A man hires a woman to spend several weeks with him by the sea. The woman is no one in particular, a "she," a warm, moist body with a beating heart-the enigma of Other. Skilled in the mechanics of sex, he desires through her to penetrate a different mystery: he wants to learn love. It isn't a matter of will, she tells him. Still, he wants to learn to try . . .This beautifully wrought erotic novel is an extended haiku on the meaning of love, "perhaps a sudden lapse in the logic of the universe," and of its absence, "the malady of death." "The whole tragedy of the inability to love is in this work, thanks to Duras' unparalleled art of reinventing the most familiar words, of weighing their meaning." - Le Monde; "Deceptively simple and Racinian in its purity, condensed to the essential." - Translation Review.

En juin 1980, les Cahiers du cinéma publiaient un numéro spécial, Les Yeux verts, qui donnait carte blanche à Marguerite Duras pour écrire sur le cinéma et choisir les illustrations. La coordination de cette revue était assurée par Serge Daney, avec le concours de Pascal Bonitzer, Michèle Manceaux, François Régnault et Charles Tesson.
Marguerite Duras revient librement sur son oeuvre cinématographique, s’exprime sur de nombreux sujets, allant de l’Histoire et la littérature, en passant par la politique, ou l’évocation du travail d’artistes tels que Charlie Chaplin, Charles Laughton, Jean Renoir, Robert Bresson ou encore Jean-Luc Godard.
Riche de plus de soixante photographies, dont des clichés signés Jean Mascolo (le fils de Marguerite Duras) ou issus de sa collection, cette nouvelle édition illustrée constitue un témoignage historique de l’oeuvre de l’une des auteures et cinéastes majeures du xxe siècle.

Un homme paye une femme pour que, pendant plusieurs jours, elle s’allonge nue dans un lit, dans une chambre face à la mer noire et se soumette. Il essayera d’aimer. Elle le fait, il la regarde dormir, la touchera, dormira et pleurera contre elle. Puis elle lui pose des questions auxquelles il ne répond que brièvement. Elle lui dit qu’il est atteint de la maladie de la mort, qu’elle l’avait reconnue dès le début. Au bout de plusieurs nuits, il pleure sur lui-même et elle parvient à lui faire dire que c’est parce qu’il n’aime pas. Elle lui dit de ne plus pleurer sur lui-même. Peu à peu, elle prend le contrôle, mais sans paraître le vouloir, comme s'il lui laissait peu à peu le contrôle. Puis, un jour, elle ne revient plus et ne reviendra jamais.

The Easy Life is the story of Francine Veyrenattes, a twenty-five-year-old woman who already feels like life is passing her by. After witnessing a series of tragedies on her family farm, she alternates between intense grief and staggering boredom as she discovers a curious detachment in herself, an inability to navigate the world as others do. Hoping to be cleansed of whatever ails her, she travels to the coast to visit the sea. But there she finds herself unraveling, uncertain of what is inside her. Lying in the sun with her toes in the sand by day while psychologically dissolving in her hotel room by night, she soon reaches the peak of her inner crisis and must grapple with whether and how she can take hold of her own existence.
An extraordinary examination of a young woman's estrangement from the world that only Marguerite Duras could have written, The Easy Life is a work of unsettling beauty and insight, and a bold, spellbinding journey into the depths of the human heart.

An instant number-one best-seller in France, The North China Lover both shocks and entrances its readers. Initially written as notes toward a film script for The Lover, the book has the grainy, filmic qualities of a documentary. Far more daring and truthful than any book Duras has written before, The North China Lover emphasizes the realities of her youth in Indochina and reveals much that her earlier works concealed.

Introduction, afterword and footnotes by Cyril Béghin. Translation by Nicholas Elliott.
Three dialogues between Marguerite Duras and Jean-Luc Godard from 1979, 1980 and 1987.
“The two demonstrate a profound shared passion, a way of literally being one with a medium and speaking about it with a dazzling lyricism interspersed with dryly ironic remarks, fueled by a conviction that inspires them to traverse history. Their point of intersection is obvious. Duras, a writer, is also a filmmaker, and Godard, a filmmaker, has maintained a distinctive relationship with literature, writing and speech.”—Cyril Béghin

Far more daring and truthful than any of her other novels, The North China Lover is a fascinating retelling of the dramatic experiences of Duras’s adolescence that shaped her most famous work. Initially conceived as notes toward a screenplay for The Lover , this later novel, written toward the end of her life, emphasizes the tougher aspects of her youth in Indochina, and possesses the feel of an intimate documentary.

Both shocking and enthralling, the story Duras tells is “so powerfully imagined (or remembered) that it . . . lingers like a strong perfume” ( Publishers Weekly ). Hailed by the French critics as a return to “the Duras of the great books and the great days,” it is a mature and complex rendering of a formative period in the author’s life.

Jacket description/back: One of the most influential works in the history of cinema, Alain Renais's Hiroshima Mon Amour gathered international acclaim upon its release in 1959 and was awarded the International Critics' Prize at the Cannes Film festival and the New York Film Critics' Award. Ostensibly the story of a love affair between a Japanese architect and a French actress visiting Japan to make a film on peace, Hiroshima Mon Amour is a stunning exploration of the influence of war on both Japanese and French culture and the conflict between love and humanity.

Writing, one of Marguerite Duras's last works, is a meditation on the process of writing and on her need for solitude in order to do it. In the five short pieces collected in this volume, she explores experiences that had an emotional impact on her and that inspired her to write. These vary from the death of a pilot in World War II, to the death of a fly, to an art exhibition. Two of the pieces were made into documentary films, and one was originally a short film. Both autobiographical and fictional, like much of her work, Writing displays Duras's unique worldview and sensitive insight in her simple and poetic prose.