Translated by Gila Walker for the first time into English, "Anthropology of the Name" is French thinker Sylvain Lazarus's response to the intellectual caesura of May 1968. Taking up thought, politics, and the name, Lazarus presents an original doctri...

In his well-known work of art criticism "Art of the Modern Age", Jean-Marie Schaeffer offered a lucid and powerful critique of what he identified as the historically dominant thinking about art and aesthetics from the Jena Romantics, to Nietzsche, He...

The devil is a defiant, nefarious figure, the emblem of evil, and harbinger of the damned. However, the festive devil – the devil that dances – turns the most hideous acts into playful transgressions. "Festive Devils of the Americas" is the first vol...

Prolific essayist, translator, and critic Pascal Quignard has described his Last Kingdom series as something unique. It consists, he says, "neither of philosophical argumentation, nor short learned essays, nor novelistic narration", but comes, rather...

As he leaves the cinema where he has just watched "Casablanca", one of his favorite films, Julien is approached by a mysterious young woman, Claire. Unbeknownst to Julien, Claire has been following him for several days. Outside the cinema she relays...

Described by Nelson Mandela as a source of inspiration, Richard Turner was a central figure in the white South African student movement and key in its radicalization. Turner acquired his doctorate at the Sorbonne in Paris, where he was inspired by th...

Few of us have had the opportunity to visit Djibouti, the small crook of a country strategically located in the Horn of Africa, which makes "The Nomads, My Brothers, Go Out to Drink from the Big Dipper" all the more seductive. In his first collection...

The work of poet Georg Trakl, a leading Austrian-German expressionist, has been praised by many, including his contemporaries Rainer Maria Rilke and Else Lasker-Schuler, as well as his patron Ludwig Wittgenstein. Wittgenstein famously wrote that whil...

When Anna discovers a long letter that her mother Marie wrote, Marie has been dead for some time, and Anna is shocked to learn that her mother disappeared with a secret. The letter is addressed to Marie's first great love, a much older teacher who sh...

In "The Pilgrim's Bowl", Swiss poet Philippe Jaccottet meditates on the work of Italian artist Giorgio Morandi and its power to evoke a complexity of emotions and astonishment. Jaccottet examines Morandi's ascetic still lifes, contrasting his artisti...