New England Council 2024 - 2025 Book List

Theme: For the Soul of France: Culture Wars in the Age of Dreyfus


New England Council Preview Event - Saturday, October 5, 2024
The Historical Perspective

  • For the Soul of France: Culture Wars in the Age of Dreyfus by Frederick Brown ISBN: 9780307279217
In this brilliant reconsideration of what fostered the rise of fascism and anti-Semitism in twentieth-century Europe, Frederick Brown chronicles the intense struggle for the soul of a nation, and shows how France’s deep fractures led to its surrender to Hitler’s armies in 1940.

  • Émile Zola 's J'accuse will be emailed to you.

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New England Council Winter Weekend - Saturday-Sunday, February 1st and 2nd, 2025
The Two Most Iconic French Writers

  • Swann In Love by Marcel Proust ISBN: 9780198744894
Swann in Love is part of Proust's monumental masterpiece In Search of Lost Time, and it is also a captivating self-contained story. This new translation encapsulates the qualities that have secured Proust's reputation, and serves as a perfect introduction to his writing.

  • Chéri and The End Of Chéri by Colette ISBN: 9781324052050
Colette skillfully portrays her characters’ shifting inner lives and desires amid a clear-eyed depiction of interpersonal power dynamics. Careau’s lean, attentive translation restores to these classic novels their taut, remarkably modern style―the essence of Colette’s genius.

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New England Council Spring Retreat - Thursday - Sunday, May 1st to May 4th, 2025
Four Nobel Prize Winners

  • The Fall by Albert Camus ISBN: 9780679720225
One of the most widely read novels of all time—from one of the best-known writers of all time—about a lawyer from Paris who brilliantly illuminates the human condition. Elegantly styled, Camus' profoundly disturbing novel of a Parisian lawyer's confessions is a searing study of modern amorality.

  • No Exit ( in No Exit and Three Other Plays ) by Jean-Paul Sartre ISBN: 9780679725169
Four seminal plays by one of the greatest philosophers of the twentieth century. An existential portrayal of Hell in Sartre's best-known play, as well as three other brilliant, thought-provoking works.

  • The Years by Annie Ernaux ISBN: 9781609807870
The Years is a personal narrative of the period 1941 to 2006 told through the lens of memory, impressions past and present— even projections into the future—photos, books, songs, radio, television and decades of advertising, headlines, contrasted with intimate conflicts and writing notes from 6 decades of diaries.

  • The Night Watch by Patrick Modiano ISBN: 9781632863720
Born at the close of World War II, 2014 Nobel Prize winner Patrick Modiano was a young man in his twenties when he burst onto the Parisian literary scene with these three brilliant, angry novels about the wartime Occupation of Paris. The second novel, The Night Watch, tells the story of a young man caught between his work for the French Gestapo, his work for a Resistance cell, and the black marketeers whose milieu he shares.

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