One of the foremost thinkers of his generation, Furio Jesi began to publish scholarly essays in academic journals at the age of fifteen. By the time of his early death in 1980, he had accumulated a body of work that astonishes with its abundance and...

In Japan there is a legend that anyone who folds one thousand paper cranes will have their wishes realized. But folding cranes, and the meditative, solemn care that it involves, has come to mean more than just an exercise in wish making. Origami cran...

"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 much of her career, Elfriede Jelinek has been maligned in the press for both her unrelenting critique of Austrian complicity in the Holocaust and her provocative deconstructions of pornography. Despite this, her central role in shaping contempora...

Despite being widely acknowledged as one of the most important German dramatists since Bertolt Brecht, Heiner Muller (1929-1995) still remains relatively unknown in the English-speaking world. This collection of plays aims to change that, presenting...

From the 1920s through the 1950s, Bertolt Brecht wrote a number of short, fictionalized comments on contemporary life, politics, and thought. Through the dramatic events of the first half of the twentieth century, Brecht's Mr. Keuner offered up aphor...

Described as an answer to or at least an echo of Samuel Beckett's "Krapp's Last Tape?", "Till Day You Do Part Or A Question of Light", by esteemed Austrian playwright and novelist Peter Handke, is a monologue delivered by the "she" in Beckett's play....

Our taste buds are a powerful way for humans to know beauty and experience beautiful things. In Taste, Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben takes a close look at why the sense of taste has not historically been appreciated as a means to know and exper...

The international community of letters mourned the recent death of Yves Bonnefoy, universally acclaimed as one of France's greatest poets of the last half century. A prolific author, he was often considered a candidate for the Nobel Prize and publish...

For more than three decades, artist William Kentridge has explored in his work the nature of subjectivity, the possibilities of revolution, the Enlightenment's legacy in Africa, and the nature of time itself. At the same time, his creative work has s...