“A writer as comfortable with reality as with fiction, with passion as with reason.” —John Le CarréInspector Maigret finds himself tangled up in a dreadful death, in Georges Simenon’s haunting tale about the lengths to which people will go to escape from guiltWhile in Brussels on police business, Inspector Jules Maigret witnesses a strange act: a scruffy-looking man counts out a large amount of currency and mails it to a Paris address. His instincts tell him there is more to this moment than meets the eye, and following an impulse, Maigret boards the man’s train, following him to Germany via Amsterdam. But in the course of his investigation, something goes horribly awry, and the man ends up dead.Maigret is devastated by the inadvertent role he played, but his own remorse is overshadowed by the discovery of the sordid events that drove the desperate man to the edge. In The Hanged Man of Saint-Pholien, Georges Simenon examines the terrible weight guilt can place on a man’s conscience and the tragedies that can result when that weight gets to be too heavy to bear.

An actor, recently divorced, at loose ends in New York; a woman, no less lonely, perhaps even more desperate than the man: they meet by chance in an all-night diner and are drawn to each other on the spot. Roaming the city streets, hitting its late-night dives, dropping another coin into yet another jukebox, these two lost souls struggle to understand what it is that has brought them, almost in spite of themselves, together. They are driven—from moment to moment, from bedroom to bedroom—to improvise the most unexpected of love stories, a tale of suspense where risk alone offers salvation.Georges Simenon was the most popular and prolific of the twentieth century's great novelists. Three Bedrooms in Manhattan—closely based on the story of his own meeting with his second wife—is his most passionate and revealing work.

“One of the greatest writers of the twentieth century . . . Simenon was unequaled at making us look inside, though the ability was masked by his brilliance at absorbing us obsessively in his stories.” —The GuardianA man’s dismembered body is found in a canal, and only Maigret can uncover the killer When a man’s headless body is discovered in Paris’s Saint-Martin Canal, Maigret is quick to answer the call. It is in this very neighborhood that he meets a strangely taciturn woman who runs a cafe. Her husband is away on a trip—or so she says. As is often the case, Maigret soon learns that there is more to the story than meets the eye.As shocking as it is incisive, Maigret and the Headless Corpse is a compelling mystery from Georges Simenon.

When a dinner between Inspector Maigret and friends ends abruptly at the discovery of a body, the detective must plumb the darker side of human nature to discover what motivates a killer\\nMaigret and wife have always enjoyed their occasional dinners with Mr. and Mrs. Pardon on the Boulevard Voltaire. But one of the congenial meals is interrupted by a neighbor who has stumbled across the body of a young man in the nearby Rue Popincourt. Maigret answers the call with his friend Dr. Pardon, and their pleasant evening is quickly brought to an end by the commencement of a complicated murder case. And when a tape recorder is discovered on the victim's body, it only complicates matters.\\nMaigret's investigation leads to the discovery of another crime altogether and the fascinating story of the murdered man's life. Maigret and the Killer is a taut, engrossing mystery that shows off Georges Simenon's flair for creating complex characters with deeply human problems and his ability to make a senseless crime understandable.

“A writer as comfortable with reality as with fiction, with passion as with reason.” —John Le CarréIn Simenon’s iconic first novel featuring Inspector Maigret, the laconic detective is taken from grimy bars to luxury hotels as he traces a fraudster’s true identityInspector Jules Maigret, a taciturn detective and commissaire of the Paris Brigade Criminelle, receives notice from Interpol that a notorious conman known only as Peitr the Latvian is en route to France. Armed with a broad description and a scant few clues, Maigret plans to intercept him at the train station outside Paris. But when he arrives, he finds that there are several suspects—some living, and some dead—who meet the description uncannily well.Who is Pietr the Latvian, truly? A vagrant, a seaman, a businessman, a corpse? Russian, Norwegian, American or Latvian? In Pietr the Latvian, the iconic first novel of Simenon’s classic series that made Inspector Maigret a legendary figure in the annals of detective fiction, Maigret must use his every instinct to unravel the mystery and track down the truth.

“One of the greatest writers of the twentieth century . . . Simenon was unequaled at making us look inside, though the ability was masked by his brilliance at absorbing us obsessively in his stories.” —The GuardianAn intimate inside look at the mind of Georges Simenon, immortalized here in his journalsIn the 1960s, Simenon bought three leather-bound journals, planning to leave a record of his life and career for his sons. He was 57 years old, a best-selling author, and happily married for many years, and in these journals he began to reflect on the complexities of aging, relationships, and the life of a writer. When I Was Old, a collection of these writings, is an essential read for any fan of this prolific literary voice.

"[W]ise, companionable, and often extremely funny.” ―Oliver Burkeman, The AtlanticBest-selling author and New Yorker writer Adam Gopnik investigates a foundational human question: How do we learn―and master―a new skill? For decades now, Adam Gopnik has been one of our most beloved writers, a brilliantly perceptive critic of art, food, France, and more. But recently, he became obsessed by a more fundamental matter, one he had often meditated on in The New Yorker: How do masters learn their miraculous skill, whether it was drawing a museum-ready nude or baking a perfect sourdough loaf? How could anyone become so good at anything? There seemed to be a fundamental mystery to mastery. Was it possible to unravel it?In The Real Work―the term magicians use for the accumulated craft that makes for a great trick―Gopnik becomes a dedicated student of several masters of their craft: a classical painter, a boxer, a dancing instructor, a driving instructor, and others. Rejecting self-help bromides and bullet points, he nevertheless shows that the top people in any field share a set of common qualities and methods. For one, their mastery is always a process of breaking down and building up―of identifying and perfecting the small constituent parts of a skill and the combining them for an overall effect greater than the sum of those parts. For another, mastery almost always involves intentional imperfection―as in music, where vibrato, a way of not quite landing on the right note, carries maximum expressiveness. Gopnik’s simplest and most invigorating lesson, however, is that we are surrounded by mastery. Far from rare, mastery is commonplace, if we only know where to look: from the parent who can whip up a professional strudel to the social worker who―in one of the most personally revealing passages Gopnik has ever written―helps him master his own demons.Spirited and profound, The Real Work will help you understand how mastery can happen in your own life―and, significantly, why each of us relentlessly seeks to better ourselves in the first place.

Kees Popinga is a solid Dutch burgher whose idea of a night on the town is a game of chess at his club. Or so it has always appeared. But one night this model husband and devoted father discovers his boss is bankrupt and that his own carefully tended life is in ruins. Before, he had looked on impassively as the trains to the outside world swept by; now he catches the first train he can to Amsterdam. Not long after that, he commits murder.Kees Popinga is tired of being Kees Popinga. He's going to turn over a new leaf—though there will be hell to pay.

For forty years Charles Alavoine has sleepwalked through his life. Growing up as a good boy in the grip of a domineering mother, he trains as a doctor, marries, opens a medical practice in a quiet country town, and settles into an existence of impeccable bourgeois conformity. And yet at unguarded moments this model family man is haunted by a sense of emptiness and futility.Then, one night, laden with Christmas presents, he meets Martine. It is time for the sleeper to awake.

The Widow is the story of two outcasts and their fatal encounter. One is the widow herself, Tati. Still young, she’s never had an easy time of it, but she’s not the kind to complain. Tati lives with her father-in-law on the family farm, putting up with his sexual attentions, working her fingers to the bone, improving the property and knowing all the time that her late husband’s sister is scheming to kick her out and take the house back. The other is a killer. Just out of prison and in search of a new life, Jean meets up with Tati, who hires him as a handyman and then takes him to bed. Things are looking up, at least until Jean falls hard for the girl next door.The Widow was published in the same year as Camus’ The Stranger, and André Gide judged it the superior book. It is Georges Simenon’s most powerful and disturbing exploration of the bond between death and desire.

'A unique teller of tales ... What interested Simenon was the average man losing control of his own fate' Observer'She was beautiful, full of vitality, and he was sixteen years older, a dusty, lonely bookseller whose only passion in life was collecting stamps.'Jonas is used to his young wife disappearing. Everyone in the town knows that she goes off with other men. This time, however, he tells a small lie to protect her, saying she is visiting a school friend. It is a lie, however, that eats into him like an illness, provoking hostility and resentment of this timid little Russian-Jewish bookseller, who always thought he had been accepted. As suspicion mounts, his true, terrifying isolation is revealed.

Au retour des vacances, Justin Calmar prend seul le train de Venise à Paris ; sa femme et ses enfants rentreront quelques jours plus tard. Dans son compartiment, un étranger parvient habilement à obtenir toutes sortes de renseignements sur son compte. Calmar a honte de sa complaisance, mais cela ne l'empêche pas d'accepter la mission que lui confie l'inconnu : à Lausanne, où Calmar a deux heures d'attente avant sa correspondance, retirer une petite valise à la consigne de la gare et la porter dans une rue proche, chez une certaine Arlette Staub. L'étranger, qui doit poursuivre son voyage jusqu'à Genève, sort du compartiment à un moment donné et ne reparaît plus. Troublé ; Calmar se rend néanmoins chez Arlette Staub, mais c'est pour y découvrir le corps d'une jeune femme assassinée.On the train back from his holidays in Venice, where his family is staying for a few more days, Justin Calmar meets a stranger and agrees to take care of a suitcase just before the stranger disappears. That chance encounter in a train compartment will change his life forever - Simenon at his best.