André Gide

'To know how to free oneself is nothing; the arduous thing is to know what to do with one's freedom' - André Gide Michel had been a blindfold scholar until, newly married, he contracted tuberculosis. His will to recover brings self-discovery and the growing desire to rebel against his background of culture, decency and morality. But the freedom from constraints that Michel finds on his restless travels is won at great cost. And freedom itself, he finds, can be a burden. Gide's novel examines the inevitable conflicts that arise when a pleasure seeker challenges conventional society and, without moralizing, it raises complex issues involving the extent of personal responsibility.

In The Immoralist, André Gide presents the confessional account of a man seeking the truth of his own nature. The story's protagonist, Michel, knows nothing about love when he marries the gentle Marceline out of duty to his father. On the couple's honeymoon to Tunisia, Michel becomes very ill, and during his recovery he meets a young Arab boy whose radiant health and beauty captivate him. An awakening for him both sexually and morally, Michel discovers a new freedom in seeking to live according to his own desires. But, as he also discovers, freedom can be a burden. A frank defense of homosexuality and a challenge to prevailing ethical concepts, The Immoralist is a literary landmark, marked by Gide's masterful, pure, simple style. Translated by David Watson, with an introduction by Alan Sheridan.

'It's only after our death that we shall really be able to hear' The measured tone of hopeless nihilism that pervades The Counterfeiters quickly shatters any image of André Gide as the querulous and impious Buddha to a quarter-century of intellectuals. In sharp and brilliant prose a seedy, cynical and gratuitously alarming narrative is developed, involving a wide range of otherwise harmless and mainly middle-to-upper-class Parisians. But the setting could be anywhere. From puberty through adolescence to death, The Counterfeiters is a rare encyclopedia of human disorder, weakness and despair.

Madeleine is the story of a great writer's marriage, a deeply disturbing account of Andr Gide's feelings towards his beloved and long-suffering wife. It was a relationship which Gide exalted-he termed it the central drama of his existence-yet deliberately shrouded in mystery. This was no ordinary marriage. Madeleine Rondeaux, two years older than her cousin Andr Gide, became his wife after Gide's first visit to Algeria. In his Journal, Gide refers to her as Emmanu le or as Em. Only in this book, published a few months after his death, does Gide call her by her real name and painfully reveal the nature of their life together. All of Gide's vast work may be viewed as a confession, impelled by his need to write what he believed to be true about himself. In Madeleine this act of confession reaches a crowning point. It is a complex tale by a complex man about a complex relationship. "Ranks among the masterpieces of Gide's vibrating prose. It is also the most tragic personal document to have emanated from Gide's pen."-New York Times.

An inspiring discourse on the power of music from one of the twentieth century's most important figures, Andr Gide Andr Gide, one of the great intellectuals of the twentieth century and a devoted pianist, invites readers to reevaluate Fr d ric Chopin as a composer "betrayed . . . deeply, intimately, totally violated" by a music community that had fundamentally misinterpreted his work. As a profound admirer of Chopin's "promenade of discoveries," Gide intersperses musical notation throughout the text to illuminate his arguments, but most moving is Gide's own poetic expression for the music he so loved.

An inspiring discourse on the power of music from one of the twentieth century's most important figures, Andr Gide Andr Gide, one of the great intellectuals of the twentieth century and a devoted pianist, invites readers to reevaluate Fr d ric Chopin as a composer "betrayed . . . deeply, intimately, totally violated" by a music community that had fundamentally misinterpreted his work. As a profound admirer of Chopin's "promenade of discoveries," Gide intersperses musical notation throughout the text to illuminate his arguments, but most moving is Gide's own poetic expression for the music he so loved.

A young artist pursues a search for knowledge through the treatment of homosexuality and the collapse of morality in middle class France.

This debut work lays bare the early brilliance and philosophical conflicts of Andr Gide, a towering figure in French literature. Andr Gide, one of the masters of French literature, captures the essence of the philosophical Romantic in this profoundly personal first novel, completed when he was just twenty years old. Drawing heavily on his religious upbringing and private journals, The Notebooks of Andr Walter--with its "white" and "black" halves--tells the story of a young man pining for his forbidden love, cousin Emmanuelle. But his evocative memories and devoted yearnings, carefully crafted through quotations and diary excerpts, lead only to madness and death. Annotated with footnotes from translator and scholar Wade Baskin, this story within a story offers a unique portrait of the artist as a young man, as it reveals the key themes of self-analysis and moral conscience that Gide explores in his mature works.

This first published work lays bare the early brilliance and philosophical conflicts of Andr Gide, a towering figure in French literature Nobel Prize-winning writer Andr Gide lays bare his adolescent psyche in this early work, first conceived and published as part of his novel The Notebooks of Andr Walter, completed when he was just twenty years old. This profoundly personal work draws heavily on his religious upbringing and private journals to tell the story of a young man who, like the author, pines for his forbidden love, cousin Emmanuelle. This unique portrait of Gide as a young man presents the passions and conflicts, temptations and anguish he would explore in maturity.

This collection of reflective essays forms a "spiritual autobiography" of Andr Gide, a key figure of French letters Andr Gide, a literary and intellectual giant of twentieth-century France, mines his memories and personal observations in this collection of essays. Gide's reflections and commentary masterfully showcase his delicate writing style and evocative sensibility, yielding new insights on writers such as Goethe and contemporaries Joseph Conrad, Nicolas Poussin, Arthur Rimbaud, and Paul-Marie Verlaine. Through it all, Gide skillfully investigates humanity's contradictory nature and struggles to resolve the moral, political, and religious conflicts inherent in daily life.