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Alan Beguivin

    Annihilation
    Atomised
    The map and the territory
    Matter and memory
    Public enemies
    Gravity and Grace
    • 2023

      On the fiftieth anniversary of the first English edition, this Routledge Classics edition offers the English reader the complete text of this landmark work for the first time ever.

      Gravity and Grace
    • 2022

      Annihilation

      • 544 pages
      • 20 hours of reading
      3.9(2298)Add rating

      In "Annihilation," set in a deteriorating France in 2027, Paul Raison navigates a tense political landscape amid cyberattacks while grappling with family dynamics following his father's stroke. Michel Houellebecq infuses his narrative with newfound compassion, blending rage and tenderness in this thought-provoking novel.

      Annihilation
    • 2022

      Public enemies

      • 309 pages
      • 11 hours of reading
      4.3(39)Add rating

      In 2008 Houellebecq and Levy, two of France's most celebrated intellectuals, began a ferocious exchange of letters, resulting in this book. In their inimitably witty, fascinating, and confrontational correspondence they lock horns on everything, including literature, sex, politics, family, fame, and even themselves."

      Public enemies
    • 2019

      Florent-Claude Labrouste is dying of sadness. Despised by his girlfriend and on the brink of career failure, his last hope for relief comes in the form of a newly available antidepressant that alters the brain's release of serotonin.When he returns to the Normandy countryside in search of serenity, he instead finds a rural community left behind by globalisation and red-tape agricultural policies, with local farmers longing for an impossible return towhat they remember as a golden age.

      Serotonin
    • 2019

      Traces the experiences of artist Jed Martin, who rises to international success as a portrait photographer before helping to solve a heinous crime that has lasting repercussions for his loved ones.

      The map and the territory
    • 2015

      Submission

      • 246 pages
      • 9 hours of reading
      3.7(17475)Add rating

      It’s 2022. Francois is bored. He’s a middle-aged lecturer at the Sorbonne and an expert on J.K. Huysmans, the famous nineteenth-century Decadent author. But Francois’s own decadence is considerably smaller in scale. He sleeps with his students, eats microwave dinners, rereads Huysmans, watches YouPorn. Meanwhile, it’s election season. And although Francois feels “about as political as a bath towel,” things are getting pretty interesting. In an alliance with the Socialists, France’s new Islamic party sweeps to power. Islamic law comes into force. Women are veiled, polygamy is encouraged, and Francois is offered an irresistible academic advancement—on condition that he convert to Islam. Adam Gopnik in The New Yorker has said of Submission that Michael Houellebecq is “not merely a satirist but—more unusually—a sincere satirist, genuinely saddened by the absurdities of history and the madnesses of mankind.” Houellebecq’s new book may be satirical and melancholic, but it is also hilarious, a comic masterpiece by one of France’s great novelists.

      Submission
    • 2013

      Platform

      • 320 pages
      • 12 hours of reading
      3.7(1040)Add rating

      Michel is a civil-servant at the Ministry of Culture. When his father is murdered, Michel takes leave of absence to go on a package tour to Thailand. Infuriated by the shallow hypocrisy and mediocrity of his fellow travellers, only the awkward Valerie att

      Platform
    • 2013

      Atomised

      • 384 pages
      • 14 hours of reading
      3.9(23177)Add rating

      Half-brothers Michel and Bruno have a mother in common but little else. This is the story of two brothers, but the subject of the novel is in its dismantling of society and its assumptions, a dissection of modern lives and loves

      Atomised
    • 2006

      Tolkien. Na březích Středozemě

      • 306 pages
      • 11 hours of reading
      2.9(27)Add rating

      Tolkien: Na březích Středozemě je první francouzsky psanou knihou, jež se do hloubky zabývá Tolkienovým nejslavnějším dílem, trilogií Pán prstenů. Jde o svého druhu průkopnickou práci a vůbec první hlubší analýzu Pána prstenů, již nyní dostávají k dispozici i čeští čtenáři. Na pozadí starých mýtů a moderních teorií románu nám Ferré nejprve představuje svět, v němž se odehrávají dobrodružství Froda, Gandalfa, Aragorna, Legolase a dalších románových postav. Zasazuje Pána prstenů do kontextu Tolkienova díla a zabývá se jeho vztahem k žánru fantasy. Ve druhé části knihy se pak věnuje tématu smrti, jejíž zkušenost je podle něj zásadní pro vývoj všech postav Tolkienovy trilogie a koneckonců i pro vyústění boje o Prsten.

      Tolkien. Na březích Středozemě
    • 2006

      Whatever

      • 155 pages
      • 6 hours of reading
      3.6(5812)Add rating

      Just thirty, with a well-paid job, depression and no love life, the narrator and anti-hero par excellence of this grim, funny, and clever novel smokes four packs of cigarettes a day and writes weird animal stories in his spare time.Houellebecq's debut novel is painfully realistic portrayal of the vanishing freedom of a world governed by science and by the empty rituals of daily life.

      Whatever