Valery The Great

'Valery the Great' is a crackling, electric collection of dark humour that follows the bizarre and beautiful lives of its eccentric protagonists. Sometimes sweet and gentle, sometimes sharply sarcastic, the unique narrative voices of this collection are always powerfully touching. In the title story, a young woman from New Brunswick uses figure skating as a way to fill the void left by her deceased father, and ends up as a Russian circus performer who dances on ice with two skating bears. We also meet an unlikely swim-team member, a crude and ineffective search and rescue volunteer, and Sparky, an ancient boxing trainer who recalls the tumultuous life of his childhood friend, a dwarf named Maurice. Throughout 'Valery the Great' we find characters who need to escape their lives, and in the attempt find alternate ways of living. they float outside of the harsh and unromantic everyday existence and into an alternate reality that allows them dreams of solace and fulfilled potential. McCluskey expertly mixes the dramatic with the deadpan to create a very readable and exciting collection, filled with characters who are connected by their longing to be heard."It may say something about Canada and Canadians that one of our canonical twentieth-century novels was called 'Beautiful Losers'. ...it's the many unique characters and settings that stay with the reader and make this collection well worth reading. Not all of McCluskey's losers are beautiful, but there is real beauty in 'Valery the Great,/i>." - Prairie Fire"Masterfully crafted short stories expose remarkable qualities of ordinary people ...This whole collection is about the unusual. These are stories about people who are ordinary, people who don't stand out in the crowd and yet somehow, they do extraordinary things - although not necessarily good extraordinary things. McCluskey understands that somewhere in the hearts of us all is the desire to be recognized for what we do. Deep down, we want our lives to be special. This is an eclectic, darkly comedic collection, entertaining in their content and hard hitting in their message." - The Halifax Chronicle Herald

A fresh look into the monumental work of Paul Valéry, one of the major French literary figures of the twentieth century. Heir to Mallarmé and the symbolists, godfather to the modernists, Paul Valéry was a poet with thousands of readers and few followers, great resonance and little echo. Along with Rilke and Eliot, he stands as a bridge between the tradition of the nineteenth century and the novelty of the twentieth. His reputation as a poet rests on three slim volumes published in a span of only ten years. Yet these poems, it turns out, are inseparable from another, much vaster intellectual and artistic enterprise: the Notebooks. Behind the published works, behind the uneventful life of the almost forgotten and then exceedingly famous poet, there hides another story, a private life of the mind, that has its record in 28,000 pages of notes revealed in their entirety only after his death. Their existence had been hinted at, evoked in rumors and literary asides; but once made public it took years for their significance to be fully appreciated. It turned out that the prose fragments published in Valéry’s lifetime were not the after-the-fact musings of an accomplished poet, nor his occasional sketchbook, nor excerpts from his private journal. They were a disfigured glimpse of a vast and fragmentary “exercise of thought,” a restless intellectual quest as unguided and yet as persistent, as rigorous, and as uncontainable as the sea that is so often their subject. The Idea of Perfection shows both sides of Valéry: the craftsman of sublimely refined verse, and the fervent investigator of the limits of human intellect and expression. It intersperses his three essential poetic works—Album of Early Verse, The Young Fate, and Charms—with incisive selections from the Notebooks and finishes with the prose poem “The Angel.” Masterfully translated by Nathaniel Rudavsky-Brody, with careful attention to form and a natural yet metrical contemporary poetic voice, The Idea of Perfection breathes new life into poems that are among the most beautiful in the French language and the most influential of the twentieth century.

This selection from representative works of the great French poet-philosopher is based on the Paris Morceaux Choisis volume, which was assembled by Valéry himself.

The politics of literature in the construction of worlds The Russian Revolution was a literary as well as political upheaval. With a focus on the revolutionary works of Andrei Platonov and the futurist collective Oberiu, leading Russian literary thinker Valery Podoroga shows how profoundly the Soviet experiment overturned the traditional expectations of fiction and poetry. The production of this groundbreaking new work was inextricably interwoven with the political and historical debates of the time. This volume expands on Podoroga’s critical exploration of the analytic anthropology of literature. Here he delves into the ways literature can be used in ‘world-building’, both in terms of what happens inside the narrative and how it reflects the external world. He explores the function of the work outside of its time: both as a means to project itself into the future and as a document of a former age. How are we to read the past through these works of the imagination? With an introductory essay from the author’s daughter, Ioulia Podoroga.

Originally published in 1999, this was the first comprehensive account of the work of the French modernist writer Paul Valéry.

History has long recognized Catherine the Great's lavish reign (1762-96), exceptional accomplishments and political savvy. This immigrant German princess, who came to Russia at the age of fourteen, took to her adopted nation with a passion and became one of history's most important monarchs. The Empress was also an avid collector and enlightened patron who understood the political power of art and grasped the role it could play in the modernization of Russia begun by her predecessor, Peter the Great.

A selection of writings that portray the inner life of the artist. Included are several short autobiographical pieces in which Valéry talks about his early childhood, his adolescence, his military experience, his travels, his poetry, and his acquaintances. The volume contains selections from the Valéry-Gide and Valéry-Fourment correspondence and two additional pieces, "The Avenues of the Mind," a magazine interview with Valéry printed in 1927, and Pierre Feline's "Memories of Paul Valéry." Originally published in 1975. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

On the basis of the French text and a translation that is at once accurate and poetical, this book provides an introduction to the poem, Le Cimetière marin, and thereby to the complex intellectual world of Valéry. A valuable resource for scholars, Valéry's Graveyard is accessible to all serious readers. As it does not require a knowledge of French, the book is suitable for study in any course on modern literature.