Yve-Alain Bois is the co-author (with Rosalind E. Krauss) of Formless: A User's Guide and the Joseph Pulitzer, Jr., Professor of Modern Art at Harvard University. Books I reread when I feel down: (Alphabetical by author) All of Jane Austen, but Pride and Prejudice and Persuasion in particular. She was the first fiction writer I could read in English. Early Paul Auster, especially The Invention of Solitude. All of James Baldwin, and not only his essays -- I do not share the common (snobbish?) contempt for his fiction. All of Roland Barthes, but in particular Criticism and Truth. (I read Barthes in French, since it's my native tongue, and I'm quite surprised that this book was only translated in 1987, more than 20 years after its appearance; I recommend, as an excellent selection of his essays in English, Image, Music, Text, translated and edited by Stephen Heath, Hill & Wang, 1977.) (Note: The edition to which this title is linked is not the one to which Bois refers.) Walter Benjamin's correspondence the volume edited by Scholem and Adorno, Chicago University Press, 1994, and the supplementary volume, oddly translated before the latter, of his correspondence with Scholem, Schocken Books, 1989). There is also another title by Benjamin which has the power of lifting my spirits, Berliner Childhood, but I don't know if it is available in English. Flaubert's correspondence. Michel Foucault's articles and interviews (there are 4 volumes in French, in chronological order. I've not checked the titles available in English.) Jean Genet's four novels. (Querelle, The Miracle of the Rose, Our Lady of the Flowers, and The Thief's Journal) Primo Levi's Survival in Auschwitz (bad translation of the original title, by the way; it should be something like "If It Is a Man.") Nabokov's Lolita.

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