Only Georges Bataille could write, of an eyeball removed from a corpse, that "the caress of the eye over the skin is so utterly, so extraordinarily gentle, and the sensation is so bizarre that it has …
"No denunciation without its proper instrument of close analysis," Roland Barthes wrote in his preface to Mythologies. There is no more proper instrument of analysis of our contemporary myths than thi…
Carson McCullers’ prodigious first novel was published to instant acclaim when she was just twenty-three. Set in a small town in the middle of the deep South, it is the story of John Singer, a lonely …
Now hailed as an American classic Tropic of Cancer, Henry Miller’s masterpiece, was banned as obscene in this country for twenty-seven years after its first publication in Paris in 1934. Only a histor…
Confessions of a Mask tells the story of Kochan, an adolescent boy tormented by his burgeoning attraction to men: he wants to be “normal.” Kochan is meek-bodied, and unable to participate in the more …
A graceful, contemplative volume, Camera Lucida was first published in 1979. Commenting on artists such as Avedon, Clifford, Mapplethorpe, and Nadar, Roland Barthes presents photography as being outsi…
The Arden Shakespeare has long been acclaimed as the established scholarly edition of Shakespeare's work. Now being totally reedited for the third time, Arden editions offer the very best in contempor…
It was to correct common misconceptions about his thought that Jean-Paul Sartre, the most dominent European intellectual of the post-World War II decades, accepted an invitation to speak on October 29…
On the Genealogy of Morals (1887) is a book about the history of ethics and about interpretation. Nietzsche rewrites the former as a history of cruelty, exposing the central values of the Judaeo-Chris…
In the sixth century b.c.—twenty-five hundred years before Einstein—Heraclitus of Ephesus declared that energy is the essence of matter, that everything becom…
A concise and illuminating book about the Dutch philosopher Baruch Spinoza , one of the early thinkers of the Enlightenment and modern biblical criticism . Spinoza's theoretical philosophy is one of t…
In later life Basho turned to Zen Buddhism, and the travel sketched in this volume relfect his attempts to cast off earthly attachments and reach out to spiritual fulfillment. The sketches are written…
What to make of a writer who follows the metaphysical heights of her great Passion According to GH with a book that looks suspiciously like a romance novel?
