His name has become synonymous with artistic, personal, and political freedom. He was the last of the Romantics, and the most passionate.

    At last, we have the long-awaited English translation of Yves Bonnefoy’s celebrated work, L’Arrière-pays, which takes us to the heart of his creative process and to the very core of his poetic spirit. In his poem, “The Convex Mirror,” Bonnefoy writes: “Look at them down there, at that crossroads, / They seem to hesitate, then go on.” The idea of the crossroads haunts Bonnefoy’s work, as he is troubled by the idea that the path not taken may lead to the arrière-pays, a place of greater plenitude, and of more authentic being—an “elsewhere in the absolute.” Seized by this fear that what he terms “presence” exists always somewhere else, a little further on, Bonnefoy here sets out on a labyrinthine quest to find traces of this “original place,” which he locates not only in objects of knowledge and experience as diverse as the deserts of Asia, a hill fort in India, a church in Armenia, the painting of Piero della Francesca but also, crucially, in the undivided intensity of his experiences as a child. Written with a visionary grace, The Arrière-pays is a spiritual testament to art, philosophy, and poetry. Enriched by a new preface by the poet, this volume also includes three recent essays in which he returns to his original account of an ethical and aesthetic haunting, one that recounts the struggle between our instinct to idealize—what he deems our eternal Platonism—and the equally strong need to combat this and to be reconciled with our nature as finite beings, made of flesh and blood, in the world of the here and now.

    They present a world of sensation in which only the vaulting demands of disruptive excess and the anguish of heightened awareness can combat the stultifying world of reason and social order. Each of the narratives contains a sense of intoxication and insanity so carefully delineated by the author that it seems to infect the reader.Philosopher, novelist and critic, Georges Bataille is a major figure in twentieth-century literature whose startling and original ideas increasingly exert a vital influence on the shaping of thought, language and experience. Best known outside France for the vertiginous sexual delirium of his short novel, Story of the Eye, the vast scope of Bataille's interests and intellect made him a major force in many spheres.Bataille's essays range over such diverse topics as economics, psychoanalysis, Marxism, yoga and anthropology. His critical essays, Literature and Evil and his complex meditations on the dark coupling of sex and death, Eroticism, are both available from Marion Boyars. Bataille's available fiction includes L'Abbé C, a twisted document detailing the holy horrors of sex and Blue of Noon, now an established modern classic in its seventh printing.

    Poet, essayist, philosopher and translator, Sanscrit scholar and pupil of Gurdjieff, Daumal was a founder of the Grand Jeu group. He was iconoclastic and electic, able to embrace simultaneously Alfred Jarry’s Pataphysics and Hindu teachings.Daumal's two major works in English translation, Mount Analogue and A Night of Serious Drinking, have long been classics in this country; but until now, readers have not had acess to the full range of his thought. The Powers of the Word spans a lifetime of essays and notes—many here translated for the first time—from the earliest incitements to drug use and revolt; through Daumal’s unique readings of literary works; to his more mature, but no less ardent, meditations.

    Sent by Churchill to divert the Germans from Dunkirk and so save the British Army from total annihilation and capture, 29 Brigade had orders not to evacuate or surrender.Airey Neave, later to be Margaret Thatcher's right hand man until his assassination in 1979, was one of those who fought, and was wounded and captured there

    Called the greatest master of French comedy since Moli�re by admirers such as Kenneth Tynan, Feydeau reflects the lusty tradition of the French bedroom farce as well as the tough exorbitant humor later to find full expression in the theater of the absurd.