A controversial figure of the postwar French literary and cultural scene, Marguerite Duras has exerted a powerful hold on readers around the world. This volume of interviews – hailed on its French publication as Duras's "secret confession" – offers r...

"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...

Odissi holds iconic status as one of the eight classical dance forms recognized and promoted by the Indian government. This book traces the dance's transformation from its historical role as a regional artistic practice to its modern incarnation as t...

From 1974 to 1994, Ron Vawter was a staple of New York's downtown theater scene, first with the Performance Group and later as a founding member of the Wooster Group. "Ron Vawter's Life in Performance" is the first book focused on this incomparable a...

Gustave Roud, perhaps the most beloved poet of Swiss Romandy, is widely considered the founder of modern francophone Swiss literature, along with Charles-Ferdinand Ramuz. Roud lived at his grandfather's farm in Carrouge, Canton Vaud, for his entire l...

In 1950s France, Camille struggles to figure out who she is and where she fits in the world of her coastal working-class neighborhood. Her mother holds the family together, with the support of a group of women who talk over coffee and cigarettes each...

"Everything starts with a song and everything ends with another song", says the narrator of "The Divine Song". Paris is an old Sufi cat who keeps watch over his brilliant yet pathetic master, Sammy Kamau-Williams, the Enchanter. In Sammy, we recogniz...

Exploring longing, lust for life, ageing, mortality, grief, and flowers in her inimitable late style, etudes is a diary-like sequence of poems by one of the greatest living Austrian poets. Friederike Mayrocker's almost daily entries give us a unique...

Is it possible to fight for social justice if you've never really loved another person? Can you save a country if you're in love? Forty-six-year-old Anton Stover's marriage is broken. His affairs are a thing of the past, and his career at the univer...

"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...