Throughout her distinguished career, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak has sought to locate and confront shifting forms of social and cultural oppression. As her work shows, the best method for doing so is through extended practice in the ethics of reading....

A dance begins beneath the outstretched branches of the giant umunyinya tree in Rwanda. First there is drumming and clapping, then the lead dancers step into the center of the gathering. The dancing subsides and the gacaca court, the community hearin...

"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...

Auschwitz. Hiroshima. Cambodia's killing fields. The World Trade Center. The mass graves of Rwanda. These places of violent death have become part of the recreational landscape of tourism, an industry that is otherwise dedicated to pleasure and escap...

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....

"We Are the Birds of the Coming Storm" is a wild novel that oscillates between fiction and reality. The story centers on two young women: Voltairine, a dancer who no longer dances but whose body is still haunted by the movement of dance, and her soul...

Dominique Edde's gripping novel tells the story of the doomed Jann family as they plot against one another for revenge and power. Kamal Jann, a successful lawyer in New York City, has a troubled past unseen to most. When he was a boy in Syria, his un...

Questioning the ethics of historical narratives and the construction of national identities, this anthology of Polish plays explores the trauma of war, anti-Semitism and the Holocaust, and reappraisals of the post-communist reality in Poland. The ele...

Heralded as one of France's greatest poets, Yves Bonnefoy has been dazzling readers since the publication of his first book in 1953. He remains influential and relevant, continuing to compose groundbreaking new work. Though Bonnefoy recently celebrat...

T. , an acclaimed but ageing actor, and Efina, a passionate theatergoer, are engaged in an obsessive love affair that careens from attraction to repulsion. They compulsively write letters – often to express their intense dislike of one another – whic...