Best known in the English speaking world for his book Le Feu Follet, which has been adopted into several films, Pierre Drieu la Rochelle considered the semi-autobiographical Gilles to be his greatest work.

The literary critic Gaëtan Picon wrote that Gilles “is, without any doubt, one of the greatest novels of the century—and one of those books in which the disarming sincerity of a man rises to the grandeur usually reserved to literary transpositions.”

As a member of the French Parliament, Alexis de Tocqueville took it upon himself to become France’s foremost expert on the Algerian question. To this end, he studied the history and people of Algeria, visited the country several times, and undertook a study of both the Islamic religion and Arab language.

In a series of letters and reports to the French Establishment, Tocqueville describes a sort of conceptual travelogue, describing first a brief outline the of the country, it’s inhabitants, their histories, and then describing more explicitly…

Harukichi Shimoi was a professor at the University of Naples. A lover of Dante, he moved to Italy in order to learn Italian so he could read the Divine Comedy in it’s original language.

Stirred by the great patriotic sentiment of pre-war Italy, Shimoi accompanied the elite Italian Aridit troops during the First World War. The Italian war as seen by a Japanese is an epistolary novel comprised of several letters written during his time at the front.