Dominique Edde met novelist and playwright Jean Genet in the 1970s. And she never forgot him. "His presence," she writes, "gave me the sensation of icy fire. Like his words, his gestures were full, calculated and precise. . . . Genet's movements mimicked the movement of time, accumulating rather than passing." This book is Edde's account of that meeting and its ripples through her years of engaging with Genet's life and work. Rooted in personal reminiscences, it is nonetheless much broader, offering a subtle analysis of Genet's work and teasing out largely unconsidered themes, like the...
Dominique Edde met novelist and playwright Jean Genet in the 1970s. And she never forgot him. "His presence," she writes, "gave me the sensation of ic...
A controversial figure of the postwar French literary and cultural scene, Marguerite Duras has exerted a powerful hold on readers around the world. This volume of interviews--hailed on its French publication as Duras's "secret confession"--offers readers a rich vein of new insight into her work, opinions, life, and relationships. The interviews that make up the book were conducted in 1987, when Italian journalist Leopoldina Pallotta della Torre met the seventy-three-year-old Duras at her Paris flat and convinced her to sit for a series of conversations. The resulting book was published...
A controversial figure of the postwar French literary and cultural scene, Marguerite Duras has exerted a powerful hold on readers around the world. Th...
Last season, Seagull Books published the first three volumes in a new series collecting essays and interviews by the late French thinker Roland Barthes. This season they'll bring the five-volume set to completion with the publication of "Masculine, Feminine, Neuter" and Signs and Images. "Masculine, Feminine, Neuter," consists of Barthes's writing on literature, covering his peers and influences, writers in French and other languages, contemporary and historical writers, and world literature. This volume comprises Barthes critical articles and interviews previously...
Last season, Seagull Books published the first three volumes in a new series collecting essays and interviews by the late French thinker Roland Barthe...
In 1968-69 I wanted to die, that is to say, stop living, being killed, but it was blocked on all sides, wrote Helene Cixous, esteemed French feminist, playwright, philosopher, literary critic, and novelist. Instead of suicide, she began to dream of writing a tomb for herself. This tomb became a work that is a testament to Cixous s life and spirit and a secret book, the first book she ever authored. Originally written in 1970, "Tombe" is a Homerian recasting of Shakespeare s "Venus and Adonis" in the thickets of Central Park, a book Cixous provocatively calls the all-powerful-other of all my...
In 1968-69 I wanted to die, that is to say, stop living, being killed, but it was blocked on all sides, wrote Helene Cixous, esteemed French feminist,...
After the failed revolutions of 1848, Galicia has been brought under the rule of the Habsburg Empire, and the Zemka family find themselves embroiled in the struggle for Polish independence. This is a history of Eastern Europe told in miniature through the tumultuous saga of one family as they try to reclaim their estate in the decades of violence and political confusion that follow. In this extraordinary novel, Diane Meur calls upon an unusual narrator: the ancestral house itselfthe House of Shadows of the titlewhich, from behind its unmoving facade, watches the comings and goings of...
After the failed revolutions of 1848, Galicia has been brought under the rule of the Habsburg Empire, and the Zemka family find themselves embroil...
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, Heidegger, Adorno, and beyond, which he termed the speculative theory of art. Here, in Beyond Speculation, Schaeffer builds from this significant work, rejecting not only the identification of the aesthetic with the work of art, but also the Kantian association of the aesthetic with subjectively universal judgment. In his analysis of...
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...
In The Red Sofa, we meet Anne, a young woman setting off on the Trans-Siberian Railway in order to find her former lover, Gyl, who left twenty years before. As the train moves across post-Soviet Russia and its devastated landscapes, Anne reflects on her past with Gyl and their patriotic struggles, as well as on the neighbor she has just left behind, Clemence Barrot. Rocked by the train's movements Anne is moved by her memory of Clemence, who is old and whose memory is failing, but who has not lost her taste for life and adventure. Ensconced on her red sofa at home, Clemence loves...
In The Red Sofa, we meet Anne, a young woman setting off on the Trans-Siberian Railway in order to find her former lover, Gyl, who left twenty ...
Critical Essays (Situations I) contains essays on literature and philosophy from a highly formative period of French philosopher and leading existentialist Jean-Paul Sartre's life, the years between 1938 and 1946. This period is particularly interesting because it is before Sartre published the magnum opus that would solidify his name as a philosopher, Being and Nothingness. Instead, during this time Sartre was emerging as one of France's most promising young novelists and playwrights--he had already published Nausea, The Age of Reason, The Flies, and No...
Critical Essays (Situations I) contains essays on literature and philosophy from a highly formative period of French philosopher and ...
The international community of letters mourned the recent death of Yves Bonnefoy, universally acclaimed as one of France's greatest poets of the last half century. A prolific author, he was often considered a candidate for the Nobel Prize and published a dozen major collections of poetry in verse and prose, several books of dream-like tales, and numerous studies of literature and art. His oeuvre has been translated into scores of languages, and he himself was a celebrated translator of Shakespeare, Yeats, Keats, and Leopardi. Together Still is his final poetic work, composed just...
The international community of letters mourned the recent death of Yves Bonnefoy, universally acclaimed as one of France's greatest poets of the last ...
The international community of letters mourned the recent death of Yves Bonnefoy, universally acclaimed as one of France's greatest poets of the last half century. A prolific author, he was often considered a candidate for the Nobel Prize and published a dozen major collections of poetry in verse and prose, several books of dream-like tales, and numerous studies of literature and art. His oeuvre has been translated into scores of languages, and he himself was a celebrated translator of Shakespeare, Yeats, Keats, and Leopardi. Poetry and Photography is Bonnefoy's seminal essay on...
The international community of letters mourned the recent death of Yves Bonnefoy, universally acclaimed as one of France's greatest poets of the last ...
