'Epic and fleeting, tender and excruciating, this is a beautifully strange account of the death of Cixous's centenarian mother. Everywhere in these pages we feel the urgency of writing and of life. In Peggy Kamuf's limpid and remarkable translation, this book constitutes an indispensable addition to Cixous's oeuvre on writing, love and the maternal unconscious.'
Nicholas Royle, University of Sussex
Mother Homer is Dead ... was written in the immediate aftermath of the death of the writer's mother in the 103rd year of her life. Ève Cixous, née Klein, had figured centrally in her daughter's writing since the publication of Osnabrück (1999). Since then, Cixous's work has turned in ever-tighter orbits around the relation to her mother's life as it tapers down toward death.
Perhaps never has the agony of letting go of the dying one been so unflinchingly rendered. Cixous's exquisitely poetic prose has also never been put to a more harrowing test of its inventive capacities.
Hélène Cixous is Emeritus Professor at the Centre d'Etudes Féminine at Université Paris VIII and A. D. White Professor-at-Large at Cornell University.
Peggy Kamuf is Professor Emerita of French and Comparative Literature at the University of Southern California.
[Note change to credit line since original brief]
Cover image: Statuette of a Mother with Child, 6th-5th century BC, Terracotta. The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles
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ISBN 978-1-4744-2511-7
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Hélène Cixous is Director of the Centre d'Études Féminines at Université Paris VIII, Emerita. one of the foremost intellectuals and creative writers in France and a major figure in the emergence and global spread of postmodern literary theory, late-20th-century Continental Thought and Women's Studies. She is the author of more than 40 novels, 14 plays and 15 volumes of theory and essays. Her work has been translated into more than 20 languages, including Japanese, Korean, Hindi and Urdu.

Peggy Kamuf writes on literary theory and contemporary French thought, particularly that of Jacques Derrida. She has translated numerous texts by Derrida and several works by Hélène Cixous, including Insister of Jacques Derrida (EUP 2007). Director of the Derrida Seminars Translation Project, she also co-edits the series publishing Derrida's teaching seminars in English. She is Marion Frances Chevalier Professor of French and Comparative Literature at the University of Southern California.

Prologue; The Very long Journey: Notebooks 10-12; The Beautiful Summer of 2011; The Anger of the Scamander; She Comes Back to Arcachon; 17 July 2013; 27 July 2013.