After several years abroad, a young man returns to his hometown to seek the man he calls master. This master, a brilliant philosopher, had made the young man into a disciple before sending him out into the world to put his teachings into practice. Re...

One of the foremost poets of the French Resistance, Rene Char has been hailed by Donald Revell as "the conscience of modern French poetry". Translated by Mark Hutchinson, "The Inventors" is a companion volume to Char's critically acclaimed "Hypnos"....

Widely considered the foremost French poet of his generation, Yves Bonnefoy has wowed the literary world for decades with his diffuse volumes. First published in France in 2008, "The Anchor's Long Chain" is an indispensable addition to his oeuvre. En...

Roland Barthes, whose centenary falls in 2015, was a restless, protean thinker. A constant innovator, often as a daring smuggler of ideas from one discipline to another, he first gained an audience with his pithy essays on mass culture and then went...

Roland Barthes, whose centenary falls in 2015, was a restless, protean thinker. A constant innovator, often as a daring smuggler of ideas from one discipline to another, he first gained an audience with his pithy essays on mass culture and then went...

Roland Barthes, whose centenary falls in 2015, was a restless, protean thinker. A constant innovator, often as a daring smuggler of ideas from one discipline to another, he first gained an audience with his pithy essays on mass culture and then went...

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...