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Cousin Betty
The Comédie Humaine
The Cosmopolitans
Author: Sarah Schulman
Publisher: The Feminist Press at CUNY
Published: 2016-02-22
Total Pages: 385
ISBN-13: 1558619054
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →A “captivating, perceptive, and empathic novel of New York” told with “panache and mischievous ebullience” (Booklist, starred review). In this retelling of Balzac’s Parisian classic Cousin Bette, Sarah Shulman spins her revenge story in Mad Men–era New York City. Bette, a lonely spinster, has worked as a secretary at an ad agency for thirty years. Her only real friend is her apartment neighbor Earl, a black, gay actor with a miserable job in a meatpacking plant. Shamed and disowned by their families, both find refuge in New York and in their friendship. Everything changes when Hortense, Bette’s wealthy niece from Ohio, moves to the city to pursue her own acting career. Her arrival reminds Bette of her scandalous past and the estranged Midwestern family she left behind. When Hortense’s calculating ambitions cause a rift between Bette and Earl, Bette uses her connections in the television ad world to destroy those who have wronged her. Textured with the grit and gloss of midcentury Manhattan in the days before the Civil Rights and Feminist Movements, The Cosmopolitans “balance[s] the hopes of an entire era on the backs of a fragile relationship. . . . Jarring and beautiful, this is a modern classic” (Kirkus Reviews, starred review).
Cousin Betty by Honoré de Balzac
Author: Honoré de Balzac
Publisher: BEYOND BOOKS HUB
Published: 2021-01-01
Total Pages:
ISBN-13:
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →La Cousine Bette is an 1846 novel by French author Honoré de Balzac. Set in mid-19th-century Paris, it tells the story of an unmarried middle-aged woman who plots the destruction of her extended family. Bette works with Valérie Marneffe, an unhappily married young lady, to seduce and torment a series of men.
A Passion in the Desert
Author: Honore de Balzac
Publisher: The Floating Press
Published: 2014-07-01
Total Pages: 21
ISBN-13: 1776539214
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →During Napoleon's campaign in Egypt, one French soldier becomes separated from his regiment and finds himself wandering lost in the desert. Just when he has given up all hope, he makes an unlikely friend. This highly allegorical short story gives readers an opportunity to ponder the nature of love and human relationships.
The Misfit of the Family
Author: Michael Lucey
Publisher: Duke University Press
Published: 2003-08-25
Total Pages: 341
ISBN-13: 0822385163
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →In more than ninety novels and novellas, Honoré de Balzac (1799–1850) created a universe teeming with over two thousand characters. The Misfit of the Family reveals how Balzac, in imagining the dense, vividly rendered social world of his novels, used his writing as a powerful means to understand and analyze—as well as represent—a range of forms of sexuality. Moving away from the many psychoanalytic approaches to the novelist's work, Michael Lucey contends that in order to grasp the full complexity with which sexuality was understood by Balzac, it is necessary to appreciate how he conceived of its relation to family, history, economics, law, and all the many structures within which sexualities take form. The Misfit of the Family is a compelling argument that Balzac must be taken seriously as a major inventor and purveyor of new tools for analyzing connections between the sexual and the social. Lucey’s account of the novelist’s deployment of "sexual misfits" to impel a wide range of his most canonical works—Cousin Pons, Cousin Bette, Eugenie Grandet, Lost Illusions, The Girl with the Golden Eyes—demonstrates how even the flexible umbrella term "queer" barely covers the enormous diversity of erotic and social behaviors of his characters. Lucey draws on the thinking of Michel Foucault and Pierre Bourdieu and engages the work of critics of nineteenth-century French fiction, including Naomi Schor, D. A. Miller, Franco Moretti, and others. His reflections on Proust as Balzac’s most cannily attentive reader suggest how the lines of social and erotic force he locates in Balzac’s work continued to manifest themselves in twentieth-century writing and society.
Cousin Bette
Author: Honoré de Balzac
Publisher: Graphic Arts Books
Published: 2020-12-01
Total Pages: 305
ISBN-13: 1513273256
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →Cousin Bette (1846) is a novel by French author Honoré de Balzac. Part of Balzac’s La Comédie humaine sequence, the novel is recognized as being the author’s last fully-realized work, and features several characters who appear elsewhere throughout his legendary series. It has inspired several film and television adaptations, as well as earned comparisons to Shakespeare’s Othello and Tolstoy’s War and Peace. The novel focuses on the life and exploits of Bette Fischer, a 42-year-old woman whose bitterness at remaining unmarried—despite several proposals by men she deemed unworthy—drives her to ruin the reputations and lives of her extended family. After rescuing the young sculptor Wenceslas Steinbock from suicide, Bette develops a complex affection for the man. When he falls in love with Hortense, the daughter of Bette’s cousin Adeline, she hatches a plan to gain revenge for this perceived personal slight. She recruits the young and beautiful Valérie Marneffe—an unhappily married woman—to seduce Adeline’s husband, Baron Hector Hulot, whose uncontrolled desires and extensive vanity both test his family’s loyalty and stretch their finances to the furthest possible limit. Cousin Bette is an intense psychological drama and character study that burns with the fire of Balzac’s critique of French society. While exposing the depths of human immorality—particularly where money is made the center of personal relationships—Balzac manages to remind us that what makes us human is not what drives us apart, but the lengths to which we will go to cultivate love despite our basest impulses. To read Cousin Bette is to observe the hopes, flaws, and desires of the people of nineteenth century France, but to ultimately judge ourselves. This final masterpiece of Honoré de Balzac is a testament to the skill and dedication of one of history’s finest literary minds. With a beautifully designed cover and professionally typeset manuscript, this edition of Honoré de Balzac’s Cousin Bette is a classic of French literature reimagined for modern readers.
Cousin Betty
Cousin Bette. Bueaucracy
