Death Shall Be Dethroned is the shadow book of Los, a Chapter, Helene Cixous tells us. It came along after Los, but it was always there "hidden" in her notebooks, in the Beethoven notebook, say, the one Jacques Derrida gave her. But when it tapped at the window, she ignored it until the day she had to let it in. This is just of one the enigmas Death explores as it probes an old relationship between the narrator and Carlos. Another is her discovery on the Internet that Carlos s archives were at Princeton, and that the archive containing their correspondence was closed to the public: Bluebeard s closet. The fruit on the tree of Good and Evil. You shall not open. Death Shall Be Dethroned is the logbook of Los, a Chapter. It owes its life to the death of a lover.

Twists and Turns in the Heart's Antarctic is a compelling new volume in Helene Cixous's search for lost time. Readers of earlier volumes - Hemlock and Hyperdream, among others - will reconnect with familiar characters: Eve, the elderly mother now in her hundredth year, Helene, the daughter, who never expected to become a mother at 70, and the brother, childhood companion and rival. She has almost no time to write. "You hate me! You hate me!" someone shouts. "You want me dead!" Is that a revolver on the table? Bang! Shot or door slammed? The brother storms out. The Family is destroying itself. Twists and Turns, like all Cixous's books, is a many-faceted text, whose narrative spins its webs in corners familiar to Cixous readers: corners with books and writers - Montaigne, Proust, Kafka, Derrida; a theater and plays; friendship, and love. It is a tale on the scale of Greek myth, about the inescapable entanglements of family relationships, that can lead one, in hyperbolic mode, to envision murder and suicide, for, as Cixous writes, "with love's force one hates." And yet, "everything twists and turns": this is a tale with profoundly touching reversals.

In So Close , the internationally renowned writer Helene Cixous recounts a return to her native Algeria after a more than thirty-year absence. Before she can decide to go, she must sift through large parts of her past in a land where she never felt at home and, from a young age, knew she must leave. Above all, she must confront the depths of her mother's rejection of the country that had rejected her despite years of devotion to the poor women of Algiers. As she is struggling with this decision, she receives a message from Zohra Drif, with whom she has had no contact since their school days, which was just before Zohra joined the Algerian FLN and become a heroine in the uprising against French rule in her homeland. They meet in Paris for the first time in more than fifty years and soon afterward the narrator departs for Algiers. The latter part of the narrative brings a rush of sensations, impressions, memories, and new encounters as the narrator revisits sites from her past in Algiers and especially in Oran, the city of her birth, the city of the family's happiness before her father's death when she was a young girl. The quest to find his grave again in the overgrown Jewish cemetery of Algiers leads to a startlingly moving scene that closes the voyage and the book.

"Isn't it ... particularly difficult to 'speak' of your work?" Frederic-Yves Jeannet asks Helene Cixous in this fascinating book of interviews. " I]t's only in writing, on paper, ... that I reach the most unknown, the strangest, the most advanced part of me for me. I feel closer to my own mystery in the aura of writing it," Cixous responds.

These conversations, which took place over three years and cover the creative process behind Cixous's fictional writing, illuminate the genesis and particular genius of one of France's most original writers. Cixous muses on her "coming to writing," from her first publications to her recent acclaim for a series of fictional texts that spring, as, she insists all true writing does, from her life: the loss of her father when she was a child, and her relationship with her mother, now in her tenth decade, as well as with such friends as Jacques Derrida and Jacques Lacan. The conversations delve into Cixous's career as an academic in Paris and abroad, her summer retreats to the Bordeaux region to write uninterrupted for two months, her work with Ariane Mnouchkine's Theatre du Soleil, her political engagements and her dreams. Readers and writers who have followed Cixous's path-blazing career as a fiction writer who crosses boundaries of genre and gender while posing essential questions about the nature of narrative and life will find this a book that cannot be put down.

A compelling work of autobiographical fiction, Helene Cixous's Hemlock weaves tragedy and comedy, narrative and meditation in its exploration of various human attachments: between an elderly butstill truculent mother and her writer-daughter, between the mother and her sister, and between the writer and her vanished but nonetheless intensely present friend, Jacques Derrida, whose death is movingly evoked. "I have in mind two lovely faces, old women in bloom," writes the author with a backwards nod to Proust's 'jeunes filles.' "Here," she says in her preface, "the criss-crossing paths of my mother and my aunt will come to an end at last. When one old flower is left, what becomes of the other face?" Socrates is conjured up, along with the poisonous plants of Hamlet, the human comedies of Balzac and Proust, and other literary and philosophical ghosts who find themselves drawn into the fabric of Cixous's text: "I'm not sleeping," writes the protagonist. "A worm is drilling my brain. It's a phrase I heard in the hellish juice of the jusquiame. I pour it into my own ear. 'I'm afraid Mama will die'."

In this new work Helene Cixous continues to explore and expand the boundaries of narrative, slipping from thought to thought and from image to image, so as to render every action, fear and thought palpable to the reader.

"Zero's Neighbour" is Helene Cixous's tribute to the minimalist genius of the artist in exile who courted nothingness in his writing like nobody else: Samuel Beckett. In this unabashedly personal odyssey through a sizeable range of his novels, plays and poems, Cixous celebrates Beckett's linguistic flair and the poignant, powerful thrust of his stylistic terseness, and passionately declares her love for his unrivalled expression of the meaningless 'precious little' of life, its unfathomable banality ending in chaos and death. Poised between a critical essay and a textual performance across two languages adapting Beckett's own literary vein, this book will appeal to scholars, critics and creative writers as well as students of the 'grey self-Sam'. Its allusive intertextual insights will also prove to be of critical relevance to readers of Dante and Proust, among other literary figures, as much as to those appreciative of Cixous's own inimitable genius for dissecting the quintessence of the life and works of a 'neighbourly' artist.

Philippines is H l ne Cixous's reverie or 'true dreaming' which intertwines Freud's uneasy views on telepathy, autobiographical memories conflating Algeria and Paris, childhood and adult life, shared with her brother 'Pete', and literary evocations from Proust and George du Maurier's forgotten novel Peter Ibbetson. Amid telepathic conversations, real or imagined, and life events uncannily answering one another from a distance, Cixous's dense evocative journey ceaselessly 'returns to its starting point' and, like the twin almonds in one shell evoked by the title, reveals intimate, secret bonds between scenes and beings, real and fictional. Its interpretive sharpness delivered with stylistic elegance and candour will make this study typical of Cixous's art, which plies between literature and criticism, appealing not only to scholars and critics interested in psychoanalysis, autobiography and the act of reading, but also to a broader readership captivated by the hallucinatory coincidences between life, dream and fiction, when 'Reality is the dream. The dream is the true reality'.

Helene Cixous has dreamed for years of "The Book-I-Don't-Write," but each time she approaches it, it withdraws. The-Book-I-Don't-Write is always just out of reach. When Jacques Derrida told her the Book would get written one day, but differently, Cixous tells us she would see it "shining behind a veil, its indecipherable back, upright on heaven's bookshelf, its elegant silhouette, utterly foreign, utterly familiar, of future revenant. I've always thought it would come, naturally. When? After all my deaths? Just before, or just after, the last of my deaths." One day, when she is no longer expecting it, the Book turns up: "Quickly, without taking my eyes off it, I copied it down, staying scrupulously close to its notations, its rhythms, its moments of silence. I found it. Just as you see it." She calls it Los, meaning "loose, detached" in German, her mother's tongue. Or Los like Carlos, the Latin American friend whose unexpected death in May 2014 takes her back to a life they shared and a time the Book will reconstitute in the present, abolishing time: "Suddenly, that morning, I saw the universe of The-Book-I-Don't-Write: it is an infinity of presents." Los, A Chapter is a marvelous exploration of time and relationships. It reimagines scenes from Paris in the late sixties: its cafes, its debates, its political turmoil. Both playful and serious, it is a book in a long line of novels from Balzac to Proust that create worlds both philosophical and concrete. In Los a lost time is regained.

"I get up every day with one day more," says Eve, the writer's 97-year-old mother. She is escaping into the New Life and the writer must race to catch up. As things slip away and fall into oblivion, as her mother's world and thus her own relentlessly shrinks, the writer is stunned to see for the first time the vestiges of a prison scene in her beloved Tower of Montaigne, which she has been visiting for fifty years. It represents the story of Cimon and Pero, a daughter's act of charity that saved her father from certain death. How extraordinary that it should only now appear to this other daughter who dreams of nothing less for her parent and thus for herself. A different prison scene draws the writer to reflect on Freud's remark "that the dream of a prisoner can have nothing other than escape as content," a comment he illustrates with Moritz von Schwind's painting "The Prisoner's Dream." But it is Freud's own dreams of escape from the prison of declining powers in his old age that the writer channels through her telepathic connection to the one she calls her "nuncle." She knows that the worst, worse even than the effects of the disease eating through his body, would have been the obliteration of his dreams upon waking, a sensation of theft that is "like a rug one pulls from beneath the head's feet, bam, bam like a tapestry of life folded up in a flash." And yet life's tapestry has never seemed more richly colored, more elaborately woven, more abundantly endowed with the gifts of Eve, the mother, the midwife, the irrepressible story-teller, the great escape artist, and the indomitable heroine of this book.

In So Close, the internationally renowned writer Helene Cixous recounts a return to her native Algeria after a more than thirty-year absence. Before she can decide to go, she must sift through large parts of her past in a land where she never felt at home and, from a young age, knew she must leave. Above all, she must confront the depths of her mother's rejection of the country that had rejected her despite years of devotion to the poor women of Algiers. As she is struggling with this decision, she receives a message from Zohra Drif, with whom she has had no contact since their school days, which was just before Zohra joined the Algerian FLN and become a heroine in the uprising against French rule in her homeland. They meet in Paris for the first time in more than fifty years and soon afterward the narrator departs for Algiers. The latter part of the narrative brings a rush of sensations, impressions, memories, and new encounters as the narrator revisits sites from her past in Algiers and especially in Oran, the city of her birth, the city of the family's happiness before her father's death when she was a young girl. The quest to find his grave again in the overgrown Jewish cemetery of Algiers leads to a startlingly moving scene that closes the voyage and the book.

A compelling work of autobiographical fiction, Helene Cixous's Hemlock weaves tragedy and comedy, narrative and meditation in its exploration of various human attachments: between an elderly butstill truculent mother and her writer-daughter, between the mother and her sister, and between the writer and her vanished but nonetheless intensely present friend, Jacques Derrida, whose death is movingly evoked. "I have in mind two lovely faces, old women in bloom," writes the author with a backwards nod to Proust's 'jeunes filles.' "Here," she says in her preface, "the criss-crossing paths of my mother and my aunt will come to an end at last. When one old flower is left, what becomes of the other face?" Socrates is conjured up, along with the poisonous plants of Hamlet, the human comedies of Balzac and Proust, and other literary and philosophical ghosts who find themselves drawn into the fabric of Cixous's text: "I'm not sleeping," writes the protagonist. "A worm is drilling my brain. It's a phrase I heard in the hellish juice of the jusquiame. I pour it into my own ear. 'I'm afraid Mama will die'."

In this new work Helene Cixous continues to explore and expand the boundaries of narrative, slipping from thought to thought and from image to image, so as to render every action, fear and thought palpable to the reader.

In 2009, the writer-narrator finds a Box. Within it lie the pages of her very first manuscript, pages she thought she had long since thrown away. "Le Prenom de Dieu" was the text that marked the start of her prodigious career, and yet for the narrator it is also the Nameless Book, the-Book-that-could-never-be-read, the book written by someone other than her. Now, once again, it heralds a beginning, as its discovery is the start of a journey into the past.

The title, with its reference to the murderous Ourang-Outang of Edgar Allan Poe's "The Murders in the Rue Morgue," sets the scene: this is a detective story haunted by literary ghosts. At the very heart of literature lies the fascination with the enigma, the search for something that has been lost. Cixous illustrates this as she leads her reader on a hunt for the ultimate hidden treasure, in the company of an array of venerable predecessors from Saint-Simon, Proust and Stendhal to Shackleton, Poe and Jacques Derrida.

"Double Oblivion of the Ourang-Outang" is a text about literature. It speaks of the books you read and the books you write, those you remember and those you forget, those you fear and those you revere. It is also a powerful, evocative tale of beginnings and endings, of remembering and forgetting, of things and their doubles.

In a densely woven narrative, Cixous's latest text focuses on the extraordinary voyage that is literary creation, and in doing so also explores the themes of memory, loss and subjectivity.

Philippines is H l ne Cixous's reverie or 'true dreaming' which intertwines Freud's uneasy views on telepathy, autobiographical memories conflating Algeria and Paris, childhood and adult life, shared with her brother 'Pete', and literary evocations from Proust and George du Maurier's forgotten novel Peter Ibbetson. Amid telepathic conversations, real or imagined, and life events uncannily answering one another from a distance, Cixous's dense evocative journey ceaselessly 'returns to its starting point' and, like the twin almonds in one shell evoked by the title, reveals intimate, secret bonds between scenes and beings, real and fictional. Its interpretive sharpness delivered with stylistic elegance and candour will make this study typical of Cixous's art, which plies between literature and criticism, appealing not only to scholars and critics interested in psychoanalysis, autobiography and the act of reading, but also to a broader readership captivated by the hallucinatory coincidences between life, dream and fiction, when 'Reality is the dream. The dream is the true reality'.

In 2009, the writer-narrator finds a Box. Within it lie the pages of her very first manuscript, pages she thought she had long since thrown away. "Le Prenom de Dieu" was the text that marked the start of her prodigious career, and yet for the narrator it is also the Nameless Book, the-Book-that-could-never-be-read, the book written by someone other than her. Now, once again, it heralds a beginning, as its discovery is the start of a journey into the past.

The title, with its reference to the murderous Ourang-Outang of Edgar Allan Poe's "The Murders in the Rue Morgue," sets the scene: this is a detective story haunted by literary ghosts. At the very heart of literature lies the fascination with the enigma, the search for something that has been lost. Cixous illustrates this as she leads her reader on a hunt for the ultimate hidden treasure, in the company of an array of venerable predecessors from Saint-Simon, Proust and Stendhal to Shackleton, Poe and Jacques Derrida.

"Double Oblivion of the Ourang-Outang" is a text about literature. It speaks of the books you read and the books you write, those you remember and those you forget, those you fear and those you revere. It is also a powerful, evocative tale of beginnings and endings, of remembering and forgetting, of things and their doubles.

In a densely woven narrative, Cixous's latest text focuses on the extraordinary voyage that is literary creation, and in doing so also explores the themes of memory, loss and subjectivity.

"Isn't it ... particularly difficult to 'speak' of your work?" Frederic-Yves Jeannet asks Helene Cixous in this fascinating book of interviews. " I]t's only in writing, on paper, ... that I reach the most unknown, the strangest, the most advanced part of me for me. I feel closer to my own mystery in the aura of writing it," Cixous responds.

These conversations, which took place over three years and cover the creative process behind Cixous's fictional writing, illuminate the genesis and particular genius of one of France's most original writers. Cixous muses on her "coming to writing," from her first publications to her recent acclaim for a series of fictional texts that spring, as, she insists all true writing does, from her life: the loss of her father when she was a child, and her relationship with her mother, now in her tenth decade, as well as with such friends as Jacques Derrida and Jacques Lacan. The conversations delve into Cixous's career as an academic in Paris and abroad, her summer retreats to the Bordeaux region to write uninterrupted for two months, her work with Ariane Mnouchkine's Theatre du Soleil, her political engagements and her dreams. Readers and writers who have followed Cixous's path-blazing career as a fiction writer who crosses boundaries of genre and gender while posing essential questions about the nature of narrative and life will find this a book that cannot be put down.

Twists and Turns in the Heart's Antarctic is a compelling new volume in Helene Cixous's search for lost time. Readers of earlier volumes - Hemlock and Hyperdream, among others - will reconnect with familiar characters: Eve, the elderly mother now in her hundredth year, Helene, the daughter, who never expected to become a mother at 70, and the brother, childhood companion and rival. She has almost no time to write. "You hate me! You hate me!" someone shouts. "You want me dead!" Is that a revolver on the table? Bang! Shot or door slammed? The brother storms out. The Family is destroying itself. Twists and Turns, like all Cixous's books, is a many-faceted text, whose narrative spins its webs in corners familiar to Cixous readers: corners with books and writers - Montaigne, Proust, Kafka, Derrida; a theater and plays; friendship, and love. It is a tale on the scale of Greek myth, about the inescapable entanglements of family relationships, that can lead one, in hyperbolic mode, to envision murder and suicide, for, as Cixous writes, "with love's force one hates." And yet, "everything twists and turns": this is a tale with profoundly touching reversals.

"Hyperdream" is a major new novel by celebrated French author Helene Cixous. It is a literary tour de force, returning anew to challenge necessity itself, the most implacable of human certainties: you die in the end - and that's the end. For you, for me.

But what if? What if death did not inevitably spell the end of life?

"Hyperdream" invests this fragile, tentative suspension of disbelief with the sheer force of its poetic audacity, inventing a sort of magic telephone: a wireless lifeline against all the odds to the dearly departed.

It is a book about time, age, love and the greatest loss. A book which turns on death: on the question or the moment of death, depending on it, expecting it, living off it, taking place at once before and after, but at the same time turning against it, contesting it, outwriting it hopefully, desperately, performatively, as an interruptible interruption.

"Hyperdream" is a book of mourning, but also of morning, a tragedy-with-comedy and a universal family romance in which it transpires that the narrator is the veritable offspring of a "treasure of literature" in the form of a bed, purchased by her mother from a certain W. Benjamin in 1934, slept on for 40 years by her brother and dreamt of by her friend "J.D."

Death Shall Be Dethroned is the shadow book of Los, a Chapter, Helene Cixous tells us. It came along after Los, but it was always there "hidden" in her notebooks, in the Beethoven notebook, say, the one Jacques Derrida gave her. But when it tapped at the window, she ignored it until the day she had to let it in. This is just of one the enigmas Death explores as it probes an old relationship between the narrator and Carlos. Another is her discovery on the Internet that Carlos s archives were at Princeton, and that the archive containing their correspondence was closed to the public: Bluebeard s closet. The fruit on the tree of Good and Evil. You shall not open. Death Shall Be Dethroned is the logbook of Los, a Chapter. It owes its life to the death of a lover.

Love's memories, love recalling itself in letters lost and found over an interval of forty years: Cixous's writer-narrator advances here far into a labyrinth of passions long ago delivered and yet still arriving through the mail, through letters and literature, in other words, the poetry of the post. As for the lovers' returning scenes, they have their addresses in Paris (rue Olivier de Serres, Avenue de Choisy, street names that endlessly feed love's unconscious language) and in New York, but also in a lost oasis of the Egyptian desert during the Napoleonic wars, in Athens and along the shores of a great lake centuries ago in the country of myth. The lovers are poets or soldiers, philosophers or students madly in love with poetry and poets. They are as well mermaids or panthers. Panthers? Yes, for it is the passion of the animal that drives all these lovers to bare themselves, and sometimes their claws, before the beloved. Misunderstandings are often, even inevitably the result. Seconded and witnessed by her passionate, truth-telling cats, Cixous's narrator-writer returns unerringly to moments of errancy inflicted on address and language, those errors and faults when love, perhaps, is listening only to itself, without subject or object, lover or beloved, just love itself, l'amour meme, l'amour m'aime, love loving me, in the letter box of memory.

Zero's Neighbour is Helene Cixous's tribute to theminimalist genius of the artist in exile who courted nothingness inhis writing like nobody else: Samuel Beckett. In this unabashedlypersonal odyssey through a sizeable range of his novels, plays andpoems, Cixous celebrates Beckett s linguistic flair and thepoignant, powerful thrust of his stylistic terseness, andpassionately declares her love for his unrivalled expression of themeaningless precious little of life, its unfathomablebanality ending in chaos and death. Poised between a critical essayand a textual performance across two languages adapting Beckett'sown literary vein, this book will appeal to scholars, critics andcreative writers as well as students of the greyself-Sam . Its allusive intertextual insights will also proveto be of critical relevance to readers of Dante and Proust, amongother literary figures, as much as to those appreciative ofCixous s own inimitable genius for dissecting thequintessence of the life and works of a neighbourly artist.

"Hyperdream" is a major new novel by celebrated French author Helene Cixous. It is a literary tour de force, returning anew to challenge necessity itself, the most implacable of human certainties: you die in the end - and that's the end. For you, for me.

But what if? What if death did not inevitably spell the end of life?

"Hyperdream" invests this fragile, tentative suspension of disbelief with the sheer force of its poetic audacity, inventing a sort of magic telephone: a wireless lifeline against all the odds to the dearly departed.

It is a book about time, age, love and the greatest loss. A book which turns on death: on the question or the moment of death, depending on it, expecting it, living off it, taking place at once before and after, but at the same time turning against it, contesting it, outwriting it hopefully, desperately, performatively, as an interruptible interruption.

"Hyperdream" is a book of mourning, but also of morning, a tragedy-with-comedy and a universal family romance in which it transpires that the narrator is the veritable offspring of a "treasure of literature" in the form of a bed, purchased by her mother from a certain W. Benjamin in 1934, slept on for 40 years by her brother and dreamt of by her friend "J.D."

Love's memories, love recalling itself in letters lost and found over an interval of forty years: Cixous's writer-narrator advances here far into a labyrinth of passions long ago delivered and yet still arriving through the mail, through letters and literature, in other words, the poetry of the post. As for the lovers' returning scenes, they have their addresses in Paris (rue Olivier de Serres, Avenue de Choisy, street names that endlessly feed love's unconscious language) and in New York, but also in a lost oasis of the Egyptian desert during the Napoleonic wars, in Athens and along the shores of a great lake centuries ago in the country of myth. The lovers are poets or soldiers, philosophers or students madly in love with poetry and poets. They are as well mermaids or panthers. Panthers? Yes, for it is the passion of the animal that drives all these lovers to bare themselves, and sometimes their claws, before the beloved. Misunderstandings are often, even inevitably the result. Seconded and witnessed by her passionate, truth-telling cats, Cixous's narrator-writer returns unerringly to moments of errancy inflicted on address and language, those errors and faults when love, perhaps, is listening only to itself, without subject or object, lover or beloved, just love itself, l'amour meme, l'amour m'aime, love loving me, in the letter box of memory.

Helene Cixous has dreamed for years of "The Book-I-Don't-Write," but each time she approaches it, it withdraws. The-Book-I-Don't-Write is always just out of reach. When Jacques Derrida told her the Book would get written one day, but differently, Cixous tells us she would see it "shining behind a veil, its indecipherable back, upright on heaven's bookshelf, its elegant silhouette, utterly foreign, utterly familiar, of future revenant. I've always thought it would come, naturally. When? After all my deaths? Just before, or just after, the last of my deaths." One day, when she is no longer expecting it, the Book turns up: "Quickly, without taking my eyes off it, I copied it down, staying scrupulously close to its notations, its rhythms, its moments of silence. I found it. Just as you see it." She calls it Los, meaning "loose, detached" in German, her mother's tongue. Or Los like Carlos, the Latin American friend whose unexpected death in May 2014 takes her back to a life they shared and a time the Book will reconstitute in the present, abolishing time: "Suddenly, that morning, I saw the universe of The-Book-I-Don't-Write: it is an infinity of presents." Los, A Chapter is a marvelous exploration of time and relationships. It reimagines scenes from Paris in the late sixties: its cafes, its debates, its political turmoil. Both playful and serious, it is a book in a long line of novels from Balzac to Proust that create worlds both philosophical and concrete. In Los a lost time is regained.

"I get up every day with one day more," says Eve, the writer's 97-year-old mother. She is escaping into the New Life and the writer must race to catch up. As things slip away and fall into oblivion, as her mother's world and thus her own relentlessly shrinks, the writer is stunned to see for the first time the vestiges of a prison scene in her beloved Tower of Montaigne, which she has been visiting for fifty years. It represents the story of Cimon and Pero, a daughter's act of charity that saved her father from certain death. How extraordinary that it should only now appear to this other daughter who dreams of nothing less for her parent and thus for herself. A different prison scene draws the writer to reflect on Freud's remark "that the dream of a prisoner can have nothing other than escape as content," a comment he illustrates with Moritz von Schwind's painting "The Prisoner's Dream." But it is Freud's own dreams of escape from the prison of declining powers in his old age that the writer channels through her telepathic connection to the one she calls her "nuncle." She knows that the worst, worse even than the effects of the disease eating through his body, would have been the obliteration of his dreams upon waking, a sensation of theft that is "like a rug one pulls from beneath the head's feet, bam, bam like a tapestry of life folded up in a flash." And yet life's tapestry has never seemed more richly colored, more elaborately woven, more abundantly endowed with the gifts of Eve, the mother, the midwife, the irrepressible story-teller, the great escape artist, and the indomitable heroine of this book.