Search results for ""seagull books""

Chemmeen tells the story of the relationship between Karutthamma, a Hindu woman from the fisherfolk community, and Pareekkutty, the son of a Muslim fish wholesaler. Unable to marry Pareekkutty for religious reasons, Karutthamma instead marries Palani, who, despite his wife's scandalous past, never stops trusting her a trust that is reaffirmed each time he goes to sea and comes back safe. For the fishermen have an important saying: the safe return of a fisherman depends on the fidelity of his wife. Then, one fateful night, Karutthamma and Pareekkutty meet and their love is rekindled while Palani is at sea, baiting a shark. Previously available only in India, this hugely successful novel was adapted into a film, winning great critical acclaim and commercial success. Anita Nair's evocative translation from Malayalam brings this tale of love and longing, a classic of Indian literature, to a new audience.

Read more less

When a Chinese American intelligence officer at the US Embassy in Beijing intercepts complex coded messages, the race is on to decipher their meaning. When she finally succeeds in decoding them, the messages seem to indicate a targeted assault on the Japanese financial market. Puzzled, the officer digs deeper and uncovers more intrigue a large, state-owned Chinese company, which has recently discovered oil in Benin seems to be involved, and...what's this about a kidnapping? As the complex plot to bring down a major financial institution unfolds at a rapid pace, American and Japanese officials scramble to prevent a crisis with international implications. Set against the backdrop of the political and financial practices of Japan, China, and the US, The Shanghai Intrigue brings with it murder, betrayal, romance, even a natural disaster, as the plot races to a most unpredictable outcome. Written by Michael S. Koyama, the book's breakneck speed and thrilling twists and turns will leave readers spellbound from the first page.

Read more less

Laura Wilmote is a television journalist living in Paris. Her life couldn't be better a stimulating job, a loving boyfriend, interesting friends until her phone rings in the middle of one night. It is C., an old school friend whom Laura recently helped find a job at the same television station: "My phone rang. I knew right away it was you." Thus begins the story of C.'s unrelenting, obsessive, incurable love/hatred of Laura. She is convinced that Laura shares her love, but cannot or will not admit it. C. begins to dress as Laura, to make her friends and family her own, and even succeeds in working alongside Laura on the unique program that is Laura's signature achievement. The obsession escalates, yet is artfully hidden. It is Laura who is perceived as the aggressor at work, Laura who appears unwell, Laura who is losing it. Even Laura's adoring boyfriend begins to question her. Laura seeks the counsel of a psychiatrist who diagnoses C. with De Clerambault syndrome she is convinced that Laura is in love with her. And worse, the syndrome can only end in one of two ways: the death of the patient, or that of the object of the obsession.A Cage in Search of a Bird is the gripping story of two women caught in the vise of a terrible delusion. Florence Noiville brilliantly narrates this story of obsession and one woman's attempts to escape the irrational love of another an inescapable, never-ending love, a love that can only end badly.

Read more less

In The Red Sofa, we meet Anne, a young woman setting off on the Trans-Siberian Railway in order to find her former lover, Gyl, who left twenty years before. As the train moves across post-Soviet Russia and its devastated landscapes, Anne reflects on her past with Gyl and their patriotic struggles, as well as on the neighbor she has just left behind, Clemence Barrot. Rocked by the train's movements Anne is moved by her memory of Clemence, who is old and whose memory is failing, but who has not lost her taste for life and adventure. Ensconced on her red sofa at home, Clemence loves to tell Anne her life story, mourning lost loved ones and celebrating the lives of brave, rebellious women who went before her. Eventually, Anne's train trip returns her home having not found Gyl, but having found something much more meaningful herself. "A luminous novel about desire, a clear text about the joy of living." Prix Pierre Mac Orlan 2007

Read more less

Bolivia's foremost social and political theorist, Rene Zavaleta Mercado held diplomatic and ministerial posts with the Revolutionary Nationalist Movement in the 1950s and '60s, before eventually aligning with the Marxist left, where he developed the creative, heterodox philosophy for which he is known. Towards a History of the National-Popular in Bolivia is his final and most significant work, available in English for the first time. Published posthumously, the book explores a series of critical moments in Bolivian history to illuminate the reconstitution of seigneurial rule and the challenges posed by plebeian, indigenous, and working-class projects, agitating for a more inclusive nation. It is a work of reflexive social theory that explores the limits of its own conceptual frameworks including classical political philosophy and Marxism through an engagement with the history that made possible its own conceptual horizons. In its content, method, and style, the book offers an original reflection on social formations and political knowledge that have far-reaching implications for the Global South. Rooted in history and yet exceedingly relevant, Zavaleta's revolutionary work makes contemporary a long genealogy of theories of the national-popular from Gramsci and Mariategui, to Fanon and Ho Chi Minh.

Read more less

Originally published in Italian in 1965, A Test of Powers was immediately seen as one of the central texts of Italian intellectual life. By the time of the 1968 student revolts, it was clear that Franco Fortini had anticipated many of the themes and concerns of the New Left, which is no surprise, given that Fortini had spent more than two decades immersed in fierce ideological debates over anti-Fascism, organizing, the alliance between progressivism and literature, and other topics that found their way into A Test of Powers. In addition to politically focused essays, the book also features essays on a range of writers who influenced Fortini, including Kafka, Pasternak, Eric Auerbach, Proust, and Brecht. Praise for Fortini’s The Dogs of the Sinai “An elegant and provocative project — the first book of Fortini’s prose to appear in English translation — that challenges one’s political assumptions about the conflict between Israel and Palestine, not only at the time of the Six-Day War but also today. . . . Toscano has done a masterful job of rendering Fortini’s often difficult prose into a fluid and concise English.”—Los Angeles Review of Books “Forensic and devastating.”—Times Literary Supplement “Fortini’s poetic production, literary criticism, political writings, translations, and journalism have assured him a position of the first rank among intellectuals of the Italian postwar period.”—Italica

Read more less

Novelist Zakes Mda has made a name for himself as a key chronicler of the new, post-apartheid South Africa, casting a satirical eye on its claims of political unity, its rising black middle class, and other aspects of its complicated, multiracial society. In this novel, however, he turns his lens elsewhere: to a college town in Ohio. Here he finds human relations and the battle between the community and the individual no less compelling, or ridiculous. In Athens, Ohio, old high school friends Rachel Boucher and Jason de Klerk reconnect­ and rekindle a relationship that quickly becomes passionate. Initially, all seems well. Not only the couple, but their friends and family, are happy at this unexpected conjunction. But then Rachel meets someone else. Jason’s anger boils over into violence—violence that turns the community on its head, pitting friends and neighbors against one another. And all this happens before Rachel realizes she’s pregnant. A powerful, piercing satire of contemporary life, love, and society, Rachel’s Blue is a wonderful example of the social novel, surprising us with undeniable revelations about everyday life.

Read more less

Pascal Quignard is an enigmatic author whose writings rove with great poise across the worlds of literary and artistic endeavour, classical and modern, across folk tale, myth and legend, and yet encapsulate moments of intense present experience, evoking with just a word or a phrase the sense of each moment's suffusion by an enormous cosmic past. Quignard's human beings are troubled, questing souls, fascinated always by the mystery of what preceded them and conceived them - in both the broadest and the narrowest possible senses. Abysses is part of Quignard's 'Last Kingdom' series, which the author himself has described as something 'strange'. It consists, he says, 'neither of philosophical argumentation, nor short learned essays, nor novelistic narration', but comes, rather, from a phase of his work in which the very concept of genre has been dropped or, perhaps more accurately, allowed to fall away. The aim is for an overarching form of thinking - 'an entirely modern vision of the world, an entirely secular vision of the world, an entirely abnormal vision of the world.' As in the previous volumes in this series published by Seagull, Roving Shadows and The Silent Crossing, the text is a rich mix of anecdote and reflection, of aphorism and quotation, of enigmatic glimpses of the present and confident, pointed borrowings from the past - particularly the European classical past in which the author is so much at home. But when Quignard raids the murkier corners of the human record, he does so not as a historian but as an antiquarian. He is not someone interested in the world for its prim and proper historical narratives (after all, as he points out, 'In the USSR, for example, in the middle of last century, the past was completely unpredictable. For fifty years what had happened in the past changed from one day to the next.'). He is in pursuit, rather, of those stories which repeat and echo across time, stories which, if not literally timeless, dance to a rhythm that we do not ordinarily contemplate, a rhythm that channels a force which seems at times to exceed our everyday conceptions of the transcendent by many orders of magnitude.

Read more less

Few of us have had the opportunity to visit Djibouti, the small crook of a country strategically located in the Horn of Africa, which makes The Nomads, My Brothers, Go Out to Drink from the Big Dipper all the more seductive. In his first collection of poetry, the critically acclaimed writer Abdourahman A. Waberi writes passionately about his country's landscape, drawing for us pictures of "desert furrows of fire" and a "yellow chameleon sky." Waberi's poems take us to unexpected spaces-in exile, in the muezzin's call, and where morning dew is "sucked up by the eye of the sun-black often, pink from time to time." Translated by Nancy Naomi Carlson, Waberi's voice is intelligent, at times ironic, and always appealing. His poems strongly condemn the civil wars that have plagued East Africa and advocate tolerance and peace. In this compact volume, such ideas live side by side as a rosary for the treasures of Timbuktu, destroyed by Islamic extremists, and a poem dedicated to Edmond Jabes, the Jewish writer and poet born in Cairo.

Read more less

MULE. Who created us? ROCINANTE. What kind of dumb question is that? The great master Cervantes, of course. Who else? MULE. God. ROCINANTE. Listen you obstinate fool. We're animals. We don't have to believe in God. That's meant for the superior species. MULE. Why did Cervantes create us? ROCINANTE. Because he was a genius. I think he made me a bit like himself. But those who ride us were not so lucky. Tariq Ali's latest play, The New Adventures of Don Quixote, can be read as homage to German poet and playwright Bertolt Brecht as much as a playful tribute to Cervantes's masterwork. The central characters from the original novel, Don Quixote and Sancho Panza, are mounted on their beasts of burden, Rocinante and the Mule, and Ali has them ride into the twenty-first century, where they are confronted by old vices familiar to them: war, greed, ethnic and religious prejudices, disappointed love, and economic crisis. Their story is satirical, and their songs are sad and angry. But there are odd moments of happiness for Quixote, when he imagines that a wounded US colonel is Dulcinea and allows himself to be seduced by her in a military hospital in Germany. Primarily interested in discovering the meaning of life and how it is molded by the world in which we live, Ali's theatrical device is the conversation between the two animals - Rocinante the philosopher and Mule the everyman who questions her relentlessly. Accompanied by numerous color performance stills of the play from its 2013 production in Germany, this volume is as intellectually stimulating as it is uproariously humorous.

Read more less

From the publication of his first book in 1953, Yves Bonnefoy has been considered the most important and influential French poet since World War II. A prolific writer, critic, and translator, Bonnefoy continues to compose groundbreaking new work sixty years later, constantly offering his readers what Paul Auster has called "the highest level of artistic excellence." In The Present Hour, Bonnefoy's latest collection, a personal narrative surfaces in splinters and shards. Every word from Bonnefoy is multifaceted, like the fragmented figures seen from different angles in cubist painting-as befits a poet who has written extensively about artists such as Goya, Picasso, Braque, and Gris. Throughout this moving collection, Bonnefoy's poems echo each other, returning to and elaborating upon key images, thoughts, feelings, and people. Intriguing and enigmatic, this mixture of sonnet sequences and prose poems - or, as Bonnefoy sees them, "dream texts" - moves from his meditations on friendship and friends like Jorge Luis Borges to a long, discursive work in free verse that is a reflection on his thought and process. These poems are the ultimate condensation of Bonnefoy's life in writing, and they will be a valuable addition to the canon of his writings available in English.

Read more less

Our contemporary celebration of difference, respect for pluralism, and avowal of identity politics have come to be regarded as the hallmarks of a progressive, modern democracy. Yet despite embracing many of its values, we have at the same time become wary of multiculturalism in recent years. In the wake of September 11 and the many terrorist attacks that have occurred since then, there has been much debate about the degree of diversity that Western nations can tolerate. In "Multiculturalism and Its Discontents", Kenan Malik looks closely at the role of multiculturalism within terrorism and societal discontent. He examines whether it is possible - or desirable - to try to build a cohesive society bound by common values, and he delves into the increasing anxiety about the presence of the "other" within our borders. "Multiculturalism and Its Discontents" not only explores the relationship between multiculturalism and terrorism, but it analyzes the history of the idea of multiculturalism alongside its political roots and social consequences.

Read more less

London between the wars was a place of anxiety and uncertainty. After the postwar boom of the 1920s, the after-effects of the stock market crash hit London and, even as the fortunes of the aristocracy went into decline, there was hunger and a rising tide of virulent fascism. It is in this setting that Max, a French journalist looking for his next story, and Lena, an American singer, find themselves in Hedi Kaddour's "Little Grey Lies". Once lovers, but now friends, Max and Lena travel with Lena's new man, Thibault and with Max's barely masked jealousy. Then they meet the striking Colonel Strether, the epitome of military decorum and bearing. An aging war hero, Strether seems to Max to be his best chance at a story, but as the two men talk, it seems Strether may not be who he claims, and the old soldier's past begins to trouble Max and Lena. As in his other work, internationally renowned poet and novelist Hedi Kaddour offers shifting time-frames and kaleidoscopic viewpoints in a mannered metafictional thriller that bears comparison to both Robert Coover and John Le Carre. "Little Grey Lies" is historical suspense at its best.

Read more less

In 1900, Dutch art historians Andre Jolles and Aby Warburg constructed an experimental dialogue in which Jolles supposed he had fallen in love with the figure of a young woman in a painting: "A fantastic figure - shall I call her a servant girl, or rather a classical nymph? What is the meaning of it all - Who is the nymph? Where does she come from?" Warburg's response: "In essence she is an elemental spirit, a pagan goddess in exile," serves as the touchstone for this wide-ranging and theoretical exploration of female representation in iconography. In "Nymphs", the newest translation of Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben's work, the author notes that academic research has lingered on the "pagan goddess," while the concept of "elemental spirit," ignored by scholars, is vital to the history of iconography. Tracing the genealogy of this idea, Agamben goes on to examine subjects as diverse as the aesthetic theories of choreographer Domineco da Piacenza, Friedrich Theodor Vischer's essay on the "symbol," Walter Benjamin's concept of the dialectic image, and the bizarre discoveries of photographer Nathan Lerner in 1972. From these investigations emerges a startlingly original exploration of the ideas of time and the image. Agamben is the rare writer whose ideas and works have a broad appeal across many fields, and "Nymphs" will engage not only the author's devoted fans in philosophy, legal theory, sociology, and literary criticism, but his growing audience among art theorists and historians as well.

Read more less

Kore, also called Persephone and referred to poetically by the Greeks as the unspeakable girl, was the daughter of Demeter and Zeus who was abducted by Hades and made queen of the netherworld. This title presents three richly detailed treatments of the myth of Kore.

Read more less

A timely book addressing the burning concerns of our times, from the excesses of capitalism to the global crisis of leadership. There is widespread agreement, across a voluble political spectrum and around the planet, that we live in times of intensifying insecurity and turmoil. If ours is an age of transition, its direction is anything but certain. Momentous transformations in ecology, geopolitics, and everyday life are shadowed by a suffocating sense of stasis. The limits to capital and the limits of nature are entangled in frightful ways, while the profoundly obsolete form of leadership, domination, and conflict exacerbate an already baleful situation. And yet struggles for liberation have not been quelled. Terms of Disorder confronts this moment by probing some of the defining terms in the modern vocabulary of emancipation, with the aim of testing their capacity to name and orient collective action set on abolishing the present state of things. Ranging from communism to leadership, the eleven keywords addressed in this book provide a set of interlocking points of entry into the common task of forging a political language capable of navigating our disorientation. If, as Gramsci famously noted, the interregnum is a time when the new struggles to be born while the old order is moribund, we may wish to heed Cedric Robinson’s call to “choose wisely among the dying.”

Read more less

An engaging collection of late-life reflections and quick thoughts, a book unlike any other Agamben book. What can the senses of an attentive philosopher see, hear, and learn that can, in turn, teach us about living better lives? Perhaps it’s less a matter of asking what and more a matter of asking how. These latest reflections from Italy’s foremost philosopher form a sort of travelogue that chronicles Giorgio Agamben’s profound interior journey. Here, with unprecedented immediacy, Agamben shares his final remarks, late-life observations, and reflections about his life that flashed before his eyes. What did he see in that brief flash? What did he stay faithful to? What remains of all those places, friends, and teachers?

Read more less

This collection of four stories by the writer George Steiner called “one of the masters of European fiction” is, as longtime fans of Thomas Bernhard would expect, bleakly comic and inspiringly rancorous. The subject of his stories vary: in one, Goethe summons Wittgenstein to discuss the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus; “Montaigne: A Story (in 22 Installments)” tells of a young man sealing himself in a tower to read; “Reunion,” meanwhile, satirizes that very impulse to escape; and the final story rounds out the collection by making Bernhard himself a victim, persecuted by his greatest enemy—his very homeland of Austria. Underpinning all these variously comic, tragic, and bitingly satirical excursions is Bernhard’s abiding interest in, and deep knowledge of, the philosophy of doubt. Bernhard’s work can seem off-putting on first acquaintance, as he suffers no fools and offers no hand to assist the unwary reader. But those who make the effort to engage with Bernhard on his own uncompromising terms will discover a writer with powerful comic gifts, penetrating insight into the failings and delusions of modern life, and an unstinting desire to tell the whole, unvarnished, unwelcome truth. Start here, readers; the rewards are great.

Read more less

We are surrounded by images, fairly drowning in them. From our cell phones to our computers, from our televisions at home to the screens that light up while we wait in the grocery store checkout line, images of all kinds are seducing us, commanding us to buy!, scaring us, dazzling us.Fear, Reverence, Terror invites us to look at images slowly, with the help of a few examples: Picasso's Guernica, the "Lord Kitchener Wants You" World War I recruitment poster, Jacques-Louis David's Marat, the frontispiece of Thomas Hobbes's Leviathan, a cup of gilded silver with scenes from the conquest of the New World. Are these political images, Carlo Ginzburg asks? Yes, because every image is, in a sense, political an instrument of power. Tacitus once wrote, unforgettably, that we are enslaved by lies of which we ourselves are the authors. Is it possible to break this bond? Fear, Reverence, Terror will answer this question. Praise for Ginzburg "Ginzburg has many claims to be considered the outstanding European historian of the generation which came of age in the late Sixties. Certainly few have equalled him in originality, variety, and audacity." London Review of Books "Ginzburg's scholarship is dazzling and profound." Publisher's Weekly

Read more less

A highly engaging exploration of existential questions, written in the midst of the Coronavirus pandemic. The Book of Commentary / Unquiet Garden of the Soul confronts the reader with questions of existential meaning, questions rendered all the more potent by the backdrop of the Coronavirus pandemic: How fragile are we as human beings? How fragile are our societies? What is a “self,” an “I,” a “community”? How are we to orient ourselves? And what, if any, role does commentary play? In a fashion that will be familiar to longtime admirers of Alexander Kluge, the book stretches both back in time to the medieval glossators of Bologna and forward into interstellar space with imagined travel to the moon Europa. Kluge’s characteristic brief, vignette-like prose passages are interspersed with images from his own film work and QR codes, forming a highly engaging, thoroughly contemporary read.

Read more less

A dazzling selection of more than one hundred poems that trace the development of Durs Grünbein’s work over the past two decades. Born in Dresden in 1962, Durs Grünbein is the most significant and successful poet of his generation in Germany. Since 1988, when the then-twenty-five-year-old burst onto the scene with his poetry collection Grauzone morgens—a mordant reckoning with the East Germany he grew up in—Grünbein has published more than thirty books of poetry and prose, which have been translated into dozens of languages. In 2005 the volume Ashes for Breakfast introduced Grünbein to English-language readers for the first time by sampling poetry from his first four collections. Psyche Running picks up where that volume left off and offers a selection of poems from his nine subsequent collections, which shows how Grünbein has developed from his ironic take on the classical into an elegiac exploration of history through dream fragments and poems with a haunting existential unease.

Read more less

One of Italy's best-known contemporary philosophers and leftists offers a literature-informed take on our contemporary political situation. During the dramatic course of the twentieth century, amid the clash of the titans which marked that era, humanity could still think in terms of partisan struggles in which large masses took sides against one another. The new millennium, by contrast, appears to have opened under the guise of generalized insecurity, which pertains not only to the historical and social situation, or to one’s personal psychological predicament, but to our very being. The Earth’s current faltering and the twilight of every convention that might govern it—where roles, images, and languages become confused by a lack of direction and distance—were already powerfully prophesied in Shakespeare’s Hamlet, and later in the works of Kafka and Beckett. In Hamletics, Massimo Cacciari, one of Italy’s foremost philosophers and leftist political figures, establishes a dialogue between these fateful authors, exploring the relationship between European nihilism and the aporias of action in the present.

Read more less

The Golden Horde is a definitive work on the Italian revolutionary movements of the 1960s and ’70s. An anthology of texts and fragments woven together with an original commentary, The Golden Horde widens our understanding of the full complexity and richness of radical thought and practice in Italy during the 1960s and ’70s. The book covers the generational turbulence of Italy’s postwar period, the transformations of Italian capitalism, the new analyses by worker-focused intellectuals, the student movement of 1968, the Hot Autumn of 1969, the extra-parliamentary groups of the early 1970s, the Red Brigades, the formation of a radical women’s movement, the development of Autonomia, and the build-up to the watershed moment of the spontaneous political movement of 1977. Far from being merely a handbook of political history, The Golden Horde also sheds light on two decades of Italian culture, including the newspapers, songs, journals, festivals, comics, and philosophy that these movements produced. The book features writings by Sergio Bologna, Umberto Eco, Elvio Fachinelli, Lea Melandri, Danilo Montaldi, Toni Negri, Raniero Panzieri, Franco Piperno, Rossana Rossanda, Paolo Virno, and others, as well as an in-depth introduction by translator Richard Braude outlining the work’s composition and development.

Read more less

This book brings English-language readers works by Walser in a rare form: dramolette. Few writers have ever experienced such a steady rise in their reputation and public profile as Swiss writer Robert Walser (1878–1956) has seen in recent years. As more of his previously little-known work has been translated into English, readers have discovered a unique writer whose off-kilter sensibility and innovations in form are perfectly suited to our fragmented, distracted, bewildering era. The short plays presented here, inspired by the German theater Walser enjoyed in his youth, while never meant to be performed, present scenes, characters, and situations that comment on the brutality of fairy tales, the impossibilities of love, the dark fate of the Christ child (and Walser himself), and more. At the same time, like all of Walser’s work they are shot through with a humor that is wholly genuine despite its shades of darkness. Gathering all of Walser’s plays, as well as his later, fragmentary dramatic writings, Comedies will be celebrated by the many devoted fans of this lately rediscovered master.

Read more less

Close to death, an old man collapses and struggles to his bed. The sounds of the endless night unsettle him, triggering images, questions, and memories. In What Darkness Was, Inka Parei, author of The Shadow-Boxing Woman, allows the reader to inhabit a singular German mind. Precise and observant—but uncomprehending and on the brink of hysteria—the old man wracks his brain as the questions flow like water: why did he inherit the building he now lives in? Why did he leave the city that was his home for so long? Is he even here voluntarily? And who was that suspicious stranger on the stairs? Lying in bed, the old man is aware that these questions may be the last puzzles he ever solves.Combining tight prose with a compulsive delight in detail, Parei’s second novel in English presents a dynamic portrait of the West German soul from World War II through the German Autumn of 1977.

Read more less

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.

Read more less