The first full-length English translation of this celebrated French poet offers a penetrating and encompassing collection touching on death, domesticity, nature, language itself, and—always—the body.French literary icon Marie-Claire Bancquart (1932–2019) is known for an uncanny inhabitation of the concrete, finding whole worlds, even afterlives, in daily instances and spaces. "If I could seize a little nothing / a bit of nothing," she muses, "all ...

From celebrated Belgian author Geneviève Damas, a modern fable about friendship, self-determination, and the power of words.Illiterate, isolated, and held at arm's length by a bitter father, François Sorrente has spent his seventeen years within narrow confines. By day he tends the family farm's pigs; by night he manages the household chores. Still, François can't help but wonder about the wider world and his place in it. Who was his mother, who he remembers not at all? And why is t...

Informed by a provocative exhibition at the Louvre curated by the author, The Severed Head unpacks artistic representations of severed heads from the Paleolithic period to the present. Surveying paintings, sculptures, and drawings, Julia Kristeva turns her famed critical eye to a study of the head as symbol and metaphor, as religious object and physical fact, further developing a critical theme in her work—the power of horror—and the potential for the face to provide an experience...

From the acclaimed author of Blue and other color histories, the beautifully illustrated story of pink, from the first ancient pigments to BarbiePink has such powerful associations today that it’s hard to imagine the color could ever have meant anything different. But it’s only since the introduction of the Barbie doll in 1959 that pink has become decisively feminized. Indeed, in the eighteenth century, pink was frequently masculine, and the color has sign...

Marcel Proust once wrote, “There is no longer anybody, not even myself, since I cannot leave my bed, who will go along the Rue du Repos to visit the little Jewish cemetery where my grandfather, following a custom that he never understood, went for so many years to lay a stone on his parents’ grave.” Investigating the origin and significance of this statement, Antoine Compagnon offers new insight into the great author’s underappreciated Jewish side.Compagnon traces Proust’s ties to ...

From the acclaimed author of Blue, a beautifully illustrated history of yellow from antiquity to the presentIn this richly illustrated book, Michel Pastoureau—a renowned authority on the history of color and the author of celebrated volumes on blue, black, green, and red—now traces the visual, social, and cultural history of yellow. Focusing on European societies, with comparisons from East Asia, India, Africa, and South America, Yellow tells the ...

From the acclaimed author of Blue, a beautifully illustrated history of the color white in visual culture, from antiquity to todayAs a pigment, white is often thought to represent an absence of color, but it is without doubt an important color in its own right, just like red, blue, green, or yellow—and, like them, white has its own intriguing history. In this richly illustrated book, Michel Pastoureau, a celebrated authority on the history of colors, prese...

A #1 bestseller in France, Second Star is an inspiring series of lyrical meditations on life's smallest moments, from peeling a clementine, drinking a cold mojito, to washing your windowsA still life in motion, Second Star "consumes the present" with a patient curiosity, asking us to "put off tomorrow" and join Philippe Delerm in tasting, touching, listening, and noticing.Whether biting into a bitter turnip or savoring a summer evening in ...

Covering almost 8 percent of the earth's terrain, lichens are living beings which are familiar to everyone, known to no one. They are one of those organisms that seem to offer nothing to hold our gaze. But the more time we spend with lichens, the more they reveal their beauty, their mysteries and their strange power of attraction. Part-algae and part-fungus, lichens call into question our customary ways of classifying forms of life, and allow us to conceive of an ecology that is no longer ...

A breathtaking introduction to Chinese multidirectional poems, told through the story of Su Hui, the greatest writer of these poems who embroidered a silk with 840 characters--equaling as many as 12,000 multidirectional poems--for her distant husband.For nearly two thousand years, the condensed language of classical Chinese has offered the possibility of writing poems that may be read both forward and backward, producing entirely different creations. The genre was ...

How can a person from a Western culture enter into a way of thinking as different as that of the Chinese? Can a person truly escape from his or her own cultural perspectives and assumptions? French philosopher François Jullien has throughout his career explored the distances between European and Chinese thought. In this fascinating summation of his work, he takes an original approach to the conundrum of cross-cultural understanding. Jullien considers just three sentences in t...

This we can be sure of: when a restaurant in the western world is famous for its cooking, it is the tricolor flag that hangs above the stove, opined one French magazine, and this is by no means an isolated example of such crowing. Indeed, both linguistically and conceptually, the restaurant itself is a French creation. Why are the French recognized by themselves and others the world over as the most enlightened of eaters, as the great gourmets? Why did the passion for food—gastronomy—origi...