In "Doing", Jean-Luc Nancy, one of the most prominent and lucid articulators of contemporary French theory and philosophy, examines the precarious but urgent relationship between being and doing. His book is not so much a call to action as a summons...

The year is 1938. The great Russian poet and essayist Osip Mandelstam is forty-seven years old and is dying in a transit camp near Vladivostok after having been arrested by Stalin's government during the repression of the 1930s and sent into exile wi...

We defy augury. There's a special providence in the fall of a sparrow. If it be now, "this not to come... the readiness is all. Under the sign of Hamlet's last act, Helene Cixous, in her eightieth year, launched her new book – and the latest chapter...

From the publication of his first book in 1953, Yves Bonnefoy has been considered the most important and influential French poet since World War II. A prolific writer, critic, and translator, Bonnefoy continues to compose groundbreaking new work sixt...

A controversial figure of the postwar French literary and cultural scene, Marguerite Duras has exerted a powerful hold on readers around the world. This volume of interviews – hailed on its French publication as Duras's "secret confession" – offers r...

"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...

"Baudelaire is indeed the greatest exemplar in modern poetry in any language", said T. S. Eliot. We experience Baudelaire in myriad ways through his multifaceted writing. His sensuous poems – dreams of escape to an impossible, preferably tropical, el...