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After committing an irreparable crime, the narrator of The Emperor waits in his bedroom for the police to arrest him. His past reverberates inside of him like a drum: his youth spent in captivity as a zonbi, under the control of a charlatan Vodou leader, and many an alienating dawn delivering the daily newspaper through the cutthroat neighborhoods of Port-au-Prince, Haiti. He now has blood on his hands because of the woman on the bus--the only woman he had ever loved.

Perros, is best remembered for the autobiographical poems, vignettes, short prose narratives, occasional diary-like notations, critical remarks, and personal essays. This title presents a selection of short texts alongside numerous maxims, a genre in which Perros excelled.

When Anna discovers a long letter that her mother, Marie, wrote, Marie has been dead for some time, and Anna is shocked to learn that her mother disappeared with a secret. The letter is addressed to Marie's first great love, a much older teacher who she describes as a great dinosaur.

Beginning in the 1960s and ending in the late '80s, this title presents a narrative of a passionate, and ultimately tragic, relationship between Mali and Farid set against the simultaneous decline of Egyptian-Lebanese society. It chronicles the casualties of social conventions, religious divisions, and cultural cliches.

In Paris, Montreal, Seville, Berlin, and towns large and small, the author has dreamt - and she has remembered her dreams. In this small volume, she shares her dreams of the years 2008-10, a time of global upheaval that happened to coincide with upheavals in her own life.

Argues that the use of the terms 'war' and 'terror' dehumanize the enemy and permit treatment that would otherwise be impermissible. This title examines the implications and corrupting impact of the attempt to impose 'good' through violence and the attempt to spread democratic values by unethical means.

A collection of poems that echo each other, returning to and elaborating upon key images, thoughts, feelings, and people. Intriguing and enigmatic, it is a mixture of sonnet sequences and prose poems.

Features Max, a French journalist looking for his next story, and Lena, an American singer, who were once lovers, but now friends. They travel with Lena's new man, Thibault and with Max's barely masked jealousy. Then they meet the striking Colonel Strether, the epitome of military decorum and bearing.

As the aftershocks of the economic meltdown reverberate throughout the world, and people organize to physically occupy the major financial centers of the West, few experts and even fewer governments have dared to consider a world without the powerful markets that brought on the crash. The author offers a way forward.

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.

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, the author's analysis of aesthetic relations opens up a space for a theory of art that is free of historicism and capable of engaging with noncanonical and non-Western arts.

The Dancing Other takes readers to France and Martinique to reveal the struggles of people who belong both places, but never quite feel at home in either. Suzanne Dracius tells the story of Rehvana, a woman who feels she is too black to fit in when living in mainland France, yet at the same time not dark-skinned enough to feel truly accepted in the Caribbean. Her sense of dislocation manifests itself at first in a turn to a mythical idea of Mother Africa; later, she moves to Martinique with a new boyfriend and thinks she may have finally found her place--but instead she is soon pregnant, isolated, and lonely. Soon her only reliable companion is her neighbor, Ma Cidalise, who regales her in Creole with supernatural tales of wizards. Rehvana, meanwhile, watches her dream of belonging fade, as she continues to refuse to accept her multicultural heritage.

Translation of: Derniers jours de Mandelstam.

An intensely personal and profoundly moving review of Bonnefoy's childhood memories. In December 2015, six months before his death at the age of 93, Yves Bonnefoy concluded what was to be his last major text in prose, L'écharpe rouge, translated here as The Red Scarf. In this unique book, described by the poet as "an anamnesis"--a formal act of commemoration--Bonnefoy undertakes, at the end of his life, a profoundly moving exegesis of some fragments written in 1964. These fragments lead him back to an unspoken, lifelong anxiety: "My most troubling memory, when I was between ten and twelve years old, concerns my father, and my anxiety about his silence." Bonnefoy offers an anatomy of his father's silence, and of the melancholy that seemed to take hold some years into his marriage to the poet's mother. At the heart of this book is the ballad of Elie and Hélène, the poet's parents. It is the story of their lives together in the Auvergne, and later in Tours, seen through the eyes of their son--the solitary boy's intense but inchoate experience, reviewed through memories of the now elderly man. What makes The Red Scarf indispensable is the intensely personal nature of the material, casting its slant light, a setting sun, on all that has gone before.

When translator Claire Methuen travels back to her hometown of Dinard for a family wedding, she runs into her old piano teacher Madame Ladon. After befriending the ageing woman, Methuen begins to toy with the idea of a permanent return to live in Brittany. She becomes increasingly obsessed by her childhood sweetheart, Simon Quelen, who, now married and a father, still lives in a village further down the coast where he is the local pharmacist and mayor. Having moved into a farmhouse, she soon spends her days walking the heathland above the cliffs and spying on him as he sails in the bay. As she walks, she is at one with the land of her childhood and youth, “her skull emptying into the landscape.â€? And when her younger brother Paul comes to join her there, the web of solidarities is further enriched.   This is a tale of dramatic episodes, told through intermingling voices and the atmospherics of the austere Breton landscape. Ultimately, it is a story of obsessional love and of a parallel sibling bond that is equally strong. Â

The author's wife and young daughter have abandoned him, he has no work or prospects, he's blind in one eye, and he must move into a horribly tiny apartment with his only possession: a twenty-five-volume encyclopedia. This book explores themes such as the roles of family, history, and one's moral responsibility toward others.

The fascinus, or phallus, was at the heart of classical Roman art and life. No god was more represented in ancient Rome than the phallic deity Priapus, and the fescennine verses, one of the earliest forms of Roman poetry, accompanied the celebrations of Priapus, the harvest, and fertility. This title looks closely at this delicate interplay.

We defy augury. There‿s a special providence in the fall of a sparrow. If it be now, ‿tis not to come ‿ the readiness is all. Under the sign of Hamlet‿s last act, Hélÿne Cixous, in her eightieth year, launched her new book‿and the latest chapter in her Human Comedy, her Search for Lost Time. Surely one of the most delightful, in its exposure of the seams of her extraordinary craft, We Defy Augury finds the reader among familiar faces. In these pages we encounter Eve, the indomitable mother; Jacques Derrida, the faithful friend; children, neighbors; and always the literary forebears: Montaigne, Diderot, Proust, and, in one moving passage, Erich Maria Remarque. We Defy Augury moves easily from Cixous‿s Algerian childhood, to Bacharach in the Rhineland, to, eerily, the Windows on the World restaurant atop the World Trade Center, in the year 2000. In one of the most astonishing passages in this tour-de-force performance of the art of digression, Cixous proclaims: “My books are free in their movements and in their choice of routes [‿] They are the product of many makers, dreamed, dictated, cobbled together.â€? This unique experience, which could only have come from the pen of Cixous, is now available in English, and readers are sure to delight in this latest work by one of France‿s most celebrated writer-philosophers. Â

Cargo Hold of Stars is an ode to the forgotten voyage of a forgotten people. Khal Torabully gives voice to the millions of indentured men and women, mostly from India and China, who were brought to Mauritius between 1849 and 1923. Many were transported overseas to other European colonies. Kept in close quarters in the ship's cargo hold, many died. Most never returned home. With Cargo Hold of Stars, Torabully introduces the concept of 'Coolitude' in a way that echoes Aimé Césaire's term 'Negritude, ' imbuing the term with dignity and pride, as well as a strong and resilient cultural identity and language. Stating that ordinary language was not equipped to bring to life the diverse voices of indenture, Torabully has developed a 'poetics of Coolitude' a new French, peppered with Mauritian Creole, wordplay, and neologisms--and always musical. The humor in these linguistic acrobatics serves to underscore the violence in which his poems are steeped. Deftly translated from the French by Nancy Naomi Carlson, Cargo Hold of Stars is the song of an uprooting, of the destruction and the reconstruction of the indentured laborer's identity. But it also celebrates setting down roots, as it conjures an ideal homeland of fraternity and reconciliation in which bodies, memories, stories, and languages mingle--a compelling odyssey that ultimately defines the essence of humankind.

Rene Char (1907-88) is considered the most important French poet of his generation. A tribute to the individual men and women who fought at his side, this book is also a celebration of the power of art to combat terror and to transform our lives.

Bringing his troubling, questing characters - souls who are fascinated by what preceded and conceived them, the author writes with a rich mix of anecdote and reflection, aphorism and quotation, offering enigmatic glimpses of the present, and confident, pointed borrowings from the past.

Egocentric and domineering, the author's grandmother was once a vibrant and sensual beauty. In Indochina at the end of World War II, she thrived in the social life of the French colony. In this memoir, the author reweaves the history of her family - and the legend of her grandmother - leaving no stone unturned and no skeleton in the closet.

A compact collection of eight wide-ranging essays by Sartre from the immediate postwar years. Iconic French novelist, playwright, and essayist Jean-Paul Sartre is widely recognized as one of the most important philosophers of the twentieth century, and his work has remained relevant and thought-provoking through the decades. The Seagull Sartre Library now presents some of his most incisive philosophical, cultural, and literary critical essays in twelve newly designed and affordable editions.  Post-War Reflections collects eight of Sartre‿s essays that were written in his most creative period, just after World War II. Sartre‿s extraordinary range of engagement is manifest in this collection, which features writings on postwar America, the social impact of war in Europe, contemporary philosophy, race, and avant-garde art. Â

A two-part essay on the “mythâ€? of revolution and the figure of the artist. Iconic French novelist, playwright, and essayist Jean-Paul Sartre is widely recognized as one of the most important philosophers of the twentieth century, and his work has remained relevant and thought-provoking through the decades. The Seagull Sartre Library now presents some of his most incisive philosophical, cultural, and literary critical essays in twelve newly designed and affordable editions.  On Revolution consists of a long essay in two parts in which Sartre dwells upon the “mythâ€? of revolution and goes on to analyze revolutionary ideas in fascism and, especially, Marxism. In the second essay, Sartre examines the figure of the artist and his conscience, especially in relation to communism. Â