Adam Phillips

Adam Phillips

Adam Phillips (born 1954) is a British child psychotherapist, literary critic and essayist. He is known for his books dealing with topics related to psychoanalysis, including On Kissing, Being Bored and Going Sane. His book of essays, Side Effects, explores the relationship between literature and psychoanalysis. Phillips is also the general editor of the second Penguin edition of the selected works of Sigmund Freud and a contributor to the London Review of Books.

cover image of the book Poetry As Insurgent Art

Poetry As Insurgent Art

Since publishing A Coney Island of the Mind (1958), Lawrence Ferlinghetti has been the poetic conscience of America. Now in Poetry as Insurgent Art, he offers a primer, in prose, of what poetry is, could be, and should be. If you read poetry, find out what is missing from the usual fare you are served; if you are a poet, read at your own risk––you will never again look at your role in the same way.

More Information
cover image of the book The Shunra and the Schmetterling

The Shunra and the Schmetterling

by Yoel Hoffmann

Translated by Peter Cole

Edited by Adam Phillips

Shunra is Aramaic for “cat.” Schmetterling is German for “butterfly." In Yoel Hoffmann’s new book, these and numerous other creatures, cultures, and languages meet in a magical shimmering hymn to childhood. Hoffmann traces his hero’s developing consciousness of the ways-and-wonders of the world as though he were peering through a tremendous kaleidoscope: all that was perceived, all that is remembered, is rendered in fluid fragments of color and light. With remarkable delicacy and sweep, Hoffmann captures childhood from the amazed inside out, and without the backward-looking wash of grown-up sentiment. Instead, the boy’s deadpan registration of the human comedy around him is offered up as strangely magical fact. Beautifully translated by Peter Cole, The Shunra and the Schmetterling is fiction for lovers of poetry and poetry for lovers of fiction––a small marvel of a book, and one of the author’s finest to date.

More Information
cover image of the book The Green Child

The Green Child

by Herbert Read

Translated by Adam Phillips

With a contribution by Eliot Weinberger and Kenneth Rexroth

The Green Child is the only novel by Herbert Read — the famous English poet, anarchist, and literary critic. First published by New Directions in 1948, it remains a singular work of bewildering imagination and radiance. The author considered it a philosophical fable akin to Plato’s cave.

Olivero, the former dictator of a South American country, has returned to his native England after faking his own assassination. On a walk he sees, through a cottage window, a green-skinned young girl tied to a chair. He watches in horror as a man forces the girl to drink lamb’s blood from a cup. Olivero rescues the child, and she leads him into unknown realms.

More Information
cover image of the book Tribute to Freud

Tribute to Freud

by Hilda Doolittle (H.D.)

With a contribution by Adam Phillips

“My bat-like thought-wings would beat painfully in that sudden searchlight,” H.D. writes in Tribute to Freud, her moving memoir. Compelled by historical as well as personal crises, H.D. underwent therapy with Freud during 1933-34, as the streets of Vienna were littered with tokens dropped like confetti on the city stating “Hitler gives work,” “Hitler gives bread.” Having endured World War I, she was now gathering her resources to face the cataclysm she knew was approaching. The first part of the book, “Writing on the Wall,” was composed some ten years after H.D.’s stay in Vienna; the second part, “Advent,” is a journal she kept during her analysis. Revealed here in the poet’s crystal shard-like words and in Freud’s own letters (which comprise an appendix) is a remarkably tender and human portrait of the legendary Doctor in the twilight of his life. Time doubles back on itself, mingling past, present, and future in a visionary weave of dream, memory, and reflections.

More Information
Scroll to Top of Page