Books published by Seagull Books London Ltd

Taking you on a bizarre romp through the Chinese countryside, the author treats you to a cornucopia of cooked animal flesh - ostrich, camel, donkey, and dog, as well as the more common varieties. As the dual narratives merge into one another, each informing and illuminating the other, he probes the character and lifestyle of modern China.

Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben is the rare writer whose ideas and works have a broad appeal across many fields. In March 2009, Agamben was invited to speak in Paris' Notre-Dame Cathedral in the presence of the bishop of Paris and a number of other high-ranking church officials. This title presents this speech.

Almost twenty years after the fall of the wall, the Kreuzberg district of Berlin has become unbearably trendy and deeply unappealing to Alina and Wolf. They move to Muggelsee, at the city's bucolic border. But there, Wolf finds himself increasingly strained by the triviality of his daily routine with Alina.

The eponymous Old Testament hero Noah fuels his local economy with a prescient plan to build the Ark. Though no one around him seriously believes in the coming flood, everyone is more than willing to do business with him: The people of Mesopotamia had never had it so good.

Growing up in Saddam Hussein's Iraq, a young Kurdish boy named Kerim has ample opportunity to witness the murderous repression that defined the era for thousands of Iraqis. This book follows Kerim from the fading memories of his childhood to his life running his family's roadside restaurant.

Richard I (1157-99) was king of England from 1189 until his death, but he is best known as a soldier, not a monarch. This title provides the story of a man living in the shadow of his own myth, also a fanatic general who wants to conquer the world's greatest sanctum and a king who is suddenly vulnerable.

After the failed revolutions of 1848, Galicia has been brought under the rule of the Habsburg Empire, and the Zemka family find themselves embroiled in the struggle for Polish independence. This is a history of Eastern Europe told in miniature through the tumultuous saga of one family as they try to reclaim their estate.

Rejecting not only the identification of the aesthetic with the work of art, but also the Kantian association of the aesthetic with subjectively universal judgment, the author's analysis of aesthetic relations opens up a space for a theory of art that is free of historicism and capable of engaging with noncanonical and non-Western arts.

A collection of essays that assesses Lacan's significant contribution to literary studies and the contribution, in turn, of literature to Lacanian psychoanalysis. It provides close readings of Lacan's literature-related work, specifically his work on Hamlet, his homage to Marguerite Duras and Lewis Carroll, and his concept of Lituraterre.

In Paris, Montreal, Seville, Berlin, and towns large and small, the author has dreamt - and she has remembered her dreams. In this small volume, she shares her dreams of the years 2008-10, a time of global upheaval that happened to coincide with upheavals in her own life.

Reflecting on Imre Kertesz's experiences of the Holocaust and the Soviet occupation of Hungary, this title likens the ideological machinery of National Socialism to the oppressive routines of life under communism.

One night in the middle of winter, as deep snow covers the mountains and forests of Austria, a doctor is crossing a ridge from Traich to Foding to see a patient. He stumbles over a body in the darkness and fears it is a corpse. But it's not a corpse at all - in fact, it's wooden-legged Victor Halfwit, collapsed, but still very much alive.

French philosopher and literary theorist Roland Barthes was one of the leading influences on the post-structuralist movement in twentieth-century literary thought. This title presents the life and thought of Barthes, through a work that is a testament to Barthes' belief that a literary work should invite the active participation of the reader.

A biography of Franz Liszt (1811-86) whose extraordinary career as a composer, conductor, and virtuoso pianist - whose incomparable skill and personal charisma dazzled audiences all over Europe, from London and Paris to Berlin, Moscow, and even Constantinople - made him the nineteenth-century equivalent of a modern international pop star.

Set in a village somewhere on the endless Hungarian plain, this title features characters who tell stories - comic, tragic, or both - of life in rural Hungary. It includes tales of onion kings and melon pickers, of scrapyards and sugar beet factories, that paint a vivid and human picture of their world.

French cultural theorist and urbanist Paul Virilio is best known for his writings on media, technology, and architecture. This title gathers conversations in which Virilio and architectural writer Marianne Brausch look at a 20th century characterized by enormous technological acceleration and by technocultural accidents of barbarism and horror.

Focuses on the characteristics - both physical and social - of ancient Indian cities. This title examines nearly a thousand years of Sanskrit kavyas to see what India's early historic cities were like as living, lived-in entities, and discovers that they were vibrant and teeming with variety and life.