In "This Strange Idea of the Beautiful", Francois Jullien explores what it means when we say something is beautiful. Bringing together ideas of beauty from both Eastern and Western philosophy, Jullien challenges the assumptions underlying our commonl...

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...

On December 29, 1918, the Spartakus League, a Marxist revolutionary movement, rose up in Germany calling for an end to class rule by the bourgeoisie. Massive demonstrations followed and more than 500,000 Berliners took to the streets in January – onl...

A searing introduction to Franco Fortini, a Jewish communist and a major figure in postwar Italian intellectual life, "The Dogs of the Sinai" is a book against – against those who love to rush to the aid of the victors, against the widespread and rac...

Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben is the rare writer whose ideas and works have a broad appeal across many fields, and his devoted fans are not just philosophers, but readers of political and legal theory, sociology, and literary criticism as well....

A prolific essayist, novelist, translator, philosopher, and a critic of rare elegance, Pascal Quignard returns anew to the major questions of existence in "The Silent Crossing", a haunting homage to life and liberty, to society and solitude, and to t...

As the aftershocks of the latest economic meltdown reverberate throughout the world, and people organize to physically occupy the major financial centers of the West, few experts and even fewer governments have dared to consider a world without the p...

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...

Since the publication of his first book in 1953, Yves Bonnefoy has become one of the most important French poets of the postwar years. At last, we have the long-awaited English translation of Yves Bonnefoy's celebrated work, "L'Arriere-pays", which t...

Hungarian Imre Kertesz was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2002 for "writing that upholds the fragile experience of the individual against the barbaric arbitrariness of history". His conversation with literary historian Thomas Cooper that is...