"Ask not for whom the bell tolls... Eulogy: one of the many English words combining legein (to gather together) and logos (the word, the law). With eulogy though the speech-act itself is all important (eu-) and its impossibility evident in a written work. The site of the gathering together of words, of scattered sounds, disappears in the act of writing, itself scatter -- all too forcefully underlining the cause, the event of dispersion that creates the need for gathering together. Jeremy Fernando s eulogy, this particular eulogy, is called Writing Death, and it reminds us that eulogy in its...

Poetry from Beyond the Grave is the first English publication of a large selection of poems by the Brazilian medium and Spiritist leader Francisco Candido "Chico" Xavier. These poems, originally collected in the volume Parnaso de Alem-Tumulo, were dictated to Xavier by a variety of spirits of Brazilian poets from the afterlife, as journeying souls or as witnesses of the spiritual city Nosso Lar, "our house." Poetry from Beyond the Grave is a veritable collection of haunted writing, in which poets present their posthumous work as if they were alive. The brilliant translation by Vitor Pequeno...

At the heart of this book lies attempts to read: reading here being understood as the openness to the possibility of another; a relation that occurs prior to any semantic or formal identification, and, therefore, prior to any attempt at assimilating, or appropriating, what is being read to the one who reads. Thus, an event. It opens with Lim Lee Ching's reading of this book; a reading before your reading, as it were. And is followed by Jeremy Fernando's attempts to respond to the many Roland Barthes - all whilst foregrounding the risk that, even as one attempts to read as openness to the...