Emile Jovis leaves the old apartment in the rue des Francs-Bourgeois where he has lived for years, to settle, with his family, in Clairevie, a modern housing estate in the suburbs. From this new installation, Jovis promises a lot of happiness. Soon, it must be agreed that Clairevie, where everyone isolates himself in anonymity, hardly replaces his old district of Paris. But Jovis made, thanks to a poorly soundproofed partition, a singular discovery....

Emile Jovis leaves the old apartment in the rue des Francs-Bourgeois where he has lived for years, to settle, with his family, in Clairevie, a modern housing estate in the suburbs. From this new installation, Jovis promises a lot of happiness. Soon, it must be agreed that Clairevie, where everyone isolates himself in anonymity, hardly replaces his old district of Paris. But Jovis made, thanks to a poorly soundproofed partition, a singular discovery....

By creating the character of Zénon, alchemist and doctor of the 16th century, Marguerite Yourcenar, the author of the Memoirs of Hadrian, does not only tell the tragic destiny of an extraordinary man. It's a whole era that lives again in its infinite richness, as well as in its acrid and brutal reality; a contrasting world where the Middle Ages and the Renaissance clash, and where modern times are already emerging, a world from which Zeno came, but...

Paris has taken its toll and Maigret is sent to Vichy for the cure, but the Inspector finds it difficult to give his curiosity a rest. He compiles a mental dossier on his fellow guests, including a curious woman he and Madam Maigret note in particular -- the lady in lilac. When a headline in the local paper announces the woman's murder, Maigret -- with some relief -- interrupts his routine to aid the investigation. The arrival of the dead woman's...

"Longer--but lesser--Simenon: a gloomy, picaresque tale of doomed love (originally published in France in 1936), featuring yet another Simenon quasi-hero who is led astray by an unworthy woman. Joseph ("Jef") Mittel, young second-generation anarchist (he has reluctantly followed in his legendary father's footsteps), finds himself on the run with lover/comrade Charlotte. . .who has murdered her former employer/lover for supposedly "political" reasons....

This anthology of nineteen short stories by thirteen different authors introduces the reader to L'ecole belge de l'etrange, the Belgian School of the Bizarre. This is a brand of concrete fantasy that has been the hallmark of Belgian fiction since 1975. Though this school has links to both French surrealism and the magic realism of Marquez and other South American authors, Belgium's concrete fantasy, or fantastique reel, is closer to realism than either...