The personal history of journalist Henri Alleg is tied inextricably to the history of the French-Algerian Conflict. Best known for his book "The Question", a first-hand account of his torture by French troops during the Algerian war for independence,...

As a maverick philosopher unafraid of challenging the ideas and methods of his colleagues, Clement Rosset's work attempts to connect sometimes-lofty academic philosophy with the concerns of everyday life. For decades, he has worked to illuminate some...

Since the publication of his first book in 1953, Yves Bonnefoy has become one of the most important French poets of the postwar years. At last, we have the long-awaited English translation of Yves Bonnefoy's celebrated work, "L'Arriere-pays", which t...

As the current global recession stubbornly persists and financial experts around the world struggle to prevent further financial collapse, everyone has a theory about how to save the economy. But perhaps no idea that has been proffered is as radical...

There are few if any voices more distinct in contemporary French literature than that of Pascal Quignard, a prolific writer of rare erudition and elegance. Essayist, critic, translator, novelist and musician, Quignard attempts here an ambitious amalg...

Their voices come from Bethlehem and Hebron. You can hear them from Jerusalem to Nazareth, and witness their protests in Gaza and Ramallah. From the refugee camps in the West Bank, you can hear the voices of the Palestinian people call out to demand...

The seven plays that comprise Chiori Miyagawa's "Thousand Years Waiting and Other Plays" explore themes of memory and identity. Her plays combine poetic language with harsh reality, and time and space are fluid in the worlds she creates – they conver...

In this companion to Urs Widmer's novel "My Mother's Lover", the narrator is again the son who pieces together the fragments of his parents' stories. Since the age of twelve, Karl, the father, has observed the family tradition of recording his life i...

Djibouti, a hot, impoverished little country on the Horn of Africa, is a place of great strategic importance, for off its coast lies a crucial passage for the world's oil. In this novel by Abdourahman A. Waberi, Djibril, a young Djiboutian voluntaril...

In "The Avant-Garde", Mike Sell rejects the common idea that the avant-garde is only about art and insists that it is much more than a European phenomenon. In doing so, he redefines the historical, geographical, ideological, disciplinary, and theoret...