Search results for ""Seagull Books""

On October 5, 2012, the German national newspaper Die Welt published its daily issue—but things looked . . . different. Quieter. The sensations of the day, forgotten as soon as they’re read, were missing, replaced with an unprecedented calm, extracted with care from the chaos of the contemporary. That calm was the work of Gerhard Richter, who had been granted control over Die Welt for that single day, taking over and imprinting all thirty pages of the newspaper with his personal stamp: images from quiet moments amid unquiet times, the demotion of politics from its primary position, the privileging of the private and personal over the public, and, above all, artful, moving contrasts between sharpness and softness. He had created an unprecedented work of mass art. Among the many people to praise the work was writer Alexander Kluge, who instantly began writing stories to accompany Richter’s images. This book, the second collaboration between Kluge and Richter, brings their stories and images together, along with new words and artworks created specifically for this volume. The result, Dispatches from Moments of Calm, is a beautiful, meditative interval in the otherwise unremitting press of everyday life, a masterpiece by two acclaimed artists working at the height of their powers.

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One of the foremost poets of the French Resistance, Rene Char has been hailed by Donald Revell as "the conscience of modern French poetry." Translated by Mark Hutchinson, The Inventors is a companion volume to Char's critically acclaimed Hypnos. It gathers more than forty poems that represent a cross-section of Char's mature work, spanning from 1936 to 1988. All three genres of Char's work are represented here: verse poems, prose poems, and the abrupt, lapidary propositions for which he is best known. These maxima sententia combine the terseness of La Rochefoucauld with the probing and sometimes riddling character of the fragments of Heraclitus. The Inventors includes a brief introduction to Char's life and work, as well as a series of notes on the backstories of the works, which explain allusions that may not be immediately familiar to the English-speaking reader. These new translations stay true to the originals, while at the same time conveying much of the music and beauty of the French poems. Praise for Rene Char "Char, I believe, is a poet who will tower over twentieth-century French poetry."-George Steiner

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Recorded during Jorge Luis Borges's final years, this second volume of his conversations with Osvaldo Ferrari provides a wide-ranging reflection on the life and work of Argentina's master writer and favorite conversationalist. In Conversations: Volume 2, Borges and Ferrari engage in a dialogue that is both improvisational and frequently humorous as they touch on subjects as diverse as epic poetry, detective fiction, Buddhism, and the moon landing. With his signature wit, Borges offers insight into the philosophical basis of his stories and poems, his fascination with religious mysticism, and the idea of life as dream. He also dwells on more personal themes, including the influence of his mother and father on his intellectual development, his friendships, and living with blindness. These recollections are alive to the passage of history, whether in the changing landscape of Buenos Aires or a succession of political conflicts, leading Borges to contemplate what he describes as his "South American destiny." The recurrent theme of these conversations, however, is a life lived through books. Borges draws on the resources of a mental library that embraces world literature-ancient and modern. He recalls the works that were a constant presence in his memory and maps his changing attitudes to a highly personal canon. In the prologue to the volume, Borges celebrates dialogue and the transmission of culture across time and place. These conversations are a testimony to the supple ways that Borges explored his own relation to numerous traditions. Praise for Borges "Borges is arguably the great bridge between modernism and post-modernism in world literature."-David Foster Wallace

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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 essays on mass culture and then went on to produce some of the most suggestive and stimulating cultural criticism of the late twentieth century, including Empire of Signs, The Pleasure of the Text, and Camera Lucida. In 1976, this one time structuralist outsider was elected to a chair at France's preeminent College de France, where he chose to style himself as professor of literary semiology until his death in 1980. The greater part of Barthes's published writings have been available to a French audience since 2002, but here, translator Chris Turner presents a collection of essays, interviews, prefaces, book reviews, and other journalistic material for the first time in English. Divided into five themed volumes, readers are presented in volume two, 'The "Scandal" of Marxism' and Other Writings on Politics, with a wide range of Barthes's more overtly political writings, with an emphasis on his early work and the serious national turbulence in the French 1950s.

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For much of her career, Elfriede Jelinek has been maligned in the press for both her unrelenting critique of Austrian complicity in the Holocaust and her provocative deconstructions of pornography. Despite this, her central role in shaping contemporary literature was finally recognized in 2004 with the award of the Nobel Prize in Literature. The committee acknowledged Jelinek's groundbreaking work that offers a "musical flow of voices and counter-voices in novels and plays that with extraordinary linguistic zeal reveal the absurdity of society's cliches and their subjugating power." Although she is an internationally recognized playwright, Jelinek's work is difficult to find in English, which makes this new volume, which includes Rechnitz: The Exterminating Angel and The Merchant's Contracts, all the more valuable. 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. More than a docudrama, this work explores the very transmission of historic memory and has been called Jelinek's best performance text to date. In The Merchant's Contracts, Jelinek brings us a comedy of economics, where the babble and media spin of spectators leave small investors alienated and bearing the brunt of the economic crisis. In the age of the global economy, Jelinek turns the story of a merchant of Vienna into a universal comedy of errors, making this her most accessible work. Along with an extensive introduction by the translator that both contextualizes and analyzes the two brilliant texts, a DVD of performances of both plays accompanies this volume.

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The Emperor of Ice-Cream tells the moving tale of an Italian family living in Scotland during the rise of Mussolini and his rule in Italy. The story is told from the point of view of Lucia, the family's daughter, who, at 83, reflects on her childhood. Her tale leads inexorably through the rise of Fascism to the terrible moment in June 1940 when Mussolini declared war on Britain, resulting in the internment of British Italians. Two of Lucia's brothers, Giulio and Emilio, judged to be "enemy aliens," are forced aboard the Arandora Star, the ship that is to lead them into exile. However, the ship is sunk by a U-boat, and only one of the brothers survives. Lucia is writing now, belatedly, to try to reconcile herself to her past, and as a tribute to her beloved lost brother. The Emperor of Ice-Cream is a novel about family, about being an immigrant and dealing with bigotry, about religious sectarianism, political idealism, and disillusionment, about sibling love and sibling rivalry, and about regret, poetry, and war. And of course, it is also about ice cream.

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Dramatist, poet, novelist, and journalist Matei Visniec, born in Romania and living in France since seeking political asylum in 1987, has been one of the most trenchant voices of Europe, condemning the atrocities of totalitarianism as well as excesses of consumer culture. This first anthology of his dramatic work made available in English collects seven of his most impressive and outspoken plays. How to Explain the History of Communism to Mental Patients is the central piece of the collection and is a satire of Stalinism that unmasks limitless political power, the fascination with utopias, and the perils of personality cults. Other plays in the anthology include Decomposed Theater, or The Human Trashcan, which explores forms of brainwashing and alienation both in totalitarian and consumerist societies; The Body of a Woman as a Battlefield in the Bosnian War, which addresses witnessing trauma and the complicated relationship between East and West; and Richard III Will Not Take Place, or Scenes from the Life of Meyerhold; which speaks to political censorship and cultural resistance under totalitarianism, focusing on the social role and responsibility of the artist. The resulting collection is a bold and unflinching critique of politics and society that is so poignant and moving it is sure to be of interest to performers and historians alike.

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Molissa Fenley, one of the most influential artists of postmodern dance, has had a lasting impact on performance. In dance, she has explored extreme effort and duration in highly crafted patterns and performed with an explosive, joyous energy that infused her work with endurance, balance, and life force. She challenged modern dance orthodoxy and redefined the character of a woman's moving body in the late twentieth century, bringing postmodernized ritual to the stage. Rhythm Field is a vivid and probing portrait of Fenley's four-decade career, written by her fellow artists. The collection functions as a multifaceted look into one woman's complex performing arts legacy. The result is itself an aesthetic undertaking that investigates the ways in which Fenley straddles dance traditions, art genres, and gender norms and has been a model to the field. The collection offers several scholarly analyses of the choreographer's work, and is, above all, a vibrant record from the field. Rhythm Field sits at a necessary midpoint between criticism and scholarship.

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Throughout her distinguished career, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak has sought to locate and confront shifting forms of social and cultural oppression. As her work shows, the best method for doing so is through extended practice in the ethics of reading. In Readings, Spivak elaborates a utopian vision for the kind of deep and investigative reading that can develop a will for peaceful social justice in coming generations. Through her own analysis of specific works, Spivak demonstrates modes in which such a vision might be achieved. In the examples here, she pays close attention to signposts of character, action, and place in J. M. Coetzec's Summertime and Elizabeth Gaskell's North and South. She also offers rereads of two of her own essays, addressing changes in her own thinking and practice over the course of her career. Now in her fifth decade of teaching, Spivak passes on her lessons through anecdote, interpretation, warning, and instruction to students and teachers of literature. She writes, "I urge students of English to understand that utopia does not happen, and yet to understand, also, their importance to the nation and the world. Indeed, I know how hard it is to sustain such a spirit in the midst of a hostile polity, but I urge the students to consider the challenge."

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In The Atlas of an Anxious Man, Christoph Ransmayr offers a mesmerizing travel diary—a sprawling tale of earthly wonders seen by a wandering eye. This is an exquisite, lyrically told travel story. Translated by Simon Pare, this unique account follows Ransmayr across the globe: from the shadow of Java’s volcanoes to the rapids of the Mekong and Danube Rivers, from the drift ice of the Arctic Circle to Himalayan passes, and on to the disenchanted islands of the South Pacific. Ransmayr begins again and again with, “I saw. . .” recounting to the reader the stories of continents, eras, and landscapes of the soul. Like maps, the episodes come together to become a book of the world—one that charts the life and death, happiness and fate of people bound up in images of breathtaking beauty. “One of the German language’s most gifted young novelists.”—Library Journal, on The Terrors of Ice and Darkness

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Modern political theory begins with the rise of the philosophical concept and practice of sovereignty in the sixteenth century. Over the course of the next several centuries, sovereignty was generalized as the form of the modern state - eventually, there was no state that was not sovereign, and there was no understanding of the state that did not depend upon the notion of sovereignty. Yet, as Gerard Mairet argues in "The Fable of the World", at this moment of the culmination of political sovereignty, the limitations and dangers of this theory and practice have become all too apparent. Furthermore, Mairet believes that we have begun to see the glimmers of a new form of political community beyond the sovereign state and its rootedness in inter-state violence: for Mairet, Europe has become the harbinger of a new federative form of statehood. In this rigorous investigation of the notion of sovereignty from Bodin and Hobbes, through Rousseau and the Federalists, to Foucault and the framers of the European constitution, Mairet examines the articulation of the concept through the bloody history of European colonialism. He also shows how the reconstitution of the European political community after World War II marked the beginning of a new trajectory - one that offers the hope of a post-sovereign mode of political being-in-the-world.

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Carefully perched somewhere between tragedy and grotesque, high-pitched and squeamish, Jelinek's play, On the Royal Road, brings into focus the phenomenon of right-wing populism, which spreads like a virus and has a lasting effect on global politics. Nobel Prize winner Elfriede Jelinek is known as a writer who works in response to contemporary crises and cultural phenomena. Perhaps none of her works display that quality as clearly as On the Royal Road. Three weeks after Donald Trump’s election, Jelinek mailed her German editor the first draft of this play, which turns out to be a stunningly prescient response to Trump and what he represents. In this drama, we discover that a “king,” blinded by himself, who has made a fortune with real estate, golf courses, and casinos, suddenly rules the United States, and the rest of the people of the world rub their eyes in disbelief until no one sees anything anymore. As topical as the evening news, yet with insight built on a lifetime of closely observing politics and culture, On the Royal Road brings into focus the phenomenon of right-wing populism, which spreads like a virus and has a lasting effect on global politics. Carefully perched somewhere between tragedy and grotesque, high-pitched and squeamish, Jelinek in this work questions her own position and forms of resistance.

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Palestinian theater today is drawing increasing interest throughout the Arab world and beyond, as theaters and universities in the English-speaking world are becoming familiar with companies like the Freedom Theatre, Al-Kasaba Theatre, Ashtar, Al-Rowwad, Yes Theatre, Al-Harah, and the Palestinian National Theatre. This volume for the first time presents contemporary plays from a number of Palestinian theatres in English. The collection offers a rare look into the dynamic life of contemporary Palestinian theater. The works gathered here arise directly from the physical and psychological realities of the occupation, combining activism and critical self-inquiry. The anthology represents both the micro-political geography and theatrical institutions of Palestine, covering the West Bank from the farthest north to the farthest south, the Galilee, Gaza, and Jerusalem. What emerges is the range of contemporary Palestinian national identity as expressed in the content, styles and institutions of its theater. As part of the In Performance series, the plays in this anthology will be of interest to those who want to produce new work, read diverse dramatic and performance literature, and understand the ways in which theater contributes to international discussions of culture, rights, history, and more.

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Cees Nooteboom wrote the poems that make up Monk's Eye on two islands: he began them on the Dutch island of Schiermonnikoog and finished them on the Spanish island of Minorca, where he has spent summers for decades. The poems--which can be read individually or, all together, as the record of a poet's life--are about the two islands. But they're also about islands as an archetype, about the serenity that we can find on beaches and amid dunes, the sea sweeping imperturbably around us. Accompanied by Sunandini Banerjee's collages, the poems in this volume are rich in allusion; they address the past, memories, illusions, dreams, and the heart of all poetry--which Nooteboom locates in the opening line of Plato's Phaedrus, when Socrates, walking with his admirer, asks, "My dear Phaedrus, whence came you, and whither are you going?"

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Thousands upon thousands of books have been written about Immanuel Kant since his death. None, let’s be clear, have been quite like what we have here. In Party Fun with Kant, Nicolas Mahler tells the story of Kant—and his fellow serious-minded figures from the history of philosophy—with a comic edge. With his witty visual style and clever wordplay, he delves into their lives and emerges with hitherto unknown scenes that show them in a new (and far less serious) light. We go to parties with Kant, visit an art exhibition with Hegel, shop at the supermarket with Nietzsche, and go to the cinema with Deleuze, and celebrate the dream wedding with de Beauvoir. In each case, we come away knowing more about the life, thoughts, and feelings of the philosopher—getting to know them as people rather than as stony-faced figures long since robbed of any existence beyond their ideas. The result is pure fun, but with plenty of insight, too.

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This lyrical novel, set in the surroundings of the Palestinian village of Zakariyya, weaves a narrative rich in sensory detail yet troubled by the porousness of memory. It tells the story of the relationship between two figures of deep mythical resonance in the region, Yahya and Zakariyya, figures who live in the present but bear the names—and many traits—of two saints. Ranging from today into back to pre-1948 Palestine, the book presents both a compelling portrait of a contemporary village and a sacred geography that lies beyond and beneath the present state of the world. Sensual, rich in allusion, yet at the same time focused on the struggles of today, Where the Bird Disappeared is a powerful novel of both connection and dispossession.

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Maryse Conde is one of the best-known and most beloved French Caribbean literary voices. The author of more than twenty novels, she was shortlisted for the Man Booker International Prize in 2015 and has long been recognized as a giant of black feminist literature. While Conde has previously published an autobiography of her childhood, What Is Africa to Me? tells for the first time the story of her early adult years in Africa years formative not only for her, but also for African colonies appealing for their own independence.What Is Africa to Me? traces the late 1950s to 1968, chronicling Conde's life in Sekou Toure's Guinea to her time in Kwame N'Krumah's Ghana, where she rubbed shoulders with Malcolm X, Che Guevara, Julius Nyerere, and Maya Angelou. Accusations of subversive activity resulted in Conde's deportation from Ghana. Settling down in Senegal, Conde ended her African years with close friends in Dakar including, filmmakers, activists, and Haitian exiles, before putting down more permanent roots in Paris. Conde's story is more than one of political upheaval, however; it is also the story of a mother raising four children as she battles steep obstacles, of a Guadeloupean seeking her identity in Africa, and of a young woman searching for her freedom and vocation as a writer. What Is Africa to Me? is a searing portrait of a literary genius it should not be missed.

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Among liberal thinkers, there is an optimistic belief that men and women are on a cultural journey toward equality - in the workplace, on the street, and in the home. But observation and evidence both tell us that in many ways this progress has stopped - and in some cases even reversed. In "The End of Equality", renowned feminist Beatrix Campbell argues that even as the patriarchy has lost some of its legitimacy, new inequalities are emerging in our culture. We are living, Campbell writes, in an era of neopatriarchy in which violence has proliferated; body anxiety and self-hatred have flourished; rape is committed with impunity; sex trafficking thrives; and the struggle for equal pay is at an end. After four decades observing society, Campbell still speaks of the long-sought goal of gender equality. But now she calls for a new revolution.

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Offers insight into the links between the development of print culture and the many dynamic strains of nationalism in dialogue during the Partition of the Indian subcontinent in 1947. How did inexpensive posters influence nationalism in the decades leading up to and succeeding the Partition of the Indian subcontinent in 1947? If mechanically reproduced images that occupy public spaces reflect the aesthetics of the “masses,” what can a critical interpretation of subcontinental popular visual culture in the mid-twentieth century reveal about the formation of communal identities? In this essay, Yousuf Saeed studies the selective deification of leaders fighting for Indian independence. He highlights the biased representation within the domain of “patriotic” posters of the time and the evolving portrayal of religious minority communities in India’s popular print culture over subsequent decades. Also charts the turn popular print culture took in post-Partition Pakistan, Saeed focuses on the country’s thriving industry of Sufi-saint posters. Partitioning Bazaar Art is a timely exploration of how nationalism can be defined through popular imagery.

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Written by one of India’s best-known public intellectuals, this book is essential reading for anyone interested in India’s fascinating history as well as the direction in which the nation is headed. People have argued since time immemorial. Disagreement is a part of life, of human experience. But we now live in times when any form of protest in India is marked as anti-Indian and met with arguments that the very concept of dissent was imported into India from the West. As Romila Thapar explores in her timely historical essay, however, dissent has a long history in the subcontinent, even if its forms have evolved through the centuries. In Voices of Dissent: An Essay, Thapar looks at the articulation of nonviolent dissent and relates it to various pivotal moments throughout India’s history. Beginning with Vedic times, she takes us from the second to the first millennium BCE, to the emergence of groups that were jointly called the Shramanas—the Jainas, Buddhists, and Ajivikas. Going forward in time, she also explores the views of the Bhakti sants and others of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries and brings us to a major moment of dissent that helped to establish a free and democratic India: Mahatma Gandhi’s satyagraha. Then Thapar places in context the recent peaceful protests against India’s new, controversial citizenship law, maintaining that dissent in our time must be opposed to injustice and supportive of democratic rights so that society may change for the better.

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A deeply contemplative work devoted to thinking from one of the foremost literary figures of contemporary France. Dying of Thinking is the ninth volume of Pascal Quignard’s Last Kingdom series. It explores three themes: how thought and death coincide, how thought is close to melancholy, and how thought takes shelter near traumatism. One who thinks, Quignard shows us, “compensates” for a very ancient abandonment. Even as a dream is a meaning whose disorderly, condensed, paradoxical images intuit something which has preceded sleep and which returns in them, thought is a meaning which uses words that are written, re-transcribed, dissected, etymologized and neologized. Throughout the Last Kingdom series, Quignard has sought to experience another way of thinking, one that has nothing to do with philosophy, a way of attaching himself “literally” to texts and of progressing by decomposing the imagery of dreams. Dying of Thinking is the heart of this quest.

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A collection of vital, melancholic, elemental, and vibrantly contemporary poems. In the beginning, was the light, or was it the Lumières? In Ulrike Almut Sandig’s latest volume of poetry, it is only a leap from the creation of the world to the symphony of the Berlin metropolis. And there is a question holding out off the coast of Lampedusa: Can shining sheep be used as night storage for the dark hours, when we are overwhelmed with fears of God, of a gym teacher with a whistle, of mothers with eyes as black as coal? In devastating sequences, Sandig charts the reality of an abused child, victims of contemporary war, or a fourteenth-century Madonna. Full of humor, musicality, lightness, and rage, Shining Sheep is not just visual poetry—it has loops in your ear and filmic explosions of imagery for all your senses.

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An engaging exploration of the meaning and power of art that looks at popular theories through the ages. One of the most astonishing aspects of the discourse on contemporary art is the firm and unwavering belief that art has the power to transform society for the better. There seems to be a consensus around the idea that art, especially visual art, is greatly suited to addressing all manner of social, political, economic, ecological, and other imbalances. Celebrated as a powerful remedy for social grievances, art finds its justification in the service it seems to provide to society. But as art historian Leonhard Emmerling contends in this timely volume, this presumptuous heroism shows willful blindness towards art’s subjugation to contradictions inherent in social relations. He argues that the narrative of the power of art has its specific history. In trying to reconstruct this history in Art of Diremption, he discovers instead art’s fundamental powerlessness as the foundation for art’s political relevance. Art is weak, argues Emmerling. It, therefore, requires an ethics of weakness, which rejects the discourse of impact and power to enable a politics of art containing the permanence of reflection, the unreliability of thought, and the emergence of form as the event of the new. With a meticulously studied and well-argued case about the “powerlessness of art,” Art of Diremption will be an important contribution to the field of art, aesthetics, and philosophy.

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The narrator in Jean-Luc Benoziglio’s Privy Portrait has fallen on hard times. His wife and young daughter have abandoned him, he has no work or prospects, he’s blind in one eye, and he must move into a horribly tiny apartment with his only possession: a twenty-five-volume encyclopedia. His neighbors, the Shritzkys, are vulgar, narrow-minded, and racist. And because he has no space for his encyclopedia in his cramped room, he stores it in the communal bathroom, and this becomes a major point of contention with his neighbors. The bathroom is also the only place he can find refuge from the Shritzkys’ blaring television, and he barricades himself in it to read his encyclopedia, much to the chagrin of the rest of the residents of the building. Darkly amusing, Privy Portrait is the monologue of a man, disoriented by the gaping void of not knowing his own nationality, recounting the final remnants of his own sanity and his life. In this buffoonish, even grotesque, yet deeply pitiful man, Benoziglio explores, with a light yet profound touch, weighty themes such as the roles of family, history, one’s moral responsibility towards others, and the fragility of personal identity.

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Now in paperback, Katharina Winkler’s heartbreaking saga of a tenacious woman trapped in an abusive marriage. Blue jewelry is private property. Not to be seen. Not to be talked about. It is worn like a bracelet around the wrists, on ribs, legs, arms. Blue jewelry is another name for the marks left on women’s bodies, inflicted by the men around them. This novel tells the story of Filiz and Yunus. When Filiz meets Yunus, he is young and beautiful, and Filiz is proud that he wants her. Against her father’s wishes, they marry when she is thirteen. Yunus is her entire universe, all encompassing, all powerful. Soon after the wedding, Filiz’s dream of living in the West with her husband, of escaping their small village in Anatolia for freedom and autonomy, comes crashing down around her. Yunus, only a few years older than his bride, turns their marriage into a prison of dependency and violence. Trapped in her mother-in-law’s house, Filiz is subjected to physical and mental abuse, forced to veil herself, and treated as a house slave. When she becomes pregnant, Filiz seems to have reached her breaking point. But she endures. When Yunus moves his young family first to Istanbul and then to Austria, the life he had once promised her seems to be within reach. But there is no escaping the spiral of violence and love, which, to Filiz, have become inseparable. Katharina Winkler’s powerful story of a marriage dominated by violence gives voice to a tenacious young woman whose will to survive is never broken.

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Writing Places is a creative writing and literary translation project between students at the University of East Anglia in Norwich and Jadavpur University in Kolkata. Encouraging students to explore the connections between writing and place, this chapbook features a range of creative responses including poetry, prose, and translation. It includes a total of 39 pieces from Sophie Landridge, Rupsa Nag, Lili Cooper, Rachel Goodman, Marzia Rahman, Alice Davies, Peter Minj, Meghomala Bhattacharya, Naina Dey, Rebecca Philips, Katarzyna Biela, Syamantakshobhan Basu, Srishti Dutta Chowdhury, Daisy Flynn, Vijay Khurana, Surojit Kayal, Alice Willitts and Bishnupriya Chowduri. Writing Places was created through the partnership between the National Centre for Writing, the University of East Anglia, the British Centre for Literary Translation (BCLT), the Kolkata Literary Meet, Seagull Books, and the Centre for the Translation of Indian Literatures at Jadavpur University. It is supported by the British Council and Arts Council England ReImagine India fund as part of the UK-India Year of Culture.

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