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...

Translated by Gila Walker for the first time into English, "Anthropology of the Name" is French thinker Sylvain Lazarus's response to the intellectual caesura of May 1968. Taking up thought, politics, and the name, Lazarus presents an original doctri...

In his well-known work of art criticism "Art of the Modern Age", Jean-Marie Schaeffer offered a lucid and powerful critique of what he identified as the historically dominant thinking about art and aesthetics from the Jena Romantics, to Nietzsche, He...

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...

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...

When Anna discovers a long letter that her mother Marie wrote, Marie has been dead for some time, and Anna is shocked to learn that her mother disappeared with a secret. The letter is addressed to Marie's first great love, a much older teacher who sh...

Praised by Paul Auster as "one of the rare poets in the history of literature to have sustained the highest level of artistic excellence throughout an entire lifetime", Yves Bonnefoy is widely considered the foremost French poet of his generation. Pr...

In "The Sexual Night", renowned French writer and critic Pascal Quignard meditates on a remarkable collection of illustrations of sexual imagery. He moves from the annals of global art to ancient and modern, from Bosch and Durer to Rembrandt and Tint...

"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 o...