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Liane de Pougy, known as Paris's most beautiful and notorious courtesan, was a Folies-Bergère dancer who became a princess and died a nun. Between 1919 and 1941 she wrote her intimate memoir, My Blue Notebooks. Making modern tell-alls seem downright tepid by comparison, this long-out-of-print classic is a fascinating look into the mind of an audacious woman of great intelligence and humor. In My Blue Notebooks, de Pougy describes hosting the likes of Jean Cocteau and the poet Max Jacob, her best friend ("Never again. Never more than one writer at a time"). She shares her literary critiques of her "friend" Colette ("I look down on her with a grimace of disgust"), recalls the funeral of Nicholas I (she happened to be in St. Petersburg at the time), and reports the sad early death of her acquaintance Marcel Proust. She writes graphically of her many sexual liaisons with both men and women, including her complex marriage to the "too handsome" Prince Georges Ghika of Romania and her difficult relationship with Nathalie Clifford Barney, perhaps the real love of her life. Here is a voyeuristic feast of high society living during the first decades of the twentieth century.
BONUS: This edition contains a The Blue Notebook discussion guide and an excerpt from James A. Levine's Bingo's Run. An unforgettable, deeply affecting debut novel, The Blue Notebook tells the story of Batuk, a precocious fifteen-year-old girl from rural India who is sold into sexual slavery by her father. As she navigates the grim realities of Mumbai’s Common Street, Batuk manages to put pen to paper, recording her private thoughts and writing fantastic tales that help her transcend her daily existence. Beautifully crafted, surprisingly hopeful, and filled with both tragedy and humor, The Blue Notebook shows how even in the most difficult situations, people use storytelling to make sense of and give meaning to their lives.
Originally published in Dearest father: stories and other writings. Schocken Books, 1954.
This is the first English translation of Liane de Pougy’s 1901 novel A Woman’s Affair (Idylle Saphique) which shocked French readers with its lesbian lover story, and is based on Liane de Pougy’s affair with Natalie Barney. Despite her beauty and her riches, Annhine de Lys, one of the most notorious courtesans of 1890s Paris, is bored and restless. Into her life bursts Flossie, a young American woman, and everything changes. The love she offers Annhine is dangerous, perverse and hard to resist. Ignoring the warnings of her best friend, Annhine encourages the affair. Yet she cannot commit: she advances, retreats, becomes bewildered, ill. After a tragic incident at a masked ball, Annhine leaves Paris to make a long tour through Europe. But the attempt to put time and distance between them comes to nothing and the fateful relationship must run its course. 'A Woman’s Affair is melodrama at full pelt... Beneath the melodrama is something more interesting: a straightforward acceptance of same-sex love that in 1901 could perhaps only have been expressed in Paris... It is worth noting that (A Woman's Affair) was nearly thirty years before Radclyffe Hall’s much milder allusion (to lesbian love) prompted a British court to brand The Well of Loneliness (1928) obscene...The more thoughtful feminism glimpsed beneath (the frou-frou and silliness in A Woman’s Affair) is illuminating on the choices facing women in the early 1900s, and on the dangers of sex work. Anderson does justice to both registers – silly and serious – in a lively translation that captures Pougy’s effervescence as well as her uneven style.’ Miranda France in The Times Literary Supplement
Using language like an artist's palette, the Blue Notebooks captures the special moments of everyday being.
Anna is a writer, author of one very successful novel, who now keeps four notebooks. In one, with a black cover, she reviews the African experience of her earlier years. In a red one she records her political life, her disillusionment with communism. In a yellow one she writes a novel in which the heroine relives part of her own experience. And in a blue one she keeps a personal diary. Finally, in love with an American writer and threatened with insanity, Anna resolves to bring the threads of all four books together in a golden notebook. Doris Lessing's best-known and most influential novel, The Golden Notebook retains its extraordinary power and relevance decades after its initial publication.
The Busy Blue Jay: True Bird Stories from My Notebooks by Olive Thorne Miller. A story about a blue jay named Jakie. This chapters focuses on his mischevious behavior. Harriet Mann Miller was a naturalist, ornithologist and children's writer. She was the wife of Watts Todd Miller and sometimes wrote under the pseudonym Olive Thorne Miller.
This is the first English translation of Chasing the Dream, Liane de Pougy’s first novel, published in 1898 when she was 29. It is the story of a courtesan in search of true love which repeatedly proves ungraspable - insaisissable. Josiane de Valneige is young, beautiful and rich. She is also exhausted, depressed and despairing. Although scores of wealthy Parisians have been her lovers, she has loved none in return. And despite Josiane’s fame as one of the fin de siècle’s grandes horizontales, fêted in every gossip column, the journey to success has revealed a flaw in her character: she has a heart. Her real self is never engaged. It is not enough to be universally loved. She needs, she yearns, to give her heart. 'Pougy's debut novel, Chasing the Dream was published in 1898. Admirably pragmatic, Anderson describes it as " a kind of half-time report on her career to date". It opens with the heroine Josiane horizontal on a chaise longue in her negligee. Suddenly a stranger arrives - her old lover, Jean, who declares his undying love, then politely enquires what she has been up to. It is a long story, so Josiane proposes a correspondence in which she will relate the details. The letters that follow chart Josiane's ascent through the Parisian demimonde via assorted aristocrats, politicians and businessmen.' Miranda France in The Times Literary Supplement
Peter Reith was a senior cabinet minister under John Howard from 1996 to 2001. He was the face of the government’s tough waterfront reforms and architect of sweeping industrial laws, a major contributor to the Fightback policy, a potential leader of the Liberal Party, a key player in the introduction of the GST, an influential republican in the 1999 referendum and Minister for Defence during the time that it was wrongly claimed that asylum seekers had thrown their children overboard. A relentless diary keeper, Peter Reith kept extensive records of those tumultuous years in over a hundred notebooks he filled with recollections of conversations with his colleagues, discussions in cabinet and his private views and predictions. The Reith Papers is the best of those diary entries from the heart of a government that changed Australia.