On March 22, 2024 we met at the Larkes. Renee suggested this book. I remember Grace and I trying to force an alternative – the fictionalized account about the midwife in Maine. We did not prevail. This saga portrays a worldly/saintly/mythic Amazonian woman, Marie, based on an historical abbess, as being in direct contact with…
Hills and the Sea, first published in 1906 to critical acclaim, collects thirty-eight of Hilaire Belloc’s essays, spanning several periods of time and travel. Author Joseph Hilaire Pierre René Belloc was an Anglo-French writer and historian who became a naturalised British subject in 1902. He was one of the most prolific writers in England during…
The first two stories of a masterwork once thought lost, written by a pre-WWII bestselling author who was deported to Auschwitz and died before her work could be completed. Author Irène Némirovsky (born February 11, 1903, Kiev, died August 17, 1942, Auschwitz, German Occupied Poland) was a Jewish novelist and biographer born in the Ukraine,…
Though they were often ridiculed or ignored by their contemporaries, today astonishing sums are paid for their paintings. Their dazzling works are familiar to even the most casual art lovers—but how well does the world know the Impressionists as people? Author Sue Roe is an acclaimed biographer and poet with a strong interest in the…
Laurence Wylie’s remarkably warm and human account of life in the rural French village he calls Peyrane vividly depicts the villagers themselves within the framework of a systematic description of their culture. Since 1950, when Wylie began his study of Peyrane, to which he has returned on many occasions since, France has become a primarily…
