Widely considered the foremost French poet of his generation, Yves Bonnefoy has wowed the literary world for decades with his diffuse volumes. First published in France in 2008, "The Anchor's Long Chain" is an indispensable addition to his oeuvre. En...

Roland Barthes, whose centenary falls in 2015, was a restless, protean thinker. A constant innovator, often as a daring smuggler of ideas from one discipline to another, he first gained an audience with his pithy essays on mass culture and then went...

Roland Barthes, whose centenary falls in 2015, was a restless, protean thinker. A constant innovator, often as a daring smuggler of ideas from one discipline to another, he first gained an audience with his pithy essays on mass culture and then went...

Roland Barthes, whose centenary falls in 2015, was a restless, protean thinker. A constant innovator, often as a daring smuggler of ideas from one discipline to another, he first gained an audience with his pithy essays on mass culture and then went...

Johnny is from New Jersey, and Kari is from Oslo. They meet in New York in the late 1950s and soon fall in love, get married, and move to Asbury Park, where their life unfolds like a dream: Kari gives birth to two beautiful daughters, and Johnny is a...

Prolific essayist, translator, and critic Pascal Quignard has described his Last Kingdom series as something unique. It consists, he says, "neither of philosophical argumentation, nor short learned essays, nor novelistic narration", but comes, rather...

In contemporary Norwegian fiction Tomas Espedal's work stands out as uniquely personal; it can be difficult to separate the fiction from Espedal's own experiences. "Against Nature", a companion volume to Espedal's earlier "Against Art", is an examina...

As he leaves the cinema where he has just watched "Casablanca", one of his favorite films, Julien is approached by a mysterious young woman, Claire. Unbeknownst to Julien, Claire has been following him for several days. Outside the cinema she relays...

Few of us have had the opportunity to visit Djibouti, the small crook of a country strategically located in the Horn of Africa, which makes "The Nomads, My Brothers, Go Out to Drink from the Big Dipper" all the more seductive. In his first collection...

The work of poet Georg Trakl, a leading Austrian-German expressionist, has been praised by many, including his contemporaries Rainer Maria Rilke and Else Lasker-Schuler, as well as his patron Ludwig Wittgenstein. Wittgenstein famously wrote that whil...