English Literature

About the Book Bibhutibhushan Bandyopadhyay was one of the greatest writers in modern Bengali literature, best known for his autobiographical novel Pather Panchali, which, along with another of Bandyopadhyay’s books, formed the basis for Satyaji...

A brief study of select Western art from Italy’s foremost philosopher. In Renaissance palaces, the studiolo was a small room to which the prince withdrew to meditate or read, surrounded by paintings he particularly loved. This book is a kind of s...

This first book in a three-volume collection of Georges Bataille’s essays introduces English readers to his philosophical and critical writings. In the aftermath of the Second World War, French thinker and writer Georges Bataille forged a singula...

About the Book 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,...

About the Book It’s the early 1970s and Dion Katthusen, thirteen, is growing up fatherless in a small village in northern Germany. An only child plagued with a devastating stutter, Dion is ostracized by his peers and finds solace in the company ...

About the Book In June 1939, Annemarie schwarzenbach and fellow writer Ella maillart set out from Geneva in a Ford, heading for Afghanistan. The first women to travel Afghanistan’s northern road, they fled the storm brewing in Europe to seek a p...

About the Book Set in Malaya during the British protectorate, Sartre’s typhus centres on the improbable couple formed by the disgraced former doctor Georges, who has sunk to the lowest depths of a highly stratified colonial society, and Nellie, ...

About the Book Described as an answer to or at least an echo of Samuel Beckett's Krapp's Last Tape ? , Till Day You Do Part Or A Question of Light , by esteemed Austrian playwright and novelist Peter Handke, is a monologue delivered by the "she" i...

About the Book In The Shadow-Boxing Woman, a novel from German writer Inka Parei, a decaying apartment building in post-Wall Berlin is home to Hell, a young woman with a passion for martial arts. When Hell’s neighbor disappears she sets out acro...

About the Book There are few if any voices more distinct in contemporary French literature than that of Pascal quignard, a prolific writer of rare erudition and elegance. Essayist, critic, translator, novelist and musician, quignard attempts here ...

The Event Of Literature by Terry Eagleton, 8170463556, 9788170463559, Seagull Books

About the Book Cees Nooteboom, best known for his novel The Following Story, is one of the most distinguished and significant authors living in the Netherlands today. Self-Portrait of an Other is one of the most unique and innovative works in his ...

About the Book The Austrian playwright, novelist and poet Thomas Bernhard (1931–89) is acknowledged as among the major writers of our time. The seven stories in this collection capture Bernhard’s distinct darkly comic voice and vision—often ...

About the Book Annemarie schwarzenbach—journalist, novelist, antifascist, archaeologist, and travellers become a European cult figure for bohemian free spirits since the rediscovery of her works in the late 1980s. Lyric novella is her story of a...

About the Book Selected from the pages of Le monde, the interviews conducted by Florence Noiville are unequalled in literary journalism. In literary miniatures, Noiville captures the words and views of some of the best known writers of the twentie...

About the Book While Mahatma Gandhi is hailed across the world as a champion of humanity and nonviolent struggle, the struggles of the woman who accompanied him closely all his life, his wife Kasturba Gandhi, remain untold. This playtext, Jagadamb...

About the Book Hardly a conventional family history, Green-Eyed Thieves tells the story of the fortunes of a family of crooks—the green-eyed thieves of the title. The matriarch of this unusual family is a university lecturer and an accomplished ...

About the Book 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 unprecede...

About the Book One night, German philosopher Hans Blumenberg returns to his study to find a shocking sight a lion lying on the floor as if it's the most natural thing in the world. The lion stretches comfortably on the Turkmen rug, eyes resting co...

About the Book Why don’t we live when we know we're here just this one time, just one single, unrepeatable time in this unutterably magnificent world? This outcry against the emptiness of ordinary everyday life uttered by the hero of Max Frisch'...

About the Book “Everyone is free here. . . . The cities are open. They are open to the world and to the future. That is what gives them all an air of adventure; and . . . a kind of touching beauty.” So wrote the French philosopher Jean-Paul Sa...

About the Book In these 99 meditations, poet and novelist Hans Magnus Enzensberger celebrates the tenacity of the normal and routine in everyday life, where the survival of the objects we use without thinking—a pair of scissors, perhaps—is bot...

In contemporary Norwegian fiction Tomas Espedal’s work stands out as uniquely personal; it can be difficult to separate the fiction from Espedal’s own experiences. Against Nature, a companion volume to Espedal’s earlier Against Art, is an examinat...

A few years after the deadly 2011 terror attack in Norway’s Utøya Island, Otto and Sofie are attempting to put the pieces of their life back together without their beloved daughter, who was murdered alongside countless other youths on one of the w...

Now in paperback, the epic tale of a violinist who must navigate the fractious world of early twentieth-century Germany. “Ruven Preuk stands apart from the village, on an August day in 1911, and listens.” Thus begins an epic bildungsroman about t...

Introducing a refreshing young French voice to English readers, this slim novel is both a riveting love story and an examination of humanity’s assault on the natural world. After a seven-day journey on the South Atlantic Ocean aboard a lobster bo...

Poetically written and originally given as lectures, this is a moving essay collection from Durs Grünbein. In his four Lord Weidenfeld Lectures held in Oxford in 2019, German poet Durs Grünbein dealt with a topic that has occupied his mind ever s...

The myth of Arthur Rimbaud (1854–1891) focuses on his early years: how the great enfant terrible tore through the nineteenthcentury literary scene with reckless abandon, leaving behind him a trail of enemies, the failed marriage of an ex-lover who...

A hopeful, music-infused poetry collection from Congolese poet Alain Mabanckou.

A novel about disability, family secrets, and Norway’s eugenic past. The White Bathing Hut is a genetic detective story. The narrator uses a wheelchair because of an inherited illness that has caused his muscle tissue to degenerate, making him u...

Reinhard Jirgl’s strikingly individual novel The Fire Above, the Mountain Below demonstrates that he is not only unorthodox in his approach to language, but also difficult to pin down in terms of any genre. Weaving together elements of crime story...

The fascinus, or phallus, was at the heart of classical Roman art and life. No God was more represented in ancient Rome than the Phallic deity Priapus, and the fescennine verses, one of the earliest forms of Roman poetry, accompanied the celebrati...

A fire broke out in the coal seams of their town years ago, and the flames are still smoldering underground. Margaret and Fritzi, the two sisters who are the heroines of Invitation to the Bold of Heart, the debut novel by Swiss writers Dorothee El...

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 ...

This play by poet and political activist Aimé Césaire recounts the tragic death of Patrice Lumumba, the first prime minister of the Republic of Congo and an African nationalist hero. It follows Lumumba’s efforts to free the Congolese from Belgian ...

In the historic tradition of calendar stories and calendar illustrations, author and film director Alexander Kluge and celebrated visual artist Gerhard Richter have composed December, a collection of thirty-nine stories and thirty-nine snow-swept ...

How To Read Literature by Terry Eagleton, 8170463564, 9788170463566, Seagull Books

The concluding novel in a trilogy that has become a landmark of Palestinian fiction. An Old Carriage with Curtains is the third and final book in a masterful trilogy of novels encompassing the history of the people of the Palestinian village of Z...

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. Sin...

A posthumously published Hungarian masterpiece that reflects on fragmented lives. Born in 1963, Szilárd Borbély emerged as one of the most important poets of post-communist Europe, exploring the themes of grief, memory, and trauma in his critica...

A rare narrative of gay love in the Arab world that travels into the lives of a group of spirited youth during the Syrian Revolution. Youssef’s mother has always told him that he is named after the biblical prophet Joseph who had the power of fo...

A personal look into the mind of one of Europe’s first and foremost women of letters. At times poetic but not a poem, prosaic but not an essay, a letter is often pure writing for writing’s sake. Such is the case for Rahel Varnhagen von Ense, née...

A profound poem on the mystical and the ecstatic and about our connection with nature. Beachlight is a sustained poem divided into smaller parts that take on the anonymous voices of those lost and forgotten. A walk along a Singaporean beach tran...

Poetry from an especially deft magician of words. This latest book of wonders from Nancy Naomi Carlson fixes upon one of the few defenses we have to confront the body’s betrayals―our words. Though in the end, even the world’s last word “forgets ...

A chilling poetic reflection on the world we have inherited and the destructions that made it. To confront time, pre-modern Arabic poems often began with the poet standing before the ruins, real and imagined, of a beloved’s home. In Postcards fr...

A highly anticipated edition of Zaqtan’s work from 2014 to 2020, all in English for the first time. Ghassan Zaqtan is not only one of the most significant Palestinian poets at work today, but one of the most important poets writing in Arabic. Sin...

Two plays exploring the dark side of power and the human cost of injustice. What is the fate of justice when morality is subservient to power? What happens when people in power lose their moral compass, and truth becomes a casualty? This volume ...

An intensely personal and profoundly moving review of Bonnefoy’s childhood memories. In December 2015, six months before his death at the age of 93, Yves Bonnefoy concluded what was to be his last major text in prose, L’écharpe rouge, translated ...

The best-known dramatic works of Paula in its first English translation. This volume brings together the best-known dramatic works of Argentine playwright Romina Paula for the first time in English translation. As a playwright, novelist, actor, a...

The second volume of notes and reflections from one of Switzerland’s most prominent and prolific men of letters. One of Europe’s finest contemporary poets, Jaccottet is a writer of exacting attention. Through keen observations of the natural worl...

A critical intervention on the relationship between language and matter. If the twentieth century was the century in which language was at the center of thought, the twenty-first century has, so far, been the century of matter. The Matter of Lang...

The first volume of notes and reflections from one of Switzerland’s most prominent and prolific men of letters. Seedtime―Jaccottet’s notebooks―is an especially good introduction to this leading francophone Swiss author, containing the poet’s obse...

A vital addition to Seagull’s growing Italian List that focuses on leftist Italian thought, bringing famous as well as little-known yet crucial voices into the English language. As speaking animals, we continuously make use of an unassuming gramm...

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 sy...

A metafictional novel about two intertwined stories of love that seek to perpetuate themselves in history. The Worst Thing of All Is the Light tells two stories. First, that of the friendship of two heterosexual men, Koldo and Edorta, through the...

Written in the first four months of the war in Ukraine, fuelled by anger towards mindless violence, Nemec’s stories tackle the present moment and confront what really matters at times of abundant destruction. A Czech man in Ukraine in search of h...

A lyrical novel with a poetic narrative about an overlooked individual in Arab African history. For two days the rabbi rides on a donkey to find the ideal fiancée. Legs and arms shaved, hands dyed with henna, a girl to be married must shine like ...