Series: Critical Century

A philosopher in the guise of a rake. In this wild, dazzling work of literary reinvention, Hungarian modernist Miklós Szentkuthy uses Casanova's memoirs as a springboard for something far stranger: a swirling meditation on eros, memory, disguise, vanity, and the metaphysics of seduction. Blending fiction, philosophy, and improvisation, Marginalia on Casanova is less a commentary than an ecstatic interruption —...

Politics is will and not truth. A very primitive formulation, but rich in consequences. Robert Musil was keenly aware of literature's vulnerability to what he called "the over-reach and encroachment of politics", but he was also an acute observer of the ways in which literature and politics interact. Literature and Politics presents Musil's writings on the relationship between literature and...

Paris Spleen is one of the first modern books—formally experimental, morally ambivalent, and relentlessly urban. Written in the 1850s, these fifty prose poems roam through the streets of Paris with unsparing detail and a deeply ambivalent gaze. Baudelaire captures daily life as something both intoxicating and absurd, filled with strange encounters, sudden violence, fleeting beauty, and constant noise. This is...

In The Divine Mimesis, Pasolini reimagines Dante's descent into Hell not as allegory but as lived, historical reality—urban, political, and deeply personal. Written in the final years of his life, this unfinished and fiercely experimental work leads us through the wreckage of modern Italy: housing projects, consumer culture, political betrayal, the spiritual void left in the wake of fascism and...

A masterwork of poetic urban observation, The Stroller of Paris is Léon-Paul Fargue's luminous love letter to the city he wandered, savored, and immortalised in prose. Long unavailable in English, this book opens the door to a Paris now spectral and half-forgotten—where the boulevards echoed with café banter, jazz and politics collided in salons, and the ghosts of Baudelaire and...

The real obstacle to the development of modern art forms is erudition, conscious knowledge, and an excess of knowledge: all growth and development in the realm of art has to take place in the dead of night. The Greek Music Drama marks a significant moment in the development of Nietzsche's thought. Delivered as a lecture in 1870, it was the...

Phrases presents the spoken language from six films by Jean-Luc Godard: Germany Nine Zero, The Kids Play Russian, JLG / JLG, 2 x 50 Years of French Cinema, For Ever Mozart, and In Praise of Love. Completed between 1991 and 2001, during what has been called Godard's "years of memory", these films and videos were made alongside and in the...

Sincerity is the one great artistic crime. Insincerity is the second greatest. In addition to his literary and fictional works, Fernando Pessoa wrote a multiplicity of theoretical texts concerning literature and aesthetics. In Writings on Art and Poetical Theory, we see Pessoa exploring, under the guise of various heteronyms, general theories on poetics, the poetry produced by his other heteronyms,...

Blaise Cendrars (1887–1961) was already a comet in European letters when the First World War shattered his body and reordered his art. He enlisted in the French Foreign Legion in 1914, fought at the Somme and the Marne, and on 28 September 1915 lost the lower half of his right arm—his writing hand. From this unthinkable fact he forged a...

In a century of revolutions, final emancipations, and eschatological dreams, the shadowy figure of Louis-Auguste Blanqui—the perpetual insurgent—composed Eternity By the Stars in 1871, imprisoned in the sea fortress of Fort du Taureau. From within his cell, Blanqui arrives at a stark and devastating proposition: given infinite time and a finite number of possible configurations, every event must recur, again...

First published in 1939, Walter Jackson Bate's seminal study of John Keats's negative capability remains the definitive account of one of the central ideas of Romantic poetics. At once genealogical and analytical, Bate traces the concept across a wide intellectual field—linking it to William Hazlitt's notion of "gusto," to William Shakespeare's dramatic impersonality, and forward to Henri Bergson's distinction between...

Why do we laugh? What does comedy reveal about human nature, society, and the mind's strange elasticity? In this classic 1900 essay, philosopher Henri Bergson anatomises the comic impulse with surgical clarity and lyrical wit. For Bergson, laughter is no mere reflex. It is a social gesture, a corrective, a way for life itself to defend its supple intelligence against...