The various dimensions of translation studies, too often studied independently, are here brought into conversation: Translation practice, including the various crafts employed by its practitioners; the specialized contexts in which translation occurs or against which translation can be considered; and the ethico-political consequences of translations or the manner of their making. Including exciting new work from leading translation theorists, practicing literary translators, and prominent...

Suicide cannot be read as simply another novel—it is, in a sense, the author’s own oblique, public suicide note, a unique meditation on this most extreme of refusals.Presenting itself as an investigation into the suicide of a close friend—perhaps real, perhaps fictional—more than twenty years earlier, Levé gives us, little by little, a striking portrait of a man, with all his talents and flaws, who chose to reject his life, and all the people who loved him...

Suicide cannot be read as simply another novel—it is, in a sense, the author’s own oblique, public suicide note, a unique meditation on this most extreme of refusals.Presenting itself as an investigation into the suicide of a close friend—perhaps real, perhaps fictional—more than twenty years earlier, Levé gives us, little by little, a striking portrait of a man, with all his talents and flaws, who chose to reject his life, and all the people who loved him...

Derrida and Africa takes up Jacques Derrida as a figure of thought in relation to Africa, with a focus on Derrida’s writings specifically on Africa, which were influenced in part by his childhood in El Biar. From chapters that take up Derrida as Mother to contemplations on how to situate Derrida in relation to other African philosophers, from essays that connect deconstruction and diaspora to a chapter that engages the ways in which Derrida—especially in a text such as Monolingualism of th...

‘What a marvellous book this is . . . de Botton dissects what [Proust] had to say about friendship, reading, looking carefully, paying attention taking your time, being alive and adds his own delicious commentary. The result is an intoxicating as it is wise, amusing as well as stimulating, and presented in so fresh a fashion as to be unique . . . I could not stop, and now much start all over again.’ Brian Masters, Mail on Sunday‘De Botton not only has a complete understan...

Just thirty, with a well-paid job, depression and no love life, the narrator and anti-hero par excellence of this grim, funny and clever novel smokes four packs of cigarettes a day and writes weird animal stories in his spare time. A computer programmer by day, he is tolerably content, until, that is, he's packed off with a colleague - the unimaginably ugly, sexually-frustrated virgin Raphael Tisserand - to train provincial civil servants in the use of a new computer system... A painfully ...

In his great triptych "The Millennium" Bosch used oranges and other fruits to symbolize the delights of Paradise.Whence Henry Miller's title for this, one of his most appealing books; first published in 1957, it tells the story of Miller's life on the Big Sur, a section of California coast where he lived for fifteen years.Big Sur is the portrait of a place—one of the most colorful in the U.S.—and of the extraordinary people Miller knew there: writers (& writers who...

After the pleasure comes the pain. The Sexual Life of Catherine M, Catherine Millet's analysis of the many forms and flavours of sexual pleasure, was internationally admired, and not just for its literary qualities. The audacity of a sex life well lived and thoroughly examined left readers wondering how she managed to pull it off while sustaining her relationship with life partner, writer Jacques Henric. 'I had love at home' she explained. 'I sought only pleasure in the world outs...

In 1966 John Berger spent three months in the Forest of Dean shadowing an English country GP, John Sassall.Sassall is a fortunate man - his work occupies and fulfils him, he lives amongst the patients he treats, the line between his life and his work is happily blurred.In A Fortunate Man, Berger's text and the photography of Jean Mohr reveal with extraordinary intensity the life of a remarkable man. It is a portrait of one selfless individual and the rural communit...

France Theoret's La femme du stalinien is the latest novel in a trilogy. It tells the story of Louise Aubert, her break from Mathieu Lord when he joins the Stalinist party, and her re-invention through language into a woman who is no longer governed by ordinary codes, conventions and commonplaces.

«On june 25th of 2009, a fan of Michael Jackson learns of the death of his idol, live on CNN. The shock is appalling. Two weeks later, despite the deep sadness that tortures him, he decides to fly to London where a commemoration is going to be held by the English fan-club, the day Michael was supposed to make his long-waited come-back. He hopes this event can be the first step in the mourning process, that will permit him to begin a new life without MJ. Unfortunately, the London experience...

An informative, fun and rather charming essay on the nature and history of one of life’s most desirable assets, Charm, by renowned culture and design critic, Stephen Bayley.Aiming to wound, a schoolmaster wrote on future design-guru Stephen Bayley’s last ever school report “Charm alone will not get him through”. Bayley took this to mean that an affable, genial, outgoing nature was not enough to ensure survival in a harsh world of statistical performance. But survive and flourish is...