? Mr. Adair is an adept writer and thinker. Take the time to read this small tome. You will be glad you did.

In words that twist within a mighty bind, a dark void winds away to worlds known but not any I can show. In this book a constant hum runs just out of mind's ability to grasp. Although many draw nigh, no pilgrim grabs it's ring of brass. Will you?

A quandry; a missing part runs far within this book but is not shown. All talk, but say naught of this void. Oh longing, may this book fulfill. It has not any of a mainstay in our world. Try it on your own, The pain is worth it, so says I who has been through this hurt upon my own. It is truly amazing.

NOTE: Not to be included in this review!! This book is a murder mystery written entirely without the letter "e" (as is this feeble review). The translator is a true genius as much as the author. His rendering of Poe's "Raven" is by itself a literary achievement of significant note, not to mention the rest of the book. Although the language is necessarily tortured and convoluted, the story flows along brilliantly. Just as a character begins to get close to uncovering the reality of the missing letter, he is done away with. For those with the stamina, a truly worthwhile read

Half the fun of reading Perec's "A Void" is when you're about halfway through a sentence, or even a paragraph, and you know you've figured out what Perec is trying to say, and you can't imagine how in hell he's ever going to say it without using the letter "E". The other half of the fun is simply because this is an amazing book, with a plot and style that both echo the central conceit of the novel in an awe-inspiring fashion. I've not read the French original version, so I cannot comment of the fidelity of translation, but I thought that Adair's translation was immensely readable and enjoyable.

I just don't get the point of those who rated that book with only one or two stars. It can't be lower than five. Some of the reviewers wrote here that it is a tour de force to write a book without using the letter "E". But Perec do more than that: he tells us, page after page, that the "E" is missing. Moreover, he tells us that he is telling us that the "E" is missing. The book must not be read only to discover that missing "E", but for all the details that tell us of that void. Perec transforms other texts in lipograms: Poe, Melville, Hugo, Flaubert, etc. That book is simply unbelievable. I did'nt read the translation, but I must congratulate the translator who decided to do that translation. It is a more difficult tour de force than Perec did himself. Simply remarquable!

Mr. Adair may be a competent writer, but a reading of _Death in Venice_, by Thomas Mann, will reveal that he owes a great deal to Herr Mann. It may be to the contemporary readers' shame that we are more familiar with pop fiction than great art, but is to Mr. Adair's that he -- aside from not crediting Mann -- does not credit the reader with the education or the wit to tell a pale imitation from the real thing.

A brilliantly witty and beautifully written short novel. Comparable to the prose stylings of a personal favorite, Graham Greene, his prose is eloquent and romantic. Adair proves himself as a wordsmith of the highest order, possessing an encyclopedic knowledge of the english language. I only wonder why a writer of his caliber lacks the publicity and popularity of his more noted literary confreres.

What a small gem! Only 137 pages, but a rich and full journey into the mind of a closeted academic as he works his way through an infatuation with vacuous teen idol Ronny Bostock. Gilbert De'Ath's encounters with the modern world in the form of multiplex cinemas, teenage fanzines, video recorders, pulp cinema and Pakistani newsagents is both hilarious and touching. A vast improvement on the somewhat lacklustre screen treatment.

Gilbert Adair, a novelist, biographer, and critic presents a series of eighty essays about the state of culture. He focuses on politics and on the popular and literary arts - cinema, theater, opera, fiction, and visual arts. Though the title might suggest a comprehensive analysis of today's cultural trends, his "surfing" has nothing to do with the Web. Instead, his overview is highly infused with a British literary and artistic sensibility. These essays are perfect for intellectual, cultural connoisseurs. However, recreational readers may find Adair's numerous references to the early 1990s British cultural scene obscure and remote. Adair discusses some American movies and offers some interesting insights, although his writing is complex, even convoluted. The dense essays are packed with literary asides and personal references. We [...] recommend this book to students of modern culture, arts aficionados of an intellectual or Anglophile bent, and those who read everything about the movies, no matter how challenging.

This isn't so much a review as a correction - this book is a paperback. It's worth every cent though!

_Wonder Tales_ is a small and expensive collection of French courtly fairy tales, most written by upper-class women. Their themes seem frivolous now, but the stories were actually quite subversive for their time; in them, the authors promoted female autonomy, true love, and marriage by choice rather than by arrangement. (The authors themselves often were the victims of terrible arranged marriages. In these stories they dream of a better world.)

The stories are not the succinct tales we are used to; they can be byzantine and winding. Just when you think it's time for "happily ever after", in comes another twist. But the tales are for the most part both funny and romantic, and I enjoyed them.

This might even be considered essential reading, if you're reading _From the Beast to the Blonde_. As I read Warner's scholarly study, I kept wishing I had access to the obscure stories she was constantly quoting. When I found this, it helped a great deal; I only wish _Wonder Tales_was sold in paperback as a companion volume to Beast/Blonde.

As one of the editorial reviewers comments, this book is intended for gift-giving. It is a charming, diminutive hardcover containing six French fairy tales from the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, translated by some prestigious modern writers and translators, with an introduction, biographical notes, and bibliography by Marina Warner. These tales (and those in future volumes which Warner says she hopes to bring out) are especially interesting to read after Warner's From the Beast to the Blonde, which examines the French salon society and its members (mostly women) who used the writing of these tales as a form of social protest as well as entertainment and even escape. But three of these six tales, as well as a number of others from the same milieu, appear in translations by Jack Zipes in his inexpensive paperback "Beauty and the Beast and Other Classic French Fairy Tales." If you are interested in a broad selection of these tales, including some famous ones like "Little Red Riding Hood" and "The Sleeping Beauty" (complete with Perrault's violent episodes that are often left out in children's versions), Zipes is a good choice. The texts are there, along with some scholarly introductions and biographies of the authors of the tales in a mass-market format.

Warner's book is more aesthetically pleasing. Its elegant, whimsical design and first-class literary translations invite the reader to escape into stories that are part magical fantasy and part social commentary. These tales are longer than the usual children's fairy stories, and they tend to have more elaborate adventures and quite worldly descriptions of clothing, decoration, and other amenities of aristocratic life. Most of the plots resolve themselves through the intervention of fairies, whose actions may seem unmotivated (deciding not to help a heroine on one page and then suddenly turning up to save her from being eaten by an ogre a couple pages later). I personally find this easier to take in this charming little hardcover than in the no-nonsense mass-market format of the Zipes collection.

Warner's book is also significant in that, in addition to the three tales that overlap with Zipes, it contains some genuine rarities in the genre. According to Warner's introduction, two of the six Wonder Tales, "Bearskin" and "Starlite", have never been translated into English before, and Charles Perrault's tale, "The Counterfeit Marquise," has never been included in previous Perrault collections (perhaps because, having no supernatural characters, and taking cross-dressing as its theme, it would not be considered appropriate for the juvenile audience that these collections have historically targeted).

Regarding the translations themselves, I compared at random some paragraphs in the stories that appear in both books. The quality of the prose is not miles apart, since both books strive for accuracy in translation. Nevertheless, if you admire the writing of John Ashbery, Gilbert Adair, Terence Cave, Ranjit Bolt, and/or A. S. Byatt, that could be another reason to choose this book.

Alice Through the Needle's Eye is a delightful sequel to Lewis Carroll's Alice books. This is a romp through the alphabet, in the manner of the Looking Glass chess game,full of word-play fitting locales to the letters, as in the title, the Needle's "I" and complete with poetry that almost could have been from long-lost Carrollian manuscripts.

While driving through Brittany, France, Guy Lantern finds his way blocked by a lightning-struck tree; on the other side is a French art expert in a hurry. They swap cars - Lantern's Mini for the Frenchman's Rolls - and what follows is a sort of homage to Hitchcock movies such as North by Northwest, in which Lantern is drawn into a complex plot, complete with femme fatale and a Proust-quoting baddie. The tale zips along, often amusing, always entertaining, to a very clever finale. Adair is a great observer of people and things, and his eye for detail adds to the at-times almost surreal atmosphere.