Books published by Seagull Books London Ltd

The Dancing Other takes readers to France and Martinique to reveal the struggles of people who belong both places, but never quite feel at home in either. Suzanne Dracius tells the story of Rehvana, a woman who feels she is too black to fit in when living in mainland France, yet at the same time not dark-skinned enough to feel truly accepted in the Caribbean. Her sense of dislocation manifests itself at first in a turn to a mythical idea of Mother Africa; later, she moves to Martinique with a new boyfriend and thinks she may have finally found her place--but instead she is soon pregnant, isolated, and lonely. Soon her only reliable companion is her neighbor, Ma Cidalise, who regales her in Creole with supernatural tales of wizards. Rehvana, meanwhile, watches her dream of belonging fade, as she continues to refuse to accept her multicultural heritage.

Musician Ann Hidden suspects her partner, Thomas, isn't telling her everything. So one dark night, she secretly follows him to an unfamiliar house in the Paris suburbs, where he disappears inside with an unknown woman. But before she can even begin to process what looks like a betrayal, she gets another surprise--an old schoolmate, Georges Roehlinger, appears, berating her for spying the from the bushes. ​With Georges's help, Ann takes radical action: while Thomas is away, she resolves to secretly sell their shared house and get rid of all the physical manifestations of their sixteen years together. Thomas returns to find her gone, the locks changed, and his few possessions packed up and sent to his office. Ann, meanwhile, has fled the country and started a new, hidden life. But our past is never that easy to escape, and Ann's secrets eventually seek her out.

A moving work of fiction from one of the most important writers of postwar Austrian and German literature. Born in 1921 to a Jewish mother, Ilse Aichinger (1921-2016) survived World War II in Vienna, while her twin sister Helga escaped with one of the last Kindertransporte to England in 1938. Many of their relatives were deported and murdered. Those losses make themselves felt throughout Aichinger's writing, which since her first and only novel, The Greater Hope, in 1948, has highlighted displacement, estrangement, and a sharp skepticism toward language. By 1976, when she published Bad Words in German, her writing had become powerfully poetic, dense, and experimental. This volume presents the whole of the original Bad Words in English for the first time, along with a selection of Aichinger's other short stories of the period; together, they demonstrate her courageous effort to create and deploy a language unmarred by misleading certainties, preconceived rules, or implicit ideologies.

"This publication was supported by a grant from the Goethe-Institut, India"--page facing title page.

Written for young children, Delhi Thaatha is a biography of Dr. Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan, a much-loved teacher and world-renowned philosopher who served as the first vice president of the Republic of India, then, beginning in 1962, president of the country.

A monologue delivered by the female character in Samuel Beckett's play Krapp's Last Tape.

Cees Nooteboom, best known for his novel "The Following Story", is one of the most distinguished and significant authors of the Netherlands. This book draws on Nooteboom's personal reflections - his arsenal of memories, dreams, fantasies, landscapes, stories, and nightmares - and presents a set of prose poems that complements Neumann's work.

Few figures in cinema history are as towering as Russian filmmaker and theorist Sergei Mikhailovitch Eisenstein (1898-1948). Not only did Eisenstein direct some of the most important and lasting works of the silent era, including Strike, October, and Battleship Potemkin, as well as, in the sound era, the historical epics Alexander Nevsky and Ivan the Terrible--he also was a theorist whose insights into the workings of film were so powerful that they remain influential for both filmmakers and scholars today. ​Seagull Books is embarking on a series of translations of key works by Eisenstein into English. On the Detective Story presents Eisenstein's elaborate study, in four essays and fragments, of the use of dialectical thinking in the creation of art and literature. Drawing on major works from Shakespeare, Tolstoy, Balzac, Gogol, Mayakovsky, Dostoevsky, and more, and ranging from folk tales to contemporary detective stories, it shows the keenly analytic quality of Eisenstein's mind when it turned to questions of creative work.

Few figures in cinema history are as towering as Russian filmmaker and theorist Sergei Mikhailovitch Eisenstein (1898-1948). Not only did Eisenstein direct some of the most important and lasting works of the silent era, including Strike, October, and Battleship Potemkin, as well as, in the sound era, the historical epics Alexander Nevsky and Ivan the Terrible--he also was a theorist whose insights into the workings of film were so powerful that they remain influential for both filmmakers and scholars today. ​Seagull Books is embarking on a series of translations of key works by Eisenstein into English. The Short-Fiction Scenario presents a master-class on turning a short story into an effective film. Delivered as a series of lectures at the State Institute of Cinematography, it details two parallel scripts drawn from the same story; at each point of difference, Eisenstein explains why one works better.

Few figures in cinema history are as towering as Russian filmmaker and theorist Sergei Mikhailovitch Eisenstein (1898-1948). Not only did Eisenstein direct some of the most important and lasting works of the silent era, including Strike, October, and Battleship Potemkin, as well as, in the sound era, the historical epics Alexander Nevsky and Ivan the Terrible--he also was a theorist whose insights into the workings of film were so powerful that they remain influential for both filmmakers and scholars today. ​Seagull Books is embarking on a series of translations of key works by Eisenstein into English. A fascinating memoir in two volumes, Beyond the Stars--first published by Seagull in 1995 and now available again. Begun as Eisenstein approached fifty, it is full of the famous names of his era, including Charlie Chaplin, Mary Pickford, John Dos Passos, Jean Cocteau, and many more; at the same time, it is a serious book of inquiry about film as a medium, offering countless reflections by Eisenstein on his own work and that of other movie pioneers.

Thomas Bernhard's Old Masters has been called his "most enjoyable novel" by the New York Review of Books. It's a wild satire that takes place almost entirely in front of Tintoretto's White-Bearded Man, on display in the Kunsthistorisches Museum, as two typically Viennese pedants (serving as alter egos for Bernhard himself) irreverently, even contemptuously take down high culture, society, state-supported artists, Heidegger, and much more. It's a book built on thought and conversation rather than action or visuals. Yet somehow celebrated Austrian cartoonist Nicholas Mahler has brought it to life in graphic form--and it's brilliant. This volume presents Mahler's typically minimalist cartoons alongside new translations of selected passages from the novel. The result is a version of Old Masters that is strikingly new, yet still true to Bernhard's bleak vision, and to the novel's outrageous proposition that the perfect work of art is truly unbearable to even think about--let alone behold.

Describes by the "Independent" as "one of the living greats of Swiss literature" - spoke to more than twelve hundred students and enthusiasts, sharing the sum of the author's understandings of poets and their timeless creations.

Since the age of twelve, Karl, the father, has observed the family tradition of recording his life in a single notebook, but when his book is lost soon after his death, his son resolves to rewrite it. Here, we get to know Karl's friends - a collection of anti-fascist painters and architects known as Group 33.

It's Switzerland in the 1920s when the two lovers first meet. She is young, beautiful, and rich. In contrast, he can barely support himself and is interested only in music. By the end of their lives, he is a famous conductor and the richest man in the country, but she is penniless. And most important of all, no one knows of her love for him.

"Bergeners is a love letter to a writer's hometown. The book opens in New York City at the swanky Standard Hotel and closes in Berlin at Askanischer Hof, a hotel that has seen better days. But between these two global metropolises we find Bergen, Norway--its streets and buildings and the people who walk those streets and live in those buildings"--Jacket.

The Book of Mordechai and Lazarus are the first and the second novels by Hungarian writer Gábor Schein. Published together in one volume, they comprise the first in Seagull Books's new Hungarian List series. Both novels trace the legacy of the Holocaust in Hungary. The Book of Mordechai tells the story of three generations in a Hungarian Jewish family, interwoven with the biblical narrative of Esther. Lazarus relates the relationship between a son, growing up in the in the final decades of late-communist Hungary, and his father, who survived the depredations of Hungarian fascists during World War II. Mordechai is an act of recovery--an attempt to seize a coherent story from a historical maelstrom. By contrast, Lazarus, like Kafka's unsent letter to his own father, is an act of defiance. Against his father's wish to never be the subject of his son's writing, the narrator places his father at the center of his story. Together, both novels speak to a contemporary Hungarian society that remains all too silent towards the crimes of the past.

It's the mid-to-late 1800s and the British have banished Wajid Ali Shah--the nawab of Awadh in Lucknow--to Calcutta. To the sound of the soulful melody of the sarangi, the mercurial courtesan Laayl-e Aasman is playing a dangerous game of love, loyalty, deception, and betrayal. Bajrangi and Kundan, bound by their love for each other and for Laayl-e, struggle to keep their balance. Ranging across generations and geography, the scale of Laayl-e's story sweeps the devil, a crime lord, and many other remarkable characters into a heady mix. Mirror of the Darkest Night is almost an aberration in Mahasweta Devi's oeuvre. Known for her activism and hard-hitting indictment of social inequalities, she pays close attention to detail in this sparkling novel. It offers a rare glimpse of Devi's talent for telling the sort of story she normally eschewed--and it's a cracker of a tale.

"Originally published as Paolo Virno, Saggio sulla negazione. per una antropologia linguistica"--Title page verso.

Preface and third chapter translated from the Italian by Anne C. Tedeschi and John Tedeschi.

Since his first collection of poetry appeared in 1953, Philippe Jaccottet has sought to express the ineffable that lies at the heart of our material world in his essential, elemental poetry. As one of Switzerland's most prominent and prolific men of letters, Jaccottet has published more than a dozen books of poetry and criticism. One of Europe's finest contemporary poets, Jaccottet is a writer of exacting attention. Through keen observations of the natural world, of art, literature, music, and reflections on the human condition, Jaccottet opens his readers' eyes to the transcendent in everyday life. The Second Seedtime is a collection of "things seen, things read, and things dreamed." The volume continues the project Jaccottet began three decades earlier in his first volume of notebooks, Seedtime. Here, again, he gathers flashes of beauty dispersed around him like seeds that may blossom into poems or moments of inspiration. He returns, insistently, to such literary touchstones as Dante, Montaigne, Góngora, Goethe, Kierkegaard, Hölderlin, Michaux, Hopkins, Brontë, and Dickinson, as well as musical greats including Bach, Monteverdi, Purcell, and Schubert. The Second Seedtime is the vivid chronicle of one man's passionate engagement with the life of the mind, the spirit, and the natural world.

This work is a gripping and profoundly personal encounter with the great expressionist poet Georg Trakl. It is a taking stock of two troubled lives, a turbulent century, and the liberating power of poetry. Picking up where his last book, 'The Jew Car', left off, Fèuhmann probes his own susceptibility to ideology's seductions - Nazism, then socialism - and examines their antidote, the goad of Trakl's enigmatic verses.

The work of poet Georg Trakl, a leading Austrian-German expressionist, has been praised by many, including his contemporaries Rainer Maria Rilke and Else Lasker-Schüler, as well as his patron Ludwig Wittgenstein. Wittgenstein famously wrote that while he did not truly understand Trakl's poems, they had the tone of a "truly ingenious person," which pleased him. A Skeleton Plays Violin comprises the final volume in a trilogy of works by Trakl published by Seagull Books. This selection gathers Trakl's early, middle, and late work, none of it published in book form during his lifetime. The work here ranges widely, from his haunting prose pieces to his darkly beautiful poems documenting the first bloody weeks of World War I on the Eastern Front. Book Three of Our Trakl--the series that began with Trakl's first book Poems and his posthumously published Sebastian Dreaming--also includes translations of unpublished poems and significant variants. Interpolated throughout this comprehensive and chronological selection is a biographical essay that provides more information about Trakl's gifted and troubled life, especially as it relates to his poetry, as well as the necessary context of his relationship with his favorite sibling, his sister Grete, whose role as a muse to her brother is still highly controversial. Trakl's life was mysterious and fascinating, a fact reflected in his work. A Skeleton Plays Violin should not be missed.

Originally published under title: Ein Tag im Jahr im neuen Jahrhundert 2001-2011. Berlin: Suhrkamp, 2013.

In 1975, when political scientist Benedict Anderson reached Wat Phai Rong Wua, a massive temple complex in rural Thailand conceived by Buddhist monk Luang Phor Khom, he felt he had wandered into a demented Disneyland. One of the world's most bizarre tourist attractions, Wat Phai Rong Wua was designed as a cautionary museum of sorts; its gruesome statues depict violent and torturous scenes that showcase what hell may be like. Over the next few decades, Anderson, who is best known for his work, Imagined Communities, found himself transfixed by this unusual amalgamation of objects, returning several times to see attractions like the largest metal-cast Buddha figure in the world and the Palace of a Hundred Spires. The concrete statuaries and perverse art in Luang Phor's personal museum of hell included, "side by side, an upright human skeleton in a glass cabinet and a life-size replica of Michelangelo's gigantic nude David, wearing fashionable red underpants from the top of which poked part of a swollen, un-Florentine penis," alongside dozens of statues of evildoers being ferociously punished in their afterlife. In The Fate of Rural Hell, Anderson unravels the intrigue of this strange setting, endeavoring to discover what compels so many Thai visitors to travel to this popular spectacle and what order, if any, inspired its creation. At the same time, he notes in Wat Phai Rong Wua the unexpected effects of the gradual advance of capitalism into the far reaches of rural Asia. Both a one-of-a-kind travelogue and a penetrating look at the community that sustains it, The Fate of Rural Hell is sure to intrigue and inspire conversation as much as Wat Phai Rong Wua itself.