"My father bought me from the council for 365 francs", recalls the narrator in Monica Cantieni's novel 'The Encyclopaedia of Good Reasons'. She's a young girl, an immigrant to Switzerland whose adoption is yet to be finalized. When she finally moves...

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...

What is poetry? If music is sound organized in a particular way, poetry is a way of organizing language. It is language made special so that it will be remembered and valued. It does not always work – over the centuries countless thousands of poems h...

"Those who know me call me Old He, and they also know that I've worked in a crematorium for my entire life". Here begins Mu Cao's novel "In the Face of Death We Are Equal", an unrelentingly realistic portrait of working-class gay men in the underbell...

"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 many, cooking is simply the mechanical act of reproducing standard recipes. To Maryse Conde, however, cooking implies creativity and personal invention, on par with the complexity of writing a story. A cook, she explains, uses spices and flavors...

For nearly four decades, Maryse Conde, best known for her novels "Segu" and "Windward Heights", has been at the forefront of French Caribbean literature. In this collection of essays and lectures, written over many years and in response to the challe...

Known as the "grandparent" of modern medicine and the sister philosophy of yoga, Ayurveda lets patients take control of their own health by focusing on prevention, not medical intervention. Practitioners become active participants in their own wellne...

In 1936, Walter Benjamin defined the revolutionary class as being in opposition to a dense and dangerous crowd, prone to fear of the foreign, and under the spell of anti-Semitic madness. Today, in formations great or small, that sad figure returns –...

Paul Celan (1920-1970) is one of the best-known German poets of the Holocaust; many of his poems, admired for their spare, precise diction, deal directly with its stark themes. Austrian writer Ingeborg Bachmann (1926-1973) is recognized as one of pos...