We Always Treat Women Too Well

Set in Dublin during the 1916 rebellion, this novel tells of a beauty trapped in a post office seized by rebels. This tale celebrates the imagination's power to transmute crude sensationalism into pure pleasure.

Set in Dublin during the 1916 Easter Rising, 'We Always Treat Women Too Well' tells the story of the siege of a small post office by a group of rebels who discover, to their embarassment, that a female postal clerk is still in the lavatory some time after they have shot or expelled the rest of the staff.

Set in Dublin during the 1916 Easter Rising, this title tells the story of the siege of a small post office by a group of rebels, who discover to their embarrassment that a female postal clerk, Gertie Girdle, is still in the lavatory some time after they have shot or expelled the rest of the staff.

The Sunday of Life, the late Raymond Queneau's tenth novel, was first published in French by Gallimard in 1951 and is now appearing for the first time in this country. In the ingenuous ex-Private Valentin Bru, the central figure in The Sunday of Life, Queneau has created that oddity in modern fiction, the Hegelian naif. Highly self-conscious yet reasonably satisfied with his lot, imbued with the good humor inherent in the naturally wise, Valentin meets the painful nonsense of life's adventures with a slightly bewildered detachment.

Queneau uses a variety of literary styles and forms in ninety-nine exercises which retell the same story about a minor brawl aboard a bus.

“Miller takes us on an exciting tour of postcolonial and world literature, guiding us through the literary maze of the real and the pretenders to the real.” —Ngugi wa Thiong’o, author of Wizard of the Crow Writing a new page in the surprisingly long history of literary deceit, Impostors examines a series of literary hoaxes, deceptions that involved flagrant acts of cultural appropriation. This book looks at authors who posed as people they were not, in order to claim a different ethnic, class, or other identity. These writers were, in other words, literary usurpers and appropriators who trafficked in what Christopher L. Miller terms the “intercultural hoax.” In the United States, such hoaxes are familiar. Forrest Carter’s The Education of Little Tree and JT LeRoy’s Sarah are two infamous examples. Miller’s contribution is to study hoaxes beyond our borders, employing a comparative framework and bringing French and African identity hoaxes into dialogue with some of their better-known American counterparts. In France, multiculturalism is generally eschewed in favor of universalism, and there should thus be no identities (in the American sense) to steal. However, as Miller demonstrates, this too is a ruse: French universalism can only go so far and do so much. There is plenty of otherness to appropriate. This French and Francophone tradition of imposture has never received the study it deserves. Taking a novel approach to this understudied tradition, Impostors examines hoaxes in both countries, finding similar practices of deception and questions of harm. “In this fascinating study of intercultural literary hoaxes, Christopher L. Miller provides a useful, brief history of American literary impostures as a backdrop for his investigation of France’s literary history of ‘ethnic usurpation.’” —Henry Louis Gates, Jr., New York Times–bestselling author

Discusses "loving too much" as a pattern of thoughts, feelings, and behaviors which certain women develop as a reponse to various problems in their family backgrounds.

Naming and Unnaming is a dazzling study that centers on the work of Raymond Queneau, one of the most influential French novelists of the twentieth century. Jordan Stump takes as his subject the many implications?epistemological, political, literary, sometimes even physical?of naming in Queneau?s remarkable novels. From the idea that the names of characters offer a more immediate and perhaps even a more intimate understanding of their souls than we might glean from their words and deeds has grown the broad field of inquiry known as literary onomastics. Stump argues that there is another approach to the literary proper name, one that concentrates not on the meaning of names but on the meaning of the use of those names?the ways in which the characters and narrator of a novel address or refer to others. Naming and Unnaming considers the literary and philosophical implications of names and naming. Stump examines four issues in Queneau?s novels?the nature of writing and of creation in general, the possibility or impossibility of knowledge, the relationship between the individual and the group, and the uses of power and control?in relation to which naming emerges as a force both powerful and utterly impotent. By exploring these forces and their evocation, Stump reveals the complexity of both the act of naming and the novels of Queneau.