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“Every day is an anxiety in my ways of getting to the water. . . . I’ve become so attuned to it, so scared of it, so in love with it that sometimes I can only think by the sea. It is the only place I feel at home.”
 
Many of us visit the sea. Admire it. Even profess to love it. But very few of us live it. Philip Hoare does. He swims in the sea every day, either off the coast of his native Southampton or his adopted Cape Cod. He watches its daily and seasonal changes. He collects and communes with the wrack—both dead and never living—that it throws up on the shingle. He thinks with, at, through the sea.
 
All of which should prepare readers: RISINGTIDEFALLINGSTAR is no ordinary book. It mounts no straight-ahead argument. It hews to no single genre. Instead, like the sea itself, it moves, flows, absorbs, transforms. In its pages we find passages of beautiful nature and travel writing, lyrical memoir, seams of American and English history and much more. We find Thoreau and Melville, Bowie and Byron, John Waters and Virginia Woolf, all linked through a certain refusal to be contained, to be strictly defined—an openness to discovery and change. Running throughout is an air of elegy, a reminder that the sea is an ending, a repository of lost ships, lost people, lost ways of being. It is where we came from; for Hoare, it is where he is going.
 
“Every swim is a little death,” Hoare writes, “but it is also a reminder that you are alive.” Few books have ever made that knife’s edge so palpable. Read RISINGTIDEFALLINGSTAR. Let it settle into the seabed of your soul. You’ll never forget it.

Reading Proust was first published in 1994.What readers of Proust in English translation miss, along with most of his critics, is how precisely his writing works, how exactly his subtle craftsmanship weaves the spell that seems to enchant and distract those who encounter it. Even critics who take up the idiosyncrasies of Proust's text, Maria Paganini asserts, refuse to test its limits for fear of running into the writer's deliberate opacities. Reading Proust puts an end to this interpretive arrest by focusing on the specificity of Proustian writing, revealing the patterns of thought and play of words peculiar to Proust's language, and showing how these metamorphose throughout La Recherche du temps perdu. Her work offers a new model for reading fictional prose, one that replaces the critical "why?" with the more practical and productive "how?" In well-known passages from La Recherche as well as often neglected ones, Paganini exposes a series of cryptic puns developed around three letters of the alphabet, "A," "R," and "T," which trigger many permutations in French: tare (flaw), rat, rater (to miss), and art. She shows how extensive passages of Proust's writings are articulated around a repetitive four-beat scansion using tare, rat, rater or arrêt, and art as its dominant theme. This four-beat scansion also translates into movement in space-point of departure, travel to the horizon, limit point, return-and Paganini uses such "promenades" to gain access to the text's mode of production. Her reading draws new meaning from this familiar yet enigmatic work and opens a new perspective on important issues such as the emergence of involuntary memory or Proust's approach to sexuality. Most significantly, though, Paganini confronts us in a very concrete way with Proust's craft, an approach that explains why and how his work continues to attract and fascinate readers. Maria Paganini is professor emerita of French at the University of Minnesota. She is the author of Flaubert, la présence de l'écrivain dans l'oeuvre.