Author: Simon Leys
Publisher: Penguin Group
ISBN: 9780140047875
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 244

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Author: Philippe Paquet
Publisher: La Trobe University Press
ISBN: 1925435563
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 541

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An award-winning biography of one of the greats. Simon Leys is the pen-name of Pierre Ryckmans, who was born in Belgium and settled in Australia in 1970. He taught Chinese literature at the Australian National University and was Professor of Chinese Studies at the University of Sydney from 1987 to 1993. He died in 2014. Writing in three languages – French, Chinese and English – he played an important political role in revealing the true nature of the Cultural Revolution. His writing on China and on varied literary and cultural topics appeared regularly in the New York Review of Books, Le Monde, Le Figaro Littéraire, Quadrant and the Monthly, and his books include The Hall of Uselessness, The Death of Napoleon, Other People’s Thoughts and The Wreck of the Batavia & Prosper. In 1996 he delivered the ABC’s Boyer Lectures. His many awards include the Prix Renaudot, the Prix Mondial Cino Del Duca, the Prix Guizot and the Christina Stead Prize for fiction. This substantial biography – recently published by Gallimard in France to wide acclaim and winning an award from the Académie Francaise – draws on extensive correspondence with Ryckmans, as well as his unpublished writings. It has been translated by an internationally renowned French translator Julie Rose (based in Sydney).

Author: Simon Leys
Publisher: New York Review of Books
ISBN: 1590176200
Category : Literary Collections
Languages : en
Pages : 577

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An NYRB Classics Original Simon Leys is a Renaissance man for the era of globalization. A distinguished scholar of classical Chinese art and literature and one of the first Westerners to recognize the appalling toll of Mao’s Cultural Revolution, Leys also writes with unfailing intelligence, seriousness, and bite about European art, literature, history, and politics and is an unflinching observer of the way we live now. The Hall of Uselessness is the most extensive collection of Leys’s essays to be published to date. In it, he addresses subjects ranging from the Chinese attitude to the past to the mysteries of Belgium and Belgitude; offers portraits of André Gide and Zhou Enlai; takes on Roland Barthes and Christopher Hitchens; broods on the Cambodian genocide; reflects on the spell of the sea; and writes with keen appreciation about writers as different as Victor Hugo, Evelyn Waugh, and Georges Simenon. Throughout, The Hall of Uselessness is marked with the deep knowledge, skeptical intelligence, and passionate conviction that have made Simon Leys one of the most powerful essayists of our time.

Author: Simon Leys
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
ISBN: 9780312127916
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 261

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Author: Simon Leys
Publisher: Macmillan
ISBN: 9780312421779
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 148

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History tells us that Napoleon Bonaparte died in exile on the desolate island of St. Helena in 1821. Or did he? This film supposes a more fanciful tale. A secret network of loyalists hatch an ingenious plot: the Emporer (Ian Holm in a double role) will return to Paris, while a double takes his place in exile. Trading identities with a dissolute sailor (Holm), Napoleon is spirited back to France to reclaim his throne. Yet, early on in the scheme, the plan goes awry. The double refuses to give up playing Napoleon thereby stranding the former Emperor in Paris.

Author: Simone Weil
Publisher: New York Review of Books
ISBN: 1590177908
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 97

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An NYRB Classics Original Simone Weil—philosopher, activist, mystic—is one of the most uncompromising of modern spiritual masters. In “On the Abolition of All Political Parties” she challenges the foundation of the modern liberal political order, making an argument that has particular resonance today, when the apathy and anger of the people and the self-serving partisanship of the political class present a threat to democracies all over the world. Dissecting the dynamic of power and propaganda caused by party spirit, the increasing disregard for truth in favor of opinion, and the consequent corruption of education, journalism, and art, Weil forcefully makes the case that a true politics can only begin where party spirit ends. This volume also includes an admiring portrait of Weil by the great poet Czeslaw Milosz and an essay about Weil’s friendship with Albert Camus by the translator Simon Leys.

Author: Simon Leys
Publisher: Black Inc.
ISBN: 9781863953269
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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In 1629, the Batavia was wrecked on a coral archipelago fifty miles from the Australian continent. Most of the people on board survived, only to become victims of a visionary psychopath who, with the help of a dozen followers, organised a methodic...

Author: Simon Leys
Publisher: Black Inc.
ISBN: 1921866632
Category : Reference
Languages : en
Pages : 162

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ʻA book is a mirror; if an ape looks into it, an apostle is hardly likely to look out.’ –G. C. Lichtenberg ‘The desire to go into politics is usually indicative of some sort of personality disorder, and it is precisely those who want power most that should be kept furthest from it.’ –Arthur Koestler ‘Beware of all enterprises that require new clothes.’ –Thoreau In this wonderfully entertaining collection of quotations, Simon Leys gathers insights and bons mots from a motley group of great artists, wits and thinkers. Topics range from ambition and adventure to youth, sex, time, toads, wine, faith and friendship. Wise, witty and delightfully unpredictable, Other People’s Thoughts is for anyone who has ever rifled through a friend’s bookshelves or snuck a peak over a reading stranger’s shoulder. In this wide-ranging miscellany, we are given free rein to explore the nooks and crannies of one man’s mental library. By turns profound, whimsical and subversive, the result is a book-lover’s delight.

Author: Confucius
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
ISBN: 0393522903
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 296

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“Leys has made Confucius speak English more persuasively than any translator to date. His achievement is one of simplicity. . . . Leys sees his task as making the Confucius of the Analects fully persuasive again. He does this brilliantly.” —Stephen Owen, The New Republic The Norton Critical Edition aims to situate the historical figure of Kongzi, the legendary figure of Confucius, and the Analects (or Lunyu), the single most influential book ascribed to the Master's circle of disciples, within their evolving ethical, cultural, and political contexts. Simon Leys’s acclaimed translation and notes are accompanied by Michael Nylan’s insightful introduction. Eleven essays by leading experts in the field of Chinese studies discuss a broad range of issues relating to the Analects, from the origins of the classicists (Ru) and the formation of the Analects text to the use (and abuse) of the Master’s iconic image in twentieth- and twenty-first-century Asian, diasporic, and Western settings. Collectively, these readings suggest that the Confucius we thought we knew is not the Kongzi of record and that this Kongzi is a protean figure given to rapid change and continual reevaluation. Contributors include Henry Rosemont Jr., Nicolas Zufferey, Robert Eno, Thomas Wilson, Sébastien Billioud and Vincent Goossaert, Julia K. Murray, Mark Csikszentmihalyi and Tae Hyun Kim, Eric L. Hutton, Luke Habberstad, He Yuming, and Sam Ho.

Author: Helen DeWitt
Publisher: New Directions Publishing
ISBN: 0811225518
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 371

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Called “remarkable” (The Wall Street Journal) and “an ambitious, colossal debut novel” (Publishers Weekly), Helen DeWitt’s The Last Samurai is back in print at last Helen DeWitt’s 2000 debut, The Last Samurai, was “destined to become a cult classic” (Miramax). The enterprising publisher sold the rights in twenty countries, so “Why not just, ‘destined to become a classic?’” (Garth Risk Hallberg) And why must cultists tell the uninitiated it has nothing to do with Tom Cruise? Sibylla, an American-at-Oxford turned loose on London, finds herself trapped as a single mother after a misguided one-night stand. High-minded principles of child-rearing work disastrously well. J. S. Mill (taught Greek at three) and Yo Yo Ma (Bach at two) claimed the methods would work with any child; when these succeed with the boy Ludo, he causes havoc at school and is home again in a month. (Is he a prodigy, a genius? Readers looking over Ludo’s shoulder find themselves easily reading Greek and more.) Lacking male role models for a fatherless boy, Sibylla turns to endless replays of Kurosawa’s masterpiece Seven Samurai. But Ludo is obsessed with the one thing he wants and doesn’t know: his father’s name. At eleven, inspired by his own take on the classic film, he sets out on a secret quest for the father he never knew. He’ll be punched, sliced, and threatened with retribution. He may not live to see twelve. Or he may find a real samurai and save a mother who thinks boredom a fate worse than death.