Three Steps on the Ladder of Writing is a poetic, insightful, and ultimately moving exploration of 'the strange science of writing.' In a magnetic, irresistible narrative, Cixous reflects on the writing process and explores three distinct areas essential for 'great' writing: The School of the Dead --the notion that something or someone must die in order for good writing to be born; The School of Dreams --the crucial role dreams play in literary inspiration and output; and The School of Roots --the importance of depth in the 'nether realms' in all aspects of writing. Cixous's love of language and passion for the written word is evident on every page. Her emotive style draws heavily on the writers she most admires: the Brazilian novelist Clarice Lispector, the Russian poet Marina Tsvetaeva, the Austrian novelists Ingeborg Bachmann and Thomas Bernhard, Dostoyevsky and, most of all, Kafka.

This collection of essays explores some poetico-philosophical questions that have long been circulating in the Cixousian universe: love's labours lost and found, feminine hours, autobiographies of writing, and animal-human family ties.

No contemporary French feminist has made a bigger impact in America than Häl_ne Cixous. Brilliant, bold, and combative, author of numerous novels and a gargantuan study of James Joyce, and sponsor of a series of notorious seminars at the Universityøof Paris about women's writing, she has exploited the roles of femme fatale and maitresse d'education in a career that has been spectacularly defiant and productive. Sihanouk is one of Cixous's most ambitious projects: the dramatic portrayal of the conflicts between old and new, East and West, North and South, religion and politics. At its center is the figure of Norodom Sihanouk. Vain when a prince, as king Sihanouk discovered his responsibility to his country and came to embody Cambodia. He used every means to keep his country growing, healthy, and out of the wars of Southeast Asia that consumed Laos and Vietnam. Cixous recognized in Sihanouk a historical figure as fascinating as a tragic king in Shakespeare: a man of uncommon intelligence on whom his country's history pivoted, a man placed by fate into a world of bad choices and surrounded by powerful and relentless antagonists. But Sihanouk gave Cixous something more: a king who is indisputably modern, who has read and loved Shakespeare, and whose story continues. First published in 1985, the play begins with Sihanouk's abdication in 1955 and ends with his arrest by the Khmer Rouge two decades later. The destiny of an entire country unfolds through the fifty characters who appear on stage.

In writing Le Livre de Promethea Hélène Cixous set for herself the task of bridging the immeasurable distance between love and language. She describes a love between two women in its totality, experienced as both a physical presence and a sense of infinity. The result is a stunning example of Pecriture feminine that won kudos when published in France in 1983. Its translation into English by Betsy Wing will extend the influence of a writer already famous for her novels and contributions to feminist theory. In her introduction Betsy Wing notes the contemporary emphasis on "fictions of presence." Cixous, in The Book of Promethea, works to "repair the separation between fiction and presence, trying to chronicle a very-present love without destroying it in the writing."

"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.

"Manhattan is the tale of a young French scholar who travels to the United States in 1965 on a Fulbright Fellowship to consult the manuscripts of beloved authors. In Yale University's Beinecke Library, tantalized by the conversational and epistolary brilliance of a fellow researcher, she is lured into a picaresque and tragic adventure. Meanwhile, back in France, her children and no-nonsense mother await her return. A young European intellectual's first contact with America and the city of New York are the background of this story. The experience of Manhattan haunts this labyrinth of a book as, over a period of thirty-five years, its narrator visits and revisits Central Park and a half-buried squirrel, the Statue of Liberty and a never again to be found hotel in the vicinity of Morningside Heights: a journey into memory in which everything is never the same. Traveling from library to library, France to the United States, Shakespeare to Kafka to Joyce, Manhattan deploys with gusto all the techniques for which Cixous's fiction and essays are known: rapid juxtapositions of time and place, narrative and description, analysis and philosophical reflection. It investigates subjects Cixous has spent her life probing: reading, writing, and the "omnipotence-other" seductions of literature; a family's flight from Nazi Germany and postcolonial Algeria; childhood, motherhood, and, not least, the strange experience of falling in love with a counterfeit genius"--

A genre-defying account of confinement and its literary echoes through history. As the pandemic sweeps through Paris in March 2020, the writer HC faces a choice: stay in Paris or flee to the countryside? The weight of historical responses bears down on her--those of her ancestors and Jewish writers during moments of persecution. Still uncertain, she flees to the country at the last moment, with her cats and her daughter, with her diaries and notebooks. What will she do here? Write? What will she write about? Can she write about the experience of being confined? She will write about her cats; every day she will observe their lives and take notes about how they cope with being housebound, and later, in the spring, with the outdoors. Thucydides, Defoe, Camus, Kafka--she will compare her experiences with those of others who have been confined by malady or persecution. She will write of her mother, who fled impending disaster on many occasions and always kept a suitcase ready. She too will endure. The important thing is to have a good death, surrounded by those she loves, not locked down in a hospital.

"In The Third Body, the poet, novelist, feminist critic, and theorist Helene Cixous interweaves a loose narrative line with anecdotal presentations, autobiography, lyricism, myth, dream, fantasy, philosophical insights, and intertextual citations of and conversations with other authors and thinkers. Cixous evokes the relationship of the female narrator and her lover, a relationship of alternating presences and absences, separations and rejoinings - a passionate and ever-buoyant relationship in which the partners partake of life and death, memory and oblivion, desire and discovery, the transgressive and the visionary, and the chimerical and the "real." This relationship assumes protean forms within a complex web of writing, creating a "third body" out of the entwined bodies of the narrator and her lover. This is a sensuous body endowed with flesh-and-blood reality, and it is also the body of the text: for Cixous, writing is grounded in the physical body, and the physical body becomes writing." "The three dominant texts that Cixous cites or alludes to Wilhelm Jensen's novel Gradiva; Freud's interpretation of that work in the essay "Delusion and Dream"; and Kleist's "Earthquake in Chile" - are integrated with reminiscences of the narrator's dead father, juxtaposed with thoughts about her lover; evocations of the narrator's mother; and ruminations on figures taken from Scripture, classical mythology, and fairy tales." --Book Jacket.

A compelling work of autobiographical fiction, Hélène Cixous's Hemlock weaves tragedy and comedy, narrative and meditation in its exploration of various human attachments: between an elderly but still 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 Hélène 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.

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 même, l’amour m’aime, love loving me, in the letter box of memory.

Hyperdream is a major new novel by celebrated French author Hélène 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 thatʹs 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. -- Back cover.