"This book is an exploration. By means of words, signs, drawings. Mescaline, the subject explored." In Miserable Miracle, the great French poet and artist Henri Michaux, a confirmed teetotaler, tells of his life-transforming first encounters with a powerful hallucinogenic drug. At once lacerating and weirdly funny, challenging and Chaplinesque, his book is a breathtaking vision of interior space and a piece of stunning writing wrested from the grip of the unspeakable.

Includes forty pages of black-and-white drawings.

Self-regard, in the works of Annie Ernaux, is always an excruciatingly painful and exact process. Here, she revisits the peculiar kind of self-fulfillment possible when we examine ourselves in the aftermath of a love affair, and sometimes, even, through the eyes of the lost beloved.

A riveting first novel, this jambalaya of human passion and deceit is set in the New Orleans of l953. The story of one man's attempt to change a culture rooted in generations of Southern white supremacy, it is a saga of the Old and the New South, of love and betrayal, terror and escape. Fletcher and Ursula Christian are glamorous leaders of New Orleans Society. Asked to develop a pilot program to admit Negro students, Fletcher, a department chair at prestigious Lemoigne University, accepts the challenge. He hires the wife of a new faculty member to assist him. When Fletcher's program is...