favorite books by french authors
Discover the best French books of all time, from de Sade’s *120 Days of Sodom* to Céline's *Journey to the End of the Night*. Explore provocative classics, Flaubert's wit, and more in this curated list of favorite French authors and unforgettable reads.
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Journey to the End of the Night
by Louis-Ferdinand Céline
A nihilistic petit-bougeois named Bardamu opens his medical practice in the slums of suburban Paris.
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Dictionary of Accepted Ideas
by Gustave Flaubert
Jacques Barzun's masterful translation proves that Flaubert's Dictionary of Accepted Ideas--an acid catalogue of the clichés of 19th-century France--is as relevant today as ever.
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The 120 Days of Sodom and Other Writings
by marquis de Sade
The Marquis de Sade, vilified by respectable society from his own time through ours, apotheosized by Apollinaire as "the freest spirit that has yet existed," wrote The 120 Days of Sodom while imprisoned in the Bastille. An exhaustive catalogue of sexual aberrations and the first systematic exploration-a hundred years before Krafft-Ebing and Freud-of the psychology of sex, it is considered Sade's crowning achievement and the cornerstone of his thought. Lost after the storming of the Bastille in 1789, it was later retrieved but remained unpublished until 1935. In addition to The 120 Days, this volume includes Sade's "Reflections on the Novel," his play Oxtiem, and his novella Ernestine. The selections are introduced by Simone de Beauvoir's landmark essay "Must We Burn Sade?" and Pierre Klossowski's provocative "Nature as Destructive Principle." "Imperious, choleric, irascible, extreme in everything, with a dissolute imagination the like of which has never been seen, atheistic to the point of fanaticism, there you have me in a nutshell, and kill me again or take me as I am, for I shall not change."-From Sade's Last Will and Testament
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The Holy Terrors
by Jean Cocteau
Cocteau's novel Les Enfants Terribles, which was first published in 1929, holds an undisputed place among the classics of modern fiction.
