Results by title

A genre-defying book about survival, transformation, and the human ability to rise from the ashes.

Hélène Cixous’s powerful new book, masterfully translated by Peggy Kamuf, is a vivid journey through fire. From the ashes of wars, wildfires, and upheaval, Cixous traces a dramatic path across time—from the Second World War and the Nazi occupation of Oran to the European wildfires of 2022—weaving a rich, intimate narrative that merges history, autobiography, and myth. With her piercing, lyrical voice, Cixous confronts the human cost of destruction and upheaval, and asks a universal question: What do we carry with us when everything we know is falling to ashes?

In Incinarration, Cixous finds hope in the power of words, memory, and imagination to illuminate our darkest moments and redeem the future. As forests burn and regimes collapse, Cixous shows us how stories become a form of resistance—a way to remember, to bear testimony, and to find renewal in the face of oblivion.

Weaving together history, literature, and personal experience, this recent book from a master of literature crafts a mesmerizing exploration of language, loss, and the enduring power of the spirit world. 

The strange word “Mdeilmm” was reported to have been uttered by the spirit of Shakespeare when called up during a séance in 1854 at the instigation of the French poet Victor Hugo. Hugo was then living in exile on the island of Jersey where he took part in several such séances. Hélène Cixous weaves this scene into a rich tapestry that draws from many corners of her world, both real and fictional: Dostoevsky’s Idiot, Hugo’s Last Day of a Condemned Man, Poe’s story “The Gold Bug,” but also film footage of the assassination of Itzhak Rabin and many layers of memories of her Algerian childhood. Transcribed communications from spirits of the departed, her father and grandfather among them, provide a fascinating glimpse into past spiritual practices.  

Cixous’s unique narrative style enhances the book’s enchanting quality, ensuring that readers are not only engaged by the content but also captivated by the beauty of the prose. Meanwhile, the reader falls under the spell of the author’s incomparable “mole speech,” the language in which poets communicate. 

A genre-defying account of confinement and its literary echoes through history.

As the pandemic sweeps through Paris in March 2020, the writer HC faces a choice: stay in Paris or flee to the countryside? The weight of historical responses bears down on her—those of her ancestors and Jewish writers during moments of persecution.

Still uncertain, she flees to the country at the last moment, with her cats and her daughter, with her diaries and notebooks. What will she do here? Write? What will she write about? Can she write about the experience of being confined? She will write about her cats; every day she will observe their lives and take notes about how they cope with being housebound, and later, in the spring, with the outdoors.

Thucydides, Defoe, Camus, Kafka—she will compare her experiences with those of others who have been confined by malady or persecution. She will write of her mother, who fled impending disaster on many occasions and always kept a suitcase ready.

She too will endure. The important thing is to have a good death, surrounded by those she loves, not locked down in a hospital.
 

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, Hélène 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.” 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.
 

A genre-defying book from one of France’s most well-known philosopher-writers.

In the Lower Saxony region of northwestern Germany sits the city of Osnabrück. This is where, in 1648, the Peace of Westphalia was signed, bringing the Thirty Years’ War and one of the most calamitous periods of European history to an end. But the city was later to witness another calamity.

Today, as one walks through Old Synagogue Street in a rich neighborhood of Osnabrück, one might miss noticing a pile of pale stones held together by chicken wire that sits between two fashionable homes. These are the well-kept ruins from behind which stares a gaping space—a place of memory and oblivion. Four polished plaques tell the tale of the horror-filled night of November 9, 1938—today known as Kristallnacht—when the synagogue that had stood on this spot was desecrated, looted, set on fire, and eventually demolished by Hitler’s forces. On the same day, ninety parishioners were imprisoned by the Gestapo and eventually sent to the Buchenwald concentration camp.

Osnabrück was also home to Eve Klein, a member of the city’s early-twentieth-century Jewish community and the mother of author Hélène Cixous. In Well-Kept Ruins, Cixous returns to the historic city in 2019 and reflects on the remains of the synagogue that “express the life lost, the life kept.” Walking the streets of the city, plumbing the depths of the past along with her own family’s history, looking deep into the future, and punctuating her poetic prose with haunting photographs, Cixous explores the ruins at the heart of humanity. Part memoir, part philosophical meditation, Well-Kept Ruins is a genre-defying and timely reflection of the contemporary human condition.