In this book, Sumanta Banerjee analyzes the development of the folk culture of Calcutta's urban poor following the establishment of the British colonial system in Bengal. Consisting primarily of traditional artisans who migrated from neighboring vill...

For nearly half a century, German artist Max Neumann has worked to create, hone, and elaborate a visual vocabulary that is dark, compulsive, and forceful. A lifelong collaborator, Neumann's paintings have accompanied the work of Cees Nooteboom, Seamu...

It's Berlin in the summer of 2003 – sunshine for weeks on end, weather to fall in love. And that's just what Christian Eich, the main character in Ulrich Peltzer's acclaimed novel "Part of the Solution", does; but that's not all. Christian Eich, a th...

Thousands upon thousands of books have been written about Immanuel Kant since his death. None, let's be clear, have been quite like what we have here. In "Party Fun with Kant", Nicolas Mahler tells the story of Kant – and his fellow serious-minded fi...

The list of subjects that Giorgio Agamben has tackled in his career is dizzying – from the dangers of our current political moment to the traces of the distant past that inflect the culture around us today. With "Pulcinella", Agamben is back with yet...

Hans Magnus Enzensberger takes the title for this collection of daring short essays on topical themes – politics, economics, religion, society – not from Jeremy Bentham's famous prison but from a mid-1930s Cabinet of Curiosities opened in Germany by...

In her landmark study "Utopia in Performance: Finding Hope at the Theatre", Jill Dolan departed from historical writings on utopia, which suggest that social reorganization and the redistribution of wealth are utopian efforts, to argue instead that u...

The international community of letters mourned the recent death of Yves Bonnefoy, universally acclaimed as one of France's greatest poets of the last half century. A prolific author, he was often considered a candidate for the Nobel Prize and publish...

Philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre counted among his friends and associates some of the most esteemed intellectuals, writers, and artists of the twentieth century. In "Portraits" ("Situations IV"), Sartre collected his impressions and accounts of many of h...

Living holds us between two places. It expresses what is most elementary – to be alive – and the absoluteness of our aspiration – finally living! But could we desire anything other than to live? In "The Philosophy of Living", Francois Jullien meditat...