Search results for ""Seagull Books""

Mahasweta Devi is one of India's foremost literary figures. Mother of 1084 is one of her most widely read works, written during the height of the Naxalite agitation - a militant communist uprising that was brutally repressed by the Indian government and led to the widespread murder of young rebels across Bengal. This novel focuses on the trauma of a mother who awakens one morning to the shattering news that her son is lying dead in the morgue and her struggle to understand his decision to be a Naxalite. Breast Stories is a collection of short fiction about the breast as more than a symbol of beauty, eroticism, or motherhood, but as a harsh indictment of an exploitative social system and a weapon of resistance. At a time when violence towards women in India has escalated exponentially, Devi exposes the inherently vicious systems in Indian society. Old Women tells the touching, poignant tales of two timeworn women - Dulali, a widow since childhood, who is now an old woman preoccupied only with day-to-day survival, and Andi, who loses her eyesight due to a combination of poverty, societal indifference, and government apathy. All three volumes, written in Devi's hard-hitting yet sensitive prose, are significant milestones in India's feminist literary landscape.

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Mahasweta Devi is one of India's foremost literary figures. Mother of 1084 is one of her most widely read works, written during the height of the Naxalite agitation - a militant communist uprising that was brutally repressed by the Indian government and led to the widespread murder of young rebels across Bengal. This novel focuses on the trauma of a mother who awakens one morning to the shattering news that her son is lying dead in the morgue and her struggle to understand his decision to be a Naxalite. Breast Stories is a collection of short fiction about the breast as more than a symbol of beauty, eroticism, or motherhood, but as a harsh indictment of an exploitative social system and a weapon of resistance. At a time when violence towards women in India has escalated exponentially, Devi exposes the inherently vicious systems in Indian society. Old Women tells the touching, poignant tales of two timeworn women - Dulali, a widow since childhood, who is now an old woman preoccupied only with day-to-day survival, and Andi, who loses her eyesight due to a combination of poverty, societal indifference, and government apathy. All three volumes, written in Devi's hard-hitting yet sensitive prose, are significant milestones in India's feminist literary landscape.

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Last season, Seagull Books published the first three volumes in a new series collecting essays and interviews by the late French thinker Roland Barthes. This season they’ll bring the five-volume set to completion with the publication of “Masculine, Feminine, Neuter” and Signs and Images.“Masculine, Feminine, Neuter,” consists of Barthes’s writing on literature, covering his peers and influences, writers in French and other languages, contemporary and historical writers, and world literature. This volume comprises Barthes critical articles and interviews previously unavailable in English. Taken together, the five volumes in this series are a gift to Barthes’ many fans, helping to round out our understanding of this restless, protean thinker and his legacy.

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Yves Bonnefoy is one of the greatest living voices of contemporary French poetry. In this, his sixth book published by Seagull Books, he explores in profound new ways the mysteries of human consciousness. Readers find snatches of conversations overheard, dropped without any possible conclusion each pregnant with half-hidden, half-visible meaning. Limpid, punctuated with silences, the poems of Ursa Major are like stones picked up, turned over and set back down on the edge of life."Countless voices traverse us; endless, almost, as the meanders of dreams or the starry scintillations of summer nights. Only listen, and a few words rise from the murmur, referring to precise things, making allusions one would like to understand, offering opinions perhaps worth mulling over." With these words Bonnefoy introduces the collection, newly available in English by the master translator Beverly Bie Brahic. This deeply moving sequence of prose poems invites readers to attend to the multitudinous voices that carry on their conversations within us, to trust them "just as on summer nights we would lie down in the grass of the meadow, behind our houses, to go forth among the millions of stars with a feeling of falling."

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