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Vineland (Classic, 20th-Century, Penguin)
Thomas Pynchon
Tristes Tropiques
John Weightman, Doreen Weightman, Patrick Wilcken, Claude Lévi-Strauss
Richard III
William Shakespeare
The Dwarf
Alexandra Dick, Pär Lagerkvist
The Collected Poems of Wilfred Owen
Wilfred Owen, Cecil Day-Lewis
Labyrinths
Richard Wolin
Giotto to Dürer: Early Renaissance Painting in the National Gallery
Jill Dunkerton, Susan Foister, Dillian Gordon, Nicholas Penny
Michel Foucault: Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics
Hubert L. Dreyfus, Paul Rabinow
Gravity's Rainbow
Thomas Pynchon
A Gravity's Rainbow Companion: Sources and Contexts for Pynchon's Novel
Steven Weisenburger

Berthe Morisot

Berthe Morisot - Jean-Dominique Rey,  Sylvie Patry This is a magnificent book - Morisot was a genius. The Irish novelist George Moore said of her: "Only one woman created a style, and that woman is Madame Morisot. Her pictures are the only pictures painted by a woman that could not be destroyed without creating a blank, a hiatus in the history of art.” It is impossible to disagree.

This book contains two essays, neither of which interested me. But the pictures, and the selection, are magnificent - beautifully reproduced. In addition, there are fascinating photographs, an illustrated biography, passages from her correspondence, including her final letter to Julie Manet.

Near the end, the authors have reproduced an envelop on which Mallarmé, who was very close to Morisot, wrote the following instructions.

Apporte ce livre, quand naît//
Sur le Bois l'Aurore amarante,//
Chez Madame Eugène Manet//
Rue au loin Villejust, quarante

Julie Manet was born in 1978, when Morisot was 38. Eugène died in 1892, and Morisot in 1895. Julie, who is the subject of many of these pictures, was then raised by Mallarmé (who himself died in 1898). In fact, many of these pictures show themselves to be a mediation on the transitoriness of human life, the passing of youth, and of death.