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The Cahiers Series is delighted to publish a newly commissioned work by renowned bilingual Jhumpa Lahiri who for three years has been collaborating with her friend the classicist Yelena Baraz on a translation of Ovid''s Metamorphoses into English. From among the elements of transformation that have spoken to her directly and intimately she has chosen to focus here on stones: stones that turn into human beings; and, later, human beings - silenced, stilled, petrified - who will turn into stone. The connotations of stone - of rock, of pebble - pose questions of origin and destiny, immobility and unsettledness, living and dying. Lahiri''s text on translation-as-metamorphosis and the protean self resonates alongside the dynamic and colourful paintings of celebrated artist Jamie Nares. These extend the exploration of metamorphosis by questioning, beautifully, the relation of the permanent to the ephemeral, the necessary to the aleatory, the completed art work to the human gesture that created it.

The Cahiers Series continues its exploration of translation in all its aspects with this account by retired professor of Russian literature Michael Finke of his fascinating with flight. Deskbound and myopic, ever since his childhood Finke has dreamt of flight. After decades as a university professor whose secret vice was to spend weekends soaring in lightplanes and gliders, he came across little-studied writings of leading Russian authors of the 1920s who, at the direction of Soviet authorities, engaged aviation as a signal promise of progress in Bolshevik Russia - another dream asking to be translated into reality. The resulting essay allows the literary scholar to meet the flier in an exploration of the sources and meanings of the several dreams inspired by flight. Placed alongside the text are paintings by the British artist Rachael Plummer, paintings which have their own oneiric quality, as airplanes disintegrate into abstraction, and as the offer of an aerial perspective renders landscape almost - but in the end not quite - legible.

Situated in the heart of historic London, Mayfair is one of the capital''s most affluent quarters. It is also home to people from all walks of life and diverse social backgrounds. Two Mayfairs sit by side by side - one out in the open, the other all but invisible. In this book, shot over a period of three years, Loren Kaye casts a sympathetic gaze on this vibrant and complex neighborhood, exposing its many layers.

When Alix Cleo Roubaud died at the age of 31, she left behind a profound and deeply personal body of work exploring self-portraiture, life, illness, the body and death. Helene Giannecchini was the curator tasked with sorting through some six hundred photographs, letters, and other written documents belonging to the artist ahead of a posthumous retrospective held at the Bibliotheque Nationale de France in 2014. But she had never met Alix Cleo Roubaud and this absence is felt keenly through her writing as she treads the boundaries between biography and fiction, life and art. Helene Giannecchini pieces together the fragments that remain of this fleeting but dazzling life, spotlighting the theoretical underpinnings of the photographer''s ideas on the double, repetition and drawing out the influences of Wittgenstein and Gertrude Stein on her practice. Just as Alix Cleo Roubaud''s art is approached through the notes jotted in her journal, and the material evidence of trial prints and chemical

The Cahiers Series continues its exploration of translation in all its aspects with this account by renowned writer and academic Marine Warner of what happened to time during the Coronavirus pandemic lockdowns. She recounts how strangely her days and weeks passed, in this highly personal account of a response to lockdown in which she delves into her experience of Catholic convent schools for some clues as to how each day might be marked as significant. She discusses missals, almanacs, Roman and Revolutionary calendars, developing her thoughts into what amounts almost to a manifesto for a new way of rendering each day different, memorable, human. Her text is accompanied by a further response to lockdown, by the Greek photographer Dimitris Kleanthis, whose haunting images somehow make visible the suspension and acceleration of time experienced by so many, while also hinting at how, to the eye that is acute enough, there may always be an event taking place.

What happens when an art dealer, expert and author of a number of books on Chinese art turns to writing fiction? Having been immersed in the world of art for most of his life, Marcus Flacks shares with us his insights, knowledge and wisdom in The Cloud Collector, a highly original literary endeavour. The book, the first of three volumes, is a series of interwoven fable-like stories set in an unspecified time in the ancient empire of China, often inspired by Chinese works of art which themselves feature in the stories.