We are very pleased to announce Essay as Enabler in Yves Bonnefoy: Creating the Good Reader, by Layla Roesler:

This will be an important book for Bonnefoy readers, of whom there are many, because although he is now well-established as one of the major French poets of the last half-century, his essays have largely been neglected by critics.

When looking for a cover for a Legenda book, it frequently happens that nobody seems ever to have painted the right thing: say, the concept of exile, or a specifically Belgian library, or whatever may be. But when you look for an image of somebody reading, the floodgates open. Renoir alone painted nearly 50, of which this is a detail from one: we wanted to crop in on the reader's face, to make it more about the attentiveness and less about gender. Why this was such an idée fixe for Renoir is a question for another day, though I dare say the need to get models to keep still had something to do with it. Perhaps today's artists are painting people checking their phones.

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