"Cargo Hold of Stars" is an ode to the forgotten voyage of a forgotten people. Khal Torabully gives voice to the millions of indentured men and women, mostly from India and China, who were brought to Mauritius between 1849 and 1923. Many were transpo...

Stella Vinitchi Radulescu's poetry dwells in spaces of paradox, seeking out the words, metaphors, and images that capture both the peaceful stillness of snow and the desperate cry of human experience. "A Cry in the Snow" often draws on these two fert...

"Critical Essays" ("Situations I") contains essays on literature and philosophy from a highly formative period of French philosopher and leading existentialist Jean-Paul Sartre's life, the years between 1938 and 1946. This period is particularly inte...

Laura Wilmote is a television journalist living in Paris. Her life couldn't be better – a stimulating job, a loving boyfriend, interesting friends – until her phone rings in the middle of one night. It is C., an old school friend whom Laura recently...

Dominique Edde met novelist and playwright Jean Genet in the 1970s. And she never forgot him. "His presence", she writes, "gave me the sensation of icy fire. Like his words, his gestures were full, calculated and precise... Genet's movements mimicked...

"The Call of the Trance" is a magnificent book that takes us to the unchartered frontiers of the forbidden. From initiation ceremonies to crises of hysteria, from suicide attempts to the ecstasies of witches, Catherine Clement explores in simple but...

In "Carnival and Cannibal", distinguished French philosopher Jean Baudrillard (1929-2007) reflects on many of his most significant ideas concerning the significance of language and the relationship between the technological and the social. In this,...

Pablo Picasso was one of the most prodigious and revolutionary artists in the history of Western painting. Gertrude Stein was an avant-garde American writer, art collector, eccentric and self-styled genius. Her Paris home was the leading salon for ar...

Artist meets writer; young woman meets older man; daughter meets father. All these encounters are played out in the arresting conversations between the artist Ninar Esper (b. 1971) and the father she hardly knew, the Syrian-Lebanese poet Adonis (b. 1...

In the autumn of 1924, just before Andre Breton published the "Manifeste du surrealisme", two young men met in Paris for the first time. Georges Bataille, 27, starting work at the Bibliotheque Nationale; Michel Leiris, 23, beginning his studies in et...