Werner Braunig was once regarded as the great hope of East German literature – until an extract from "Rummelplatz" was read before the East German censorship authorities in 1965, and fierce opposition summarily sealed its fate. The novel's sin? It pa...

Praised by Paul Auster as "one of the rare poets in the history of literature to have sustained the highest level of artistic excellence throughout an entire lifetime", Yves Bonnefoy is widely considered the foremost French poet of his generation. Pr...

For much of her career, Elfriede Jelinek has been maligned in the press for both her unrelenting critique of Austrian complicity in the Holocaust and her provocative deconstructions of pornography. Despite this, her central role in shaping contempora...

Molissa Fenley, one of the most influential artists of postmodern dance, has had a lasting impact on performance. In dance, she has explored extreme effort and duration in highly crafted patterns and performed with an explosive, joyous energy that in...

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....

An iconic work of Western art, Fragonard's "L'escarpolette", or "The Swing", is often reproduced and its famous foreground image of a young woman losing her slipper mid-swing is widely familiar. In "Reckitt's Blue", John Wilkinson explores that well-...

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...

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...

These essays by Petra Christine Hardt, head of the rights department at esteemed German publisher Suhrkamp Verlag, offer unique and informed insight into day-to-day practices in the rights and permissions departments of publishing houses. Hardt also...

"Remembered Rhythms" explores the role of music and cultural memory in shaping and creating diasporic identities. With contributions from leading scholars in the fields of ethnomusicology, cultural studies, sociology, and anthropology, the essays ran...