Hélène Cixous

"Born to an Algerian-French father and a German mother, both Jews, Helene Cixous experienced a childhood fraught with racial and gender crises. In this moving story she recounts how small domestic events - a new dog, the gift of a bicycle - reverberate decades later with social and psychological meaning. The story's protagonist, whose life resembles that of the author, endures a double alienation: from Algerians because she is French and from the French because she is Jewish. The isolation and exclusion Cixous and her family feel, especially under the Vichy government and during the Algerian War of independence, underpin this heartbreaking but also warmly human and often funny story. The author-narrator concedes that memories of Algeria awaken in her longings for the sights, sounds, and smells of her home country and ponders how that stormy relationship has influenced her life and thought. A meditation on postcolonial identity and gender, Reveries of the Wild Woman is also a poignant recollection of how childhood is author to the woman."--BOOK JACKET

This year the renowned artist Renate Bertlmann, a pioneer and role model of early feminist performance art, is exhibiting in the Austrian Pavilion at the Biennale Arte 2019 in Venice. By selecting Renate Bertlmann, curator Felicitas Thun-Hohenstein opted for an artist whose work not only holds a significant position in the history of female performance in Austria, but who also is highly esteemed among the international feminist avant-garde. In presenting Renate Bertlmann, the Austrian Pavilion is dedicated to a female solo exhibition for the first time in its decades-long history. The book under consideration is more than an exhibition catalog; it is an extension of the exhibitions in book form, as the texts by Hélène Cixous, Catherine Wood, Beatriz Colomina, and Lina Streeruwitz offer in-depth discussions, analyses, and discursive explorations of Renate Bertlmann's works. Readers are invited to continue their excursion through Renate Bertlmann's thought and practice in the so-called sourcebook, which offers insights into the artist's virtually inexhaustible archive. Notes, sketches, and other finds from countless diaries and sketchbooks, analytical material such as charts, association cards, sketches of unproduced projects, booths in fictitious exhibitions, texts by authors that have been instrumental to Renate Bertlmann and her artistic work, her own texts about art, her poems, manifestos, and musical scores get to the heart and brain of Bertlmann's 50-year cosmos. Exhibition: Austrian Pavilion 2019, 58th Venice Biennale, Venice, Italy (11.05. - 24.11.2019).

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.

"Published in France as La jeune née in 1975, and now translated for the first time into English, The Newly Born Woman seeks to uncover the veiled structures of language and society that have situated women in the position called "woman's place." Through their readings of historical, literary, and psychoanalytic accounts, Hélène Cixous and Catherine Clément explore what is hidden and repressed in culture, revealing the unconscious of history. Their work is set within the context of American feminism in Sandra M. Gilbert's introduction, and translator, Betsy Wing's glossary provides the special vocabulary necessary for English-language readers."--back cover.

"This collection gathers most of Hélène Cixous' texts devoted to contemporary artists, such as the painter Nancy Spero, the photographer Andres Serrano, the visual artist Roni Horn, the fashion designer Sonia Rykiel and the choreographer Karine Saporta, among others. The artworks belong to different genres and media - photography, painting, installations, film, choreography and fashion design - while the commentaries all deal with some of Hélène Cixous' privileged themes: exile, war, violence (against women) and exclusion, as well as love, memory, beauty and tenderness. Neither art criticism nor a collection of critical essays, Hélène Cixous responds to these artworks as a poet, reading them as if they were poems. Written between 1985 and 2010, most of these essays are unpublished in English, or published only in rare catalogues or art books."--pub. desc.

"Amanda Beth Luker has spent her whole life desperately looking for someone who can show her the way out of her trailer park Florida town. And then, finally, help arrives in the form of Tom Davis, a successful lawyer with political aspirations who grew up just a few towns over from Amanda. But it's his wife Lindsay who really captures Amanda's imagination. Strong, smart, and determined, she gives Amanda something she's never had: a role model."--Amazon.com.

"In these personal essays from the Washington Post Book World, Michael Dirda shares some of the pleasures of the reading life. His subjects range from classics in translation to fantasy and crime fiction; from children's books to American and European literature; from innovative writing to neglected novels."--BOOK JACKET.