Gather together French colonialists, young nationalists eager for independence, and local Maghreb leaders in a small North African city of the 1920s. Bring a collection of brash American filmmakers and celebrities into the picture. Dangerous cultural...

Taking its inspiration from Walter Benjamin's seminal 1931 essay, the "Unpacking My Library" series charts a spirited exploration of the reading and book collecting practices of today's leading thinkers. "Artists and Their Books" showcases the person...

While largely unknown today, Danish writer and Darwin translator Jens Peter Jacobsen was the leading prose writer in Scandinavia in the late nineteenth century and part of a generation that included Henrik Ibsen, Knut Hamsun, and August Strindberg. H...

This" Collected Poems" spans the three decades of Milne's growth into one of the most distinctive radical poets of the middle generation. In "Darkest Capital" engages modern politics, challenges language's tyranny and reshapes modern poetry.

For decades, James Joyce's modernism has overshadowed his Irishness, as his self-imposed exile and association with the high modernism of Europe's urban centers has led critics to see him almost exclusively as a cosmopolitan figure. In "Joyce's Ghost...

Who reads poetry? We know that poets do, but what about the rest of us? When and why do we turn to verse? Seeking the answer, "Poetry" magazine since 2005 has published a column called "The View From Here", which has invited readers "from outside the...

In Paris's exclusive Saint-Germain neighborhood is a mansion. In that mansion lives a family. Deep in that mansion. The Bolts are that family, and they have secrets".The Safe House" tells their story. When the Nazis came, Etienne Boltanski divorce...

Two men talk in Tokyo. One, a Belgian, is a diplomat. The other, Dutch, is a photographer. What, they wonder, is the real face of Japan? How can they get beyond the European idea of the nation and its people – with its exoticism – and see Japan as it...

London between the wars was a place of anxiety and uncertainty. After the postwar boom of the 1920s, the aftereffects of the stock market crash hit London and, even as the fortunes of the aristocracy went into decline, there was hunger and a rising t...

"Smoothie" is Claudine Toutoungi's debut collection of poems. It takes a tender, exuberant and deliciously dark look at our desire to be heard, whatever the cost; a desire that can be treacherous, comical and sometimes – often enough to fend off desp...