'It's the women who upset the applecart. Between themselves they talk only about the practicalities of life,' declares Duras in this collection of her transcribed conversations with friend Jerome Beaujour. Some of her free-ranging meditations are short and deceptively simple, while many are autobiographical and reveal her most intimate thoughts about motherhood, her struggle with alcohol, her love for a young man, and more.

In this classic novel by the best-selling author of The Lover, erotic intrigue masks a chillingly deceptive form of madness. Elisabeth Alione is convalescing in a hotel in rural France when she meets two men and another woman. The sophisticated dalliance among the four serves to obscure an underlying violence, which, when the curtain of civilization is drawn aside, reveals in her fellow guests a very contemporary, perhaps even new, form of insanity. Like many of Duras's novels, Destroy, She Said owes much to cinema, displaying a skillful interplay of dialogue and description. There are recurring moods and motifs from the Duras repertoire: eroticism, lassitude, stifled desire, a beautiful woman, a mysterious forest, a desolate provincial hotel. Included in this volume is an in-depth interview with Duras by Jacques Rivette and Jean Narboni.

By one of the world¹s most acclaimed writers and author of The Lover One of France¹s leading literary figures, Marguerite Duras casts a brooding, elegant spell over her readers with her acute portrayals of love: its aphrodisiacal powers and its sweet, inevitable pain. This novella is haunting, erotic, and tragic, with the distinctive evocation that is Duras¹ own.

³Ms. Duras¹ 1980 novella, The Man Sitting in the Corridor, whose superb translation by Barbara Bray is only now appearing, was Š an exercise in the author¹s progressive distillation of her prose. Thus unencumbered, the rare bits of writing gain resonance, like a lone voice echoing through a tunnel. Moreover, by writing less‹and thereby suggesting more‹Ms. Duras invests her information with a power unavailable to more copious, if still evocative, forms of literary expression.² - from The New York Times Book Review

Long acknowledged as one of the most important literary figures in France, Marguerite Duras has garnered worldwide praise for her work, from the acclaimed screenplay Hiroshima Mon Amour to the best-selling novel The Lover. In this volume of four short novels, Duras demonstrates her remarkable ability to create an emotional intensity and unity by focusing on the intimate details of the relationships among only a few central characters: from the park bench couple in The Square (1955) to the double love triangle in Ten-thirty on a Summer Night (1960), each novel probes the depths of human emotion, of love and of despair. Exceptional for their range in mood and situation, these four novels are unparalleled exhibitions of a poetic beauty that is uniquely Duras.