BiblioVault - Books about Green, Anne

A Certain Smile

A Novel

Françoise Sagan

University of Chicago Press, 2011

Françoise Sagan is best known for her first novel, Bonjour Tristesse, which caused a scandal when she first published it at the age of eighteen in 1953. But her second novel, A Certain Smile, less shocking and more psychologically convincing, was preferred by many critics. Like Bonjour Tristesse, this story is set in Paris in the 1950s and told by a young student bored by her law books, restless and curious about love and sex. She is fond of her loyal boyfriend, but he, too, bores her. His worldly uncle strikes her as more exciting, appealingly risky and forbidden. Frank and spontaneous, vulnerable and cruel, thoughtless and insightful, Sagan's young narrator explores such perennial themes as unrequited love and the precarious balance of irrational emotions and self-restraint.

This edition includes a new foreword by Diane Johnson, author of the best-selling novels Le Divorce and L’Affaire.

“The second book is now out, and so is the verdict. Sagan’s novel Un Certain Sourire, written in two months, is the new literary sensation of Paris.”—Time

“Miss Sagan is a technician of the highest order, working with exceptional economy and elegance in the tradition of Colette and Benjamin Constant.”—Atlantic

“The reader is given the feeling of having opened a young girl’s intimate diary by mistake. But whoever put such a diary down?—especially when the author is as sensitive, experienced, gifted and freshly talented as Mlle. Sagan!”—San Francisco Examiner

“[Sagan’s] style is honest, direct, and her dialogue true. But for her sake let’s hold back those invidious comparisons. Colette indeed! She might turn out to be Sagan.”—Saturday Review

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Gloves

An Intimate History

Anne Green

Reaktion Books, 2021

A captivating history of gloves both real and mythical, practical and high fashion.

This beautifully illustrated history of gloves draws on examples from across the world to explore their cultural significance. From hand-knitted mittens to exquisitely embroidered confections, and from the three-fingered gloves of medieval shepherds to Bluetooth-enabled examples that function like a mobile phone, gloves’ extraordinary variety is a tribute to human ingenuity. So, too, is the remarkable diversity of their—often contradictory—cultural associations. They have been linked to honor, identity, and status, but also to decadence and deceit. In this book, Anne Green discusses gloves both as material objects with their own fascinating history and as fictional creations in folktales, literature, films, etiquette manuals, paintings, and advertisements. Looking to the runway, Green even explores their recent resurgence as objects of high fashion.

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Gustave Flaubert

Anne Green

Reaktion Books, 2017

Gustave Flaubert (1821–1880) is widely regarded as one of the world’s greatest novelists, and his work continues to influence and inspire contemporary writers, artists, and musicians. Flaubert was determined from a young age to become a writer and achieved sudden fame in 1857 when his first published novel, Madame Bovary, resulted in an unsuccessful prosecution for obscenity. In his subsequent work—including the carefully researched Carthaginian novel, Salammbô, the contemporary Parisian novel Sentimental Education, the obsessively reworked Temptation of St. Anthony, and the unfinished comic masterpiece, Bouvard and Pécuchet—Flaubert continued to reflect on the human condition and on the rapidly changing society of his time, while constantly striving for new forms of literary and stylistic perfection.

In this new critical biography, Anne Green draws on Flaubert’s voluminous correspondence and unpublished manuscripts to reveal the extent to which his writing was haunted by traumatic early experiences. She weaves discussion of his work into an intimate account of Flaubert’s life and volatile character, following him from his childhood in Rouen to his student days in Paris, from his extensive travels through North Africa to the imperial court of Napoleon III. Green pays special attention to Flaubert’s close family relationships, love-affairs, and friendships with literary figures, including Turgenev, Sand, Zola, Maupassant, and the Goncourt brothers. This concise and informative biography is a must-read for lovers of literature everywhere.

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