"In 1968-1969 I wanted to die, that is to say, stop living, being killed, but it was blocked on all sides", wrote Helene Cixous, esteemed French feminist, playwright, philosopher, literary critic, and novelist. Instead of suicide, she began to dream...

For nearly four decades, Maryse Conde, best known for her novels "Segu" and "Windward Heights", has been at the forefront of French Caribbean literature. In this collection of essays and lectures, written over many years and in response to the challe...

Douglas Crase is best known for a single book of poems, "The Revisionist" (1981). In the year of its publication John Ashbery urged Carcanet to consider it for British publication and now, thirty-eightyears later, the book appears together with the c...

What do American poets mean when they talk about freedom? How can form help us understand questions about what shapes we want to give our poetic lives, and how much power we have to choose those shapes? For that matter, what do we even mean by we? In...

This sixth collection by one of Carcanet's most celebrated Irish poets gathers together lyric poems musing on history, on archaeology, geology and on the deep need of the human spirit to find expression in music and song.

Using the same musical sense of language she applies to her translations, Nancy Naomi Carlson masterfully interprets herself in "An Infusion of Violets". The sometimes erotic, sometimes melancholy landscapes she creates as the self-appointed sitar's...

In 1936, Walter Benjamin defined the revolutionary class as being in opposition to a dense and dangerous crowd, prone to fear of the foreign, and under the spell of anti-Semitic madness. Today, in formations great or small, that sad figure returns –...

Paul Celan (1920-1970) is one of the best-known German poets of the Holocaust; many of his poems, admired for their spare, precise diction, deal directly with its stark themes. Austrian writer Ingeborg Bachmann (1926-1973) is recognized as one of pos...

For fans of the great detective, this volume collects 10 classic tales of mystery and detection. In addition to the complete short novel "The Hound of the Baskervilles", it includes several stories that Holmes s creator, Arthur Conan Doyle, himself s...

Vahni Capildeo, author of "Measures of Expatriation" (Forward Prize, 2016), returns with her third Carcanet collection, "Skin Can Hold". The collection marks an experimental departure for a traditionally pen-and-paper poet as she explores embodied pr...