“Isou’s life is at once tragic and farcical: a whirling reprise of all of the twentieth century’s artistic avantgardes played out against the backdrop of Paris’s Left Bank in its heyday. Hussey is the ideal chronicler, and his biography, with its exuberant prose, both channels Isou’s restless creativity and positions it within the main currents of postwar French thought. Essential reading.”

"A sympathetic account of an extraordinary life. Hussey has the depth of historical understanding necessary to do justice both to Isidore Isou’s glamorous, sometimes absurd, life as a hero of the Left Bank and to the horrors of the Romanian Holocaust he had escaped. This is an expertly told story about Paris, Europe, and the interplay of private passion and public trauma."

"Riveting. . . . Isou remains the least well-known of the major avant-gardists of the twentieth century. Following upon a major retrospective held at the Centre Georges Pompidou in 2019, Hussey’s rich biography aims to correct that oversight, providing an engaging, readable narrative of Isou’s multiple dimensions and sprawling ambitions."

"This fascinating biography, by an author extremely well-versed in Parisian cultural life (see Hussey’s book on Guy Debord, The Game of War), traces the turbulent life of a difficult man, who survived the horrors of the Holocaust to become 'a theoretician of utopia,' with all its follies and splendors. Isou and the Lettrists are still little known and barely translated in this country—an omission which Speaking East, successfully, seeks to redress."

"As Hussey puts it in his enthralling new biography, Isou is 'grandiose, exasperating, self-regarding, brilliant, piercing, and poetic, often all in the space of the same page.'"

"Hussey’s beguiling biography, Speaking East: The Strange and Enchanted Life of Isidore Isou, delivers a long and lush cultural cache that sympathetically—but also critically—conveys at last the complete story of the indefatigable Romanian-French theorist, poet, painter, filmmaker, playwright, Left Bank megalomaniac intellectual, and rogue avant-gardist of avant-gardists; Isidore Isou. Hussey’s painstakingly researched writing here is masterfully performed and informed. . . . This book is a vivid tour de force of readable precision—and a must have for art historians of late-Modernism and/or early-Conceptualism."

"Hussey is an engaging raconteur and his biography of Isou is a fine companion to his earlier work. . . . In Speaking East, Hussey points out that Isou is 'endlessly elusive,' a biographical subject who is 'full of contradictions, truths and untruths.' And while Hussey succeeds in capturing 'something of his extraordinary voice, his ideas, and his art,' the book raises some questions about the biographer’s role. In the process of capturing Isou’s voice, Hussey slips into the role of the omniscient biographer, who claims to know the inner workings of his subject: what he was thinking, when, and why. It’s a technique, however, that succeeds; Isou emerges as a complex, dark, and charismatic figure, whose brief ascendance in the world of the postwar avant-garde is documented with panache."

"Like Antonin Artaud before him, Isou lived his art. He also paid the price for it. In Hussey’s account he emerges as a man always on the brink. As his disciples betrayed him and his movement disintegrated, so too did his mind... Hussey writes kindly about this chapter of Isou’s life, without romanticising Isou’s illness or naively criticising psychiatry..."