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Last Updated:
Mar 10, 2024
A Blue Tale and Other Stories
Marguerite Yourcenar*****Published to great acclaim in France in 1993, this collection is not only a delight for Marguerite Yourcenar fans but a welcome port of entry for any reader not yet familiar with the author's lengthier, more demanding works. The sole published work of fiction by Yourcenar yet to be translated into English, this collection includes three stories written between 1927 and 1930 when the author was in her mid-twenties. These stories cover a range of themes, from an allegory on greed and a scene from the war of the sexes, to a witchhunt that obsessively creates its own quarry.

For the devoted readers of Yourcenar, this collection allows a rare glimpse at the beginnings of a writer's craft. In these accomplished but forgotten pieces, edited and introduced by her biographer, Josyane Savigneau, the reader will find the blend of fable and fairy tale of Oriental Tales, the psychological chronicle of Dear Departed, the ironic realism of A Coin in Nine Hands. Read as an introduction to Yourcenar's work, the stories take us into the writer's workshop, as it were, to the early days of creation. In either case, A Blue Tale and Other Stories carries the unmistakable voice of a formidable and vastly talented writer.

Marguerite Yourcenar (her pseudonym was an anagram of her family name, Crayencour) was born in Brussels in 1903 and died in Maine in 1987. One of the most respected writers in the French language, she is best known as the author of the best-selling Memoirs of Hadrian and The Abyss. She was awarded many literary honors, most notably election to the Académie Francaise in 1980, the first woman to be so honored.
A Coin in Nine Hands: A Novel (Phoenix Fiction)
Marguerite Yourcenar*****
Dear Departed: A Memoir
Marguerite YourcenarFirst published in French in 1974 under the title 'Souvenirs Pieux', DEAR DEPARTED is the first volume of a trilogy by Marguerite Yourcenar, one of the most celebrated French writers of the century, devoted to her own origins and background. Yourcenar describes the events surrounding her birth in 1903, then takes us back through the centuries to meet her mother's forebears: soldiers, essayists, idealists, heroines, even ambassadors. Throughout, the history of the family serves as a window on the history of a rapidly-changing Europe.Using memoirs, letters and momentos, Yourcenar richly evokes both the larger events on the European stage and the rhythms and textures of everyday existence. Though rarely visible, Yourcenar is everywhere present, her perceptions rendered in her unmistakable voice. The book is a tour-de-force of historical and literary imagination.
Dreams and Destinies
Marguerite YourcenarDreams and Destinies, the Rosetta stone of Marguerite Yourcenar's canon, is an intimate journal of her dreams. In this book, Yourcenar writes in a daring yet unconventional autobiographical form that allows the reader to view her life as it is refracted through the poetic sensibility of her own sleeping mind. Men, women, children, animals, and mythical creatures populate her dreams as Yourcenar wanders through a picture gallery of the soul, pausing before ruined cathedrals filled with candles, dark ravines that hold dead bodies, and still reflecting pools located deep inside soaring gothic churches. Revised to include changes that she requested before her death, and now available for the first time in English, Dreams and Destinies is a reminder from one of the greatest writers of the twentieth century that the dreams we create are with us forever.
Fires (Phoenix Fiction)
Marguerite Yourcenar*****Fires consists of nine monologues and narratives based on classical Greek stories. Antigone, Clytemnestra, Phaedo, Sappho are all mythical figures whose stories are mingled with contemporary themes. Interspersed are highly personal narratives, reflecting on a time of profound inner crisis in the author's life.

"The unwritten novel among the fantasies and aphorisms of Fires is a classic tale."—Stephen Koch, New York Times Book Review
How Many Years: A Memoir
Marguerite YourcenarThe second volume of the French writer's autobiographical trilogy deals with Marguerite Yourcenar's father, recounting his turbulent youth, army desertions, affairs and marriages, gambling, and vagabond spirit, and recognizing the boldness, sensuality, and independence he passed on to her.
Memoirs of Hadrian
Marguerite Yourcenar*****Both an exploration of character and a reflection on the meaning of history, Memoirs of Hadrian has received international acclaim since its first publication in France in 1951. In it, Marguerite Yourcenar reimagines the Emperor Hadrian's arduous boyhood, his triumphs and reversals, and finally, as emperor, his gradual reordering of a war-torn world, writing with the imaginative insight of a great writer of the twentieth century while crafting a prose style as elegant and precise as those of the Latin stylists of Hadrian's own era.
That Mighty Sculptor, Time
Marguerite YourcenarThis posthumously published collection of essays takes up such diverse subjects as the poet Oppian, Tantrism, the feasts of the Christian year, Durer, the Japanese studies of Ivan Morris, the erotic mysticism of the Gita-Govinda, the eternal spirit of Andalusia, and Bede's Ecclesiastical History. The title esay consider's time's transforming effect on arrt, meditating on the erosion of a statue and the resulting production of a new, sublime work of art.
The Abyss: A Novel
Marguerite Yourcenar*****Marguerite Yourcenar instantly assumes command of our imagination in her novel The Abyss. Almost before we know it the author establishes a scene and time, and engages us in the fate of two cousins.
Yourcenar : Oeuvres Romanesques
Marguerite Yourcenar