Rouben Cholakian: 5 books

Sister to the king of France, queen of Navarre, gifted writer, religious reformer, and patron of the arts—in her many roles, Marguerite de Navarre (1492-1549) was one of the most important figures of the French Renaissance. In this, the first major biography in English, Patricia F. Cholakian and...

No artist creates in a vacuum, and Marguerite is no exception. Drawing inspiration from two Italian worksBoccaccios Decameron and Castigliones The Book of the CourtierMarguerite nevertheless produces a compelling and original text, examined here from both the point of view of content and style.

This is a shortened reworking of the 2006 biography Marguerite de Navarre, made more accessible here without the scholarly trappings.

Adam Smith et al. alternates book-club discussions about such important writers as Thomas Paine, Mary Wollstonecraft, Thoreau, and Nietzsche, with interesting short narratives about the discussants themselves. Since each session ends with a gastronomic feast, the text also includes recipes of the food consumed by the members of the book group.

These mini-portraits aim to invite the reader to fill the temporal spaces, backwards and forwards. In a sense then, these short readings can be looked upon as an exercise in collaborative invention, one in which writer and reader work as partners. Thus not all the spaces will be filled in the same way.