In the early 1960s, the Hungry Generation revitalized Bengali poetry in Calcutta, liberating it from the fetters of scholarship and the fog of punditry and freeing it to explore new forms, language, and subjects. Shakti Chattopadhyay was a cofounder...

Maryse Conde is one of the best-known and most beloved French Caribbean literary voices. The author of more than twenty novels, she was shortlisted for the Man Booker International Prize in 2015 and has long been recognized as a giant of black femini...

Swiss novelist Catherine Colomb is known as one of the most unusual and inventive francophone novelists of the twentieth century. Fascinated by the processes of memory and consciousness, she has been compared to that of Virginia Woolf and Marcel Prou...

One of the central figures from a remarkable generation of French-language poets, Pierre Chappuis has thus far only been represented in English translation in fragments: a few poems here and there in magazines, online reviews, and anthologies. "Like...

One of the foremost poets of the French Resistance, Rene Char has been hailed by Donald Revell as "the conscience of modern French poetry". Translated by Mark Hutchinson, "The Inventors" is a companion volume to Char's critically acclaimed "Hypnos"....

The devil is a defiant, nefarious figure, the emblem of evil, and harbinger of the damned. However, the festive devil – the devil that dances – turns the most hideous acts into playful transgressions. "Festive Devils of the Americas" is the first vol...

Franz Kafka was one of the most influential writers of the twentieth century. His writing contributed greatly to existentialism, and the term "Kafkaesque" is now synonymous with the literature of the surreal, the complex and the illogical. His works...

"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...

Rene Char (1907-1988) is considered the most important French poet of his generation. A member of the surrealists in the early 1930s, he became increasingly preoccupied by the rise of Nazi Germany and later played a key role in the French Resistance....

"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...