Antonio Gramsci (1891-1937) is widely celebrated as the most original political thinker in Western Marxism and an all-around outstanding intellectual figure. Arrested and imprisoned by the Italian Fascist regime in 1926, Gramsci died before fully regaining his freedom. Nevertheless, in his prison notebooks, he recorded thousands of brilliant reflections on an extraordinary range of subjects, establishing an enduring intellectual legacy.

Columbia University Press's multivolume Prison Notebooks is the only complete critical edition of Antonio Gramsci's seminal writings in English....

-- "Voice Literary Supplement"

This book is concerned with the notion of the "stranger" -the foreigner, outsider, or alien in a country and society not their own- as well as the notion of strangeness within the self -a person's deep sense of being, as distinct from outside appearance and their conscious idea of self.

Kristeva begins with the personal and moves outward by examining world literature and philosophy. She discusses the foreigner in Greek tragedy, in the Bible, and in the literature of the Middle Ages, Renaissance, Enlightenment, and the twentieth century. She discusses the legal status of foreigners...

Assassins of Memory is a passionate and painstaking look at one of the more curious realities of recent French cultural life: the prominence accorded to the phenomenon of revisionism. An attempt on the part of a tiny group of fanatics, often masquerading as scholars and researchers, to deny the existence of the gas chambers and horrors of Hitler's genocidal policies, revisionism is quietly gaining adherents.

In 1988, in what was probably one of the last trials of a Nazi war criminal and the first of such trials to take place in France, Klaus Barbie, the notorious "Butcher of Lyon," was found guilty of crimes against humanity and sentenced to life in prison. Yet despite the memories stirred, despite the verdict, to Alain Finkielkraut the trial was a moral failure. In Remembering in Vain, Finkielkraut maintains that the Barbie trial attests to the failure of international society to take responsibility for criminals of state. Trying Barbie not only for actions against Jews but also for...

In this brillant meditation on conceptions of history, Le Goff traces the evolution of the historian's craft. Examining real and imagined oppositions between past and present, ancient and modern, oral and written history, History and Memory reveals the strands of continuity that have characterized historiography from ancient Mesopotamia to modern Europe.

Called by many France's foremost philosopher, Gilles Deleuze is one of the leading thinkers in the Western World. His acclaimed works and celebrated collaborations with Felix Guattari have established him as a seminal figure in the fields of literary criticism and philosophy. The long-awaited publication of What Is Philosophy? in English marks the culmination of Deleuze's career.

Deleuze and Guattari differentiate between philosophy, science, and the arts, seeing as means of confronting chaos, and challenge the common view that philosophy is an extension of logic. The authors also...

Kristeva points to Montesquieu's esprit general -- his notion of the social body as a guaranteed hierarchy of private rights -- in this humanistic plea for tolerance and commonality.

All original to this volume, these evocative essays by such scholars as Robyn Wiegman, Elizabeth Grosz, and Judith Roof examine a realm as yet untouched in literary and cultural criticism and gender theory, a specifically lesbian postmodern.

The essays trace, on the one hand, how some lesbian cultural theory and production foreground a politics of difference and marginality and thereby critique patriarchal and heterosexual hegemony. On the other hand, some essays note how a postmodern aesthetic, with its valorization of difference, sexual plurality, and gender blurring, assists lesbian...