From 1923, when he emigrated from Bucharest, to his deportation to Auschwitz-Birkenau in 1944, Benjamin Fondane made a unique and independent-minded contribution to the literary and intellectual life of Paris. One of the most significant pieces in Fondane’s body of work is the long poem Ulysses, first published in 1933. Fondane considerably revised his text during the dark years of occupied Paris, and it is this second “edition without an end,” left unfinished at the time of his deportation, that is translated here. It is a moving testament to the poetic voice and philosophical engagement of this exceptional figure of the Paris avant-garde.

This volume assembles sixteen authoritative articles on Homer's Odyssey that have appeared over the last thirty years. A wide variety of interpretative strategies are represented, including, in addition to traditional close readings, the approaches of comparative anthropology, narratology, feminism, and audience-oriented criticism. Papers have been selected for their clarity and accessibility, and each is informed by close attention to philological and textual detail. A full glossary and list of abbreviations have been included, and a specially written introduction puts the selections in a wider context by giving an overview of major strands in the interpretation of Homer in the second half of the twentieth century.

Among the Jewish writers who emigrated from Eastern Europe to France in the 1910s and 1920s, a number chose to switch from writing in their languages of origin to writing primarily in French, a language that represented both a literary center and the promises of French universalism. But under the Nazi occupation of France from 1940 to 1944, these Jewish émigré writers—among them Irène Némirovsky, Benjamin Fondane, Romain Gary, Jean Malaquais, and Elsa Triolet—continued to write in their adopted language, even as the Vichy regime and Nazi occupiers denied their French identity through xenophobic and antisemitic laws. In this book, Julia Elsky argues that these writers reexamined both their Jewishness and their place as authors in France through the language in which they wrote. The group of authors Elsky considers depicted key moments in the war from their perspective as Jewish émigrés, including the June 1940 civilian flight from Paris, life in the occupied and southern zones, the roundups and internment camps, and the Resistance in France and in London. Writing in French, they expressed multiple cultural, religious, and linguistic identities, challenging the boundaries between center and periphery, between French and foreign, even when their sense of belonging was being violently denied.

Benjamin Fondane was that rarest of poets: an experimental formalist with a powerful lyric poetic voice; a renegade surrealist who was also a highly original existential philosopher; a self-consciously Jewish poet of diaspora and loss, whose last manuscripts made it out of Drancy in 1944 just before his deportation to Auschwitz-Birkenau, where he was murdered, yet whose poetry speaks of an overflowing plenitude. This bilingual selection is the first volume of Fondane’s poetry to appear in English, and it includes a broad sample of his work, from the coruscating and comic cinepoems of his surrealist years, to philosophical meditations, to poems that in their secular and mystical Judaism confront the historical calamity—and imaginative triumph—of European Jewry.

Benjamin Fondane—who was born and educated in Romania, moved as an adult to Paris, lived for a time in Buenos Aires, where he was close to Victoria Ocampo, Jorge Luis Borges’s friend and publisher, and died in Auschwitz—was an artist and thinker who found in every limit, in every border, “a torture and a spur.” Poet, critic, man of the theater, movie director, Fondane was the most daring of the existentialists, a metaphysical anarchist, affirming individual against those great abstractions that limit human freedom—the State, History, the Law, the Idea. Existential Monday, the first selection of his philosophical work to appear in English, includes four of Fondane's most thought-provoking and important texts, "Existential Monday and the Sunday of History," "Preface for the Present Moment," "Man Before History" (co-translated by Andrew Rubens), and "Boredom." Here Fondane, until now little-known except to specialists, emerges as one of the enduring French philosophers of the twentieth century.

Baudelaire’s Bitter Metaphysics: Anti-Nihilist Readings by Fondane, Benjamin, and Sartre reconstructs a philosophical trialogue that might have been expected to take place between Benjamin Fondane, Walter Benjamin, and Jean-Paul Sartre over their philosophical readings of Charles Baudelaire, an exchange preempted by the untimely deaths of two of the interlocutors during the Nazi holocaust. Why did three of Europe’s sharpest minds respond to the terror of 1933-45 by writing about a long-dead poet? Aaron Brice Cummings argues that Fondane, Benjamin, and Sartre turned to the poet of nihilism’s abyss because they recognized a fact of cultural history that remains relevant today: until sometime in the 2080s, the literary world will have to confront (even if to deny) the two-century window forecast by Nietzsche as the age of cultural and existential nihilism. Accordingly, the author examines the bitter metaphysics latent in Baudelaire’s motifs of the abyss, clocks, brutes, streets, and bored dandies. In so doing, this book confronts the nothingness which modern life encounters in the heart of art, ethics, ideality, time, memory, history, urban life, and religion.

The award-winning poet reinvents a genre in a stunning work that is both a novel and a poem, both an unconventional re-creation of an ancient Greek myth and a wholly original coming-of-age story set in the present. Geryon, a young boy who is also a winged red monster, reveals the volcanic terrain of his fragile, tormented soul in an autobiography he begins at the age of five. As he grows older, Geryon escapes his abusive brother and affectionate but ineffectual mother, finding solace behind the lens of his camera and in the arms of a young man named Herakles, a cavalier drifter who leaves him at the peak of infatuation. When Herakles reappears years later, Geryon confronts again the pain of his desire and embarks on a journey that will unleash his creative imagination to its fullest extent. By turns whimsical and haunting, erudite and accessible, richly layered and deceptively simple, Autobiography of Red is a profoundly moving portrait of an artist coming to terms with the fantastic accident of who he is. A NEW YORK TIMES NOTABLE BOOK OF THE YEAR National Book Critics Circle Award Finalist "Anne Carson is, for me, the most exciting poet writing in English today." --Michael Ondaatje "This book is amazing--I haven't discovered any writing in years so marvelously disturbing." --Alice Munro "A profound love story . . . sensuous and funny, poignant, musical and tender." --The New York Times Book Review "A deeply odd and immensely engaging book. . . . [Carson] exposes with passionate force the mythic underlying the explosive everyday." --The Village Voice

“Everything in this book is fictional and everything is true,” wrote Victor Serge in the epigraph to Men in Prison. “I have attempted, through literary creation, to bring out the general meaning and human content of a personal experience.” The author of Men in Prison served five years in French penitentiaries (1912–1917) for the crime of “criminal association”—in fact for his courageous refusal to testify against his old comrades, the infamous “Tragic Bandits” of French anarchism. “While I was still in prison,” Serge later recalled, “fighting off tuberculosis, insanity, depression, the spiritual poverty of the men, the brutality of the regulations, I already saw one kind of justification of that infernal voyage in the possibility of describing it. Among the thousands who suffer and are crushed in prison—and how few men really know that prison!—I was perhaps the only one who could try one day to tell all… There is no novelist’s hero in this novel, unless that terrible machine, prison, is its real hero. It is not about ‘me,’ about a few men, but about men, all men crushed in that dark corner of society.” Ironically, Serge returned to writing upon his release from a GPU prison in Soviet Russia, where he was arrested as an anti-Stalinist subversive in 1928. He completed Men in Prison (and two other novels) in “semi-captivity” before he was rearrested and deported to the Gulag in 1933. Serge’s classic prison novel has been compared to Dostoyevsky’s House of the Dead, Koestler’s Spanish Testament, Genet’s Miracle of the Rose, and Solzhenitsyn’s One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovitch both for its authenticity and its artistic achievement. This edition features a substantial new introduction by translator Richard Greeman, situating the work in Serge’s life and times.

The Jewish philosopher Lev Shestov (1866-1938) is perhaps the great forgotten thinker of the twentieth century, but one whose revival seems timely and urgent in the twenty-first century. An important influence on Georges Bataille, Albert Camus, Gilles Deleuze and many others, Shestov developed a fascinating anti-Enlightenment philosophy that critiqued the limits of reason and triumphantly affirmed an ethics of hope in the face of hopelessness. In a wide-ranging reappraisal of his life and thought, which explores his ideas in relation to the history of literature and painting as well as philosophy, Matthew Beaumont restores Shestov to prominence as a thinker for turbulent times. In reconstructing Shestov's thought and asserting its continued relevance, the book's central theme is wakefulness. It argues that for Shestov, escape from the limits of rationalist Enlightenment thought comes from maintaining an insomniac vigilance in the face of the spiritual night to which his century appeared condemned. Shestov's engagement with the image of Christ remaining awake in the Garden of Gethsemane then, is at the core of his inspiring understanding of our ethical responsibilities after the horrors of the twentieth century.