Anatole France - excellent social satire
Discover Anatole France's sharpest social satires in this curated collection, featuring Penguin Island, The Gods are Athirst, and The Crime of Sylvestre Bonnard—timeless classics of wit and irony.
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The Gods are Athirst (French Classics)
by Anatole France
Anatole France's novel The Gods are Athirst (Les Dieux ont soif, 1912) tells the story of the painter Evariste Gamelin, who developed into a fanatical Jacobin during the French Revolution at the beginning of the 90's in the 18th century. Filled with a sense of fairness and justice as a young man, he soon became a bloodthirsty judge, sending hundreds of people, including many innocent ones and even close friends, to the guillotine, until he himself became a victim of the historical developments.
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The Crime of Sylvestre Bonnard
by Anatole France
Sylvestre Bonnard, an elderly and highly esteemed scholar, encounters unexpected problems when he embarks upon a search for an ancient ecclesiastical literary document that takes him from Paris to Sicily and then into his own life history. For the sake of justice and love, he ends up committing acts that at best are of doubtful legality. --- With "The Crime of Sylvestre Bonnard," Anatole France (1844-1924) wrote a novel that is both clever and wise and in the manner of the great masters of literary style - a book that is full of suspense from beginning to end.
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Penguin Island
by Anatole France
Anatole France (Jacques Anatole François Thibault; 1844-1924. Member of the Académie Française. Awarded the Nobel Price for Literature in 1921. Penguin Island (1908) has been called "the best social satire ever written" (Toni Ungerer). The story takes place in Antarctica, where a fictional penguin population mirrors the foibles of human beings. With the devil's help, a missionary arrives in Antartica and baptizes the local penguins. With God's help, he then turns them into human beings. As a result, the penguins must now try to figure out how to live together and create a civilization. They experience their own barbaric Ancient Times and Middle Ages, and in their efforts to create a modern age, they undergo social conflicts and devastating wars. Written in the spirit of rationalism and enlightenment,Penguin Island is a wickedly funny, incisive portrait of religious fanatacism.
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Thais by Anatole France, Fiction, Suspense
by Anatole France
A dryly tongue-in cheek novel of spiritual enormity from Anatole France, winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature.
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Penguin Island
by Anatole France
Penguin Island in all its peculiar glory: this is the tale of the enchanted island island where the nearsighted Abbot Mael baptised penguins in error. These penguins posessed of Divine Grace by dint of baptism are remarkably like and unlike men; they rule the fictional land of Penguinia.
