For distinguished philosopher Hans Blumenberg, lions were a life-long obsession. "Lions", translated by Kari Driscoll, collects thirty-two of Blumenberg's philosophical vignettes to reveal that the figure of the lion unites two of his other great pre...

Cairo 1925, Haret al-Yahud, the old Jewish Quarter. Esther, a beautiful young woman believed to be possessed by demons, longs to give birth after seven blissful years of marriage. Her husband, blind since childhood, does not object when, in her effor...

The year is 1938. The great Russian poet and essayist Osip Mandelstam is forty-seven years old and is dying in a transit camp near Vladivostok after having been arrested by Stalin's government during the repression of the 1930s and sent into exile wi...

Taking its title from Karl Marx's description of religion as the world's "logic in a popular form", this book explores the hidden logic behind popular religions in nineteenth-century Bengal. Sumanta Banerjee examines cross-religious cults and the con...

This unique book is a graphic novel and performance poem, a mixed-media musical cartoon, an animated feature film come to life. Lee Breuer's "La Divina Caricatura" is in the pataphysical tradition of Alfred Jarry – if Jarry had been a Dante fan. In t...

No human quality is more necessary for survival than love. But while love has the power to lift us up with boundless joy, it has equal strength to crush us – it is easy to lose your way within love's complex labyrinth of oppositions. "The Labyrinth...

For a fifteen-year-old, falling in love can eclipse everything else in the world, and make a few short weeks feel like a lifetime of experience. In "Love Writ Large", Navid Kermani captures those intense feelings, from the emotional explosion of a fi...

The BBC commissioned Tariq Ali to write a three-part TV series on the circumstances leading to the overthrow, trial and execution of Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto, the first elected Prime Minister of Pakistan. As rehearsals were about to begin, the BBC hierarc...

When "Life in Peactime" opens, on May 29, 2015, engineer Ivo Brandani is sixty-nine years old. He's disillusioned and angry – but morbidly attached to life. As he makes a day-long trip home from his job in Sharm el Sheik reconstructing the coral reef...

Richard I (1157-1199) was king of England from 1189 until his death, but he is best known as a soldier, not a monarch. He earned his moniker Richard the Lionheart as a knight and military leader, and his revolt against his father Henry II and his con...