Books published by Seagull Books London Ltd

Johnny is from New Jersey, and Kari is from Oslo. They meet in New York in the late 1950s and soon fall in love, get married, and move to Asbury Park, where their life unfolds like a dream: Kari gives birth to two beautiful daughters, and Johnny is a wildly successful entrepreneur.

When Anna discovers a long letter that her mother, Marie, wrote, Marie has been dead for some time, and Anna is shocked to learn that her mother disappeared with a secret. The letter is addressed to Marie's first great love, a much older teacher who she describes as a great dinosaur.

The day after his ninety-fourth birthday, a man is sitting in a beautiful garden. It is a paradise where he often played during his childhood, and it is here that he is recording the story of his adventures with Mr Adamson.

Perros, is best remembered for the autobiographical poems, vignettes, short prose narratives, occasional diary-like notations, critical remarks, and personal essays. This title presents a selection of short texts alongside numerous maxims, a genre in which Perros excelled.

In Rechnitz, a chorus of messengers reports on the circumstances of the massacre of 180 Jews, an actual historical event that took place near the Austrian/Hungarian border town of Rechnitz. The author brings us a comedy of economics, where the babble and media spin of spectators leave small investors alienated.

With subversive energy and masterful brevity, Mr Zed undermines arrogance, megalomania, and false authority. A determined speaker who doesn't care for ambitions, he forces topics that others would rather keep to themselves. This work collects the considerations and provocations of this squat park-bench philosopher.

Tells the moving tale of an Italian family living in Scotland during the rise of Mussolini and his rule in Italy. This story is told from the point of view of Lucia, the family's daughter, who, at 83, reflects on her childhood.

Molissa Fenley, one of the most influential artists of postmodern dance, has had a lasting impact on performance. This is a vivid and probing portrait of Fenley's four-decade career, written by her fellow artists. It offers several scholarly analyses of the choreographer's work, and is, above all, a vibrant record from the field.

Born in the former East Germany, Volker Braun is a humane, witty, brave, and disappointed poet. In the East, his poetry upheld the voice of the individual imagination and identified with a utopian possibility that never became reality. This is a selection of poems from the distinguished, half-century-long career of German poet Volker Braun.

Begins with a man who receives a startling call from his ex-wife. She's in the hospital, awaiting a cancer diagnosis. His mind races as he suddenly realizes he must find out whether she was contaminated by fallout from the 1986 Chernobyl nuclear disaster.

A novel, in which the narrator unexpectedly finds himself back in the world of his childhood: Switzerland in the 1940s. He returns to his childhood home to find his parents frantic because their son is missing. Then, in another switch, the young boy that he was back then turns up in the present of the early 1990s, during the Gulf War.

Throughout her distinguished career, the author has sought to locate and confront shifting forms of social and cultural oppression. In this book, she elaborates a utopian vision for the kind of deep and investigative reading that can develop a will for peaceful social justice in coming generations.

A collection of short stories that is about our globalizing and atomizing world - with stories set in India, Sweden, Australia, and Iran - that also looks at how we meet and fail to meet and what connects us to one another, as well as waste and communication, and, in turn, communication through waste.

The devil is a defiant, nefarious figure, the emblem of evil, and harbinger of the damned. However, the festive devil, turns the most hideous acts into playful transgressions. This volume presents a transnational and performance-centered approach to this character of fiestas, street festivals, and carnivals in North, Central, and South America.

Roland Barthes, whose centenary falls in 2015, was a restless, protean thinker. A constant innovator, often as a daring smuggler of ideas from one discipline to another, he first gained an audience with his pithy, semiological essays on mass culture, then unsettled the literary critical establishment with heretical writings on the French classics, before going on to produce some of the most suggestive and stimulating cultural criticism of the late twentieth century (Empire of Signs, S/Z, The Pleasure of the Text, Camera Lucida, Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes). In 1976, the one-time structuralist 'outsider' was elected to a chair at France's pre-eminent academic institution, the College de France, choosing to style himself its Professor of Literary Semiology, though this last somewhat hedonistic and more 'subjectivist' phase of his intellectual adventure was cut short by his untimely death in 1980. The greater part of Barthes's published writings have been available to a French audience since the publication in 2002 of the expanded version of his Oeuvres completes [Complete Works], edited by Eric Marty. The present collection of essays, interviews, prefaces, book reviews and other occasional journalistic pieces, all drawn from that comprehensive source, attempts to give English-speaking readers access to the most significant previously untranslated material from the various stages of Barthes's career. It is divided (not entirely scientifically) into five themed volumes entitled: Theory, Politics, Literary Criticism, Signs and Images (Art, Cinema, Photography), and Interviews. Barthes's earliest interest is in literature--in theatre and the classic realist novel, but also in the more experimental writers of the 1940s and 50s (literature of the absurd, nouveau roman etc.). The articles translated in this volume run from his mid-1950s writings on popular poetry, the giants of the nineteenth century novel (Hugo, Maupassant, Zola), and the narrative innovations of Robbe-Grillet and his associates through to writings from his later years on Sade, Rousseau and Voltaire, and the longer study 'Masculine, Feminine, Neuter' which is, in the words of his French editor, the 'first outline' of his remarkable critical work S/Z.

When Keith Stapperpfenning and his family give their grandfather the trip of a lifetime - an all-expenses-paid holiday to any destination in the world - the eccentric old man arbitrarily chooses China, and he asks Keith to accompany him. But when his grandfather dies unexpectedly, Keith is left to continue the farce alone.

A collection of poems that echo each other, returning to and elaborating upon key images, thoughts, feelings, and people. Intriguing and enigmatic, it is a mixture of sonnet sequences and prose poems.

Comprised of thirteen pieces - the majority dating from between 1993 and 1998, this book covers a period when the author produced some of his most important insights.

Ingeborg Bachmann (1926-1973) is recognized as one of postwar German literature's most important novelists, poets, and playwrights. Nearly twenty years after her death, during an estate sale in Vienna, fifteen episodes of the Viennese radio drama The Radio Family were discovered. This book features these fifteen scripts.

Takes us to the unchartered frontiers of the forbidden. From initiation ceremonies to crises of hysteria, from suicide attempts to the ecstasies of witches, the author explores in simple but scholarly terms the responses that civilizations have offered to the humanistic need for escape from the body.

Tells a story that centers on two young women: Voltairine, a dancer who no longer dances but whose body is still haunted by the movement of dance, and her soulmate Emile, a young woman recovering from unexpected cardiac arrest. The girls are inseparable, and both their lives have been shattered by the horror of rape.

Offers a collection of essays, fiction, poetry, and discussions, derived from the cult Internet magazine Humanities Underground, provides entry into some of the most burning issues in the humanities in contemporary South Asia.

The author was arguably the best-known and most influential writer in the former East Germany. In this title, she revisits her stay at a tuberculosis hospital in the winter of 1946, a real-life event that was the inspiration for the closing scenes of her 1976 novel Patterns of Childhood.