Bøger udgivet af Seagull Books London Ltd

A two-part essay on the “mythâ€? of revolution and the figure of the artist. Iconic French novelist, playwright, and essayist Jean-Paul Sartre is widely recognized as one of the most important philosophers of the twentieth century, and his work has remained relevant and thought-provoking through the decades. The Seagull Sartre Library now presents some of his most incisive philosophical, cultural, and literary critical essays in twelve newly designed and affordable editions.  On Revolution consists of a long essay in two parts in which Sartre dwells upon the “mythâ€? of revolution and goes on to analyze revolutionary ideas in fascism and, especially, Marxism. In the second essay, Sartre examines the figure of the artist and his conscience, especially in relation to communism. Â

Two long Sartre essays that explore the Négritude poetry movement and the work of French writer Francis Ponge. Iconic French novelist, playwright, and essayist Jean-Paul Sartre is widely recognized as one of the most important philosophers of the twentieth century, and his work has remained relevant and thought-provoking through the decades. The Seagull Sartre Library now presents some of his most incisive philosophical, cultural, and literary critical essays in twelve newly designed and affordable editions.  On Poetry includes two long essays in this slim volume. The first explores the Négritude poetry movement by analyzing the work of several Black poets of the time. The second is a meditation on the poetry of renowned French author Francis Ponge (1899‿1988), who, influenced by surrealism, developed his unique form of prose poetry.

Set in the entertainment world in France, this searing memoir explores the realities of being a mixed or biracial French citizen. In Blind Spot, Myriam Tadessé exposes the difficulty, even the impossibility, for France to truly understand and celebrate the lived realities of mixed or biracial French citizens. What the French word métis--which translates to "half-breed" or "mixed-race"--hides is how central the notion of race actually is in a society that claims to repudiate it. The French film and theater world, in which Tadessé has made her career, appears unable to confront the individuality of the performers. They are required to correspond to categories--often based on race--that don't allow for biracial identities. This classification not only contradicts France's asserted ideals but also views as anomalies those who defy ethno-racial assumptions. Drawing on her personal experiences as a biracial Ethiopian-French woman and her family history, Tadessé explores the realities of life for mixed-race individuals in France through her searing and honest memoir.

Egocentric and domineering, the author's grandmother was once a vibrant and sensual beauty. In Indochina at the end of World War II, she thrived in the social life of the French colony. In this memoir, the author reweaves the history of her family - and the legend of her grandmother - leaving no stone unturned and no skeleton in the closet.

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

First published in 2014 by Transcript with title, Performing Stories: Erzèahlen in Theater und Performance.

In a world full of devils, the giant ape Kong defends what he loves the most. But who and what is this undomesticated animal? Might it reside within us? As we tread confidently, is this where the earth opens up beneath us?   In Kong‿s Finest Hour, Alexander Kluge explores anew the accessible spaces where Kong dwells within us and in our million-year-old past. The more than two hundred stories contained in this volume form a chronicle of connections that together survey these spaces using diverse perspectives. These include stories about the folds of Kong‿s nose, the voice of the author‿s mother, the poet Heinrich von Kleist and Jack the Ripper, the indestructability of the political, and the supercontinent Pangaea that once unified the earth. Dissolving theory into storytelling has been Kluge‿s lifelong pursuit, and this magnificent collection tells stories of people as well of things.   First in a series of Kluge‿s Chronicles forthcoming from Seagull Books, Kong‿s Finest Hour will delight those familiar with his writing as well as introduce readers to the brilliance of one of Germany‿s greatest living writers. Â

In contemporary Norwegian fiction, Tomas Espedal‿s work stands out as uniquely bound up with the author‿s personal experiences. His first book, Tramp, introduced us to the wanderer Tomas; Against Art told us how a boy approaches art and eventually becomes a writer; Against Nature examined love‿s labor‿the job of writing; and in Bergerners, he is torn between his love for his home town and what lies beyond. Now, in The Year, we encounter the author‿s struggle to reconcile his inner life with the external world, and the myriad forms of love, hate, loss, and death‿both personal and literary‿with the immutable pattern of time and the seasons. It is the journal of a year, a diary like no other. And suffusing it all are questions Petrarch asked: How do you live when the one you love is gone? And when your life force shifts from spring to autumn, how do you find the good death?   Written as a long poem, The Year is Espedal‿s riveting stream of consciousness‿profound, edgy, sometimes manic, but always intensely intimate. Â

A powerful history of the long tradition of political dissent in India published at a moment when the very idea of dissent is under attack.

With fifteen stunning new color drawings by Kentridge and an additional coda, this revised edition of Accounts and Drawings from Underground continues its remarkable documentation of the stories of migrant laborers and the flows of capital and desire, providing us with a palpable sense of a vanished world.

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. 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?

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 place untouched by what they considered to be Western neuroses. This title documents that Afghan journey.

Any new book by poet, essayist, writer, and translator Hans Magnus Enzensberger, one of the most influential and internationally renowned German intellectuals, is cause for notice, and Mr. Zed‿s Reflections is no exception. Every afternoon for almost a year, a plump man named Mr. Zed comes to the same spot in the city park and engages passersby with quick-witted repartee. Those who pass ask, who is this man? A wisecracker, a clown, a belligerent philosopher? Many shake their heads and move on; others listen to him, engage with him, and, again and again, end up at the same place. He doesn‿t write anything down, but his listeners often take notes. With subversive energy and masterful brevity, Mr. Zed undermines arrogance, megalomania, and false authority. A determined speaker who doesn‿t care for ambitions, he forces topics that others would rather keep to themselves. Reluctant to trust institutions and seeing absolutely nothing as “non-negotiable,â€? he admits mistakes and does away with judgment.  He is no mere ventriloquist dummy for his creator‿he is too stubborn for that. And at the end of the season, when it becomes too cold and uncomfortable in the park, he disappears, never to be seen again. Collected in this thought-provoking and unique work are the considerations and provocations of this squat, park-bench philosopher, giving us a volume of truths and conversations that are clear-cut, skeptical, and fiercely illuminating.

A screenplay that was developed from an episode in the author's 1964 novel "Gantenbein", or "A Wilderness of Mirrors".

Set in the early days of the Jewish state, Yankinton tells the stories of refugees from the Holocaust and antisemitism who struggled to build new lives in Israel. Through the eyes of a young Orthodox Jewish girl growing up in Tel Aviv, we watch a colorful mosaic of characters from Soviet revolutionaries to weapons runners during the War of Independence. Faced with the difficulties of the traumatized adults around her, from panic attacks to suicide attempts, the girl seeks moments of wonder among the struggle and tragedy. We join her as she moves through the Tel Aviv streets, avoiding the spots exposed to Arab sniper fire; seeks literature of the wider world in a city awash in translations of Soviet propaganda novels; and navigates the idiosyncrasies of the adults around her. With her, we listen in on political discussions, reminiscences of Russia and wartime Eastern Europe, and Soviet revolutionary songs accompanied by balalaikas. We track the lives of the couple for which the novel is named. Mrs. Yankinton smuggled grenades in her baby‿s carriage during Israel‿s War of Independence; for years after, she would end every day standing at attention, alone in her living room, when the national anthem came over the radio. Mr. Yankinton, whose arrest as a revolutionary in Soviet Russia foiled his plans to study medicine, became the proud curator of the Zionist visionary Jabotinsky‿s complete works. In this rich mosaic of scenes and characters from postwar Tel Aviv, Shihor muses on the vital significance of the act of remembering and of the search for flashes of magic in the darkness. Â

After immigrating with his German Jewish family to South America in the 1930s, Heinz Magnus hopes to escape the Nazi regime and build a new life for himself. But with the storm clouds of war gathering over Europe, the Politeama Theatre in Buenos Aires is chosen as the venue for the Chess Tournament of Nations. The world‿s eyes are suddenly fixed on Heinz‿s newly adopted city. Heinz and a colorful cast of characters‿drawn from real life, the author‿s imagination, and stolen from the pages of Stefan Zweig‿find themselves caught up in a web of political intrigue, romantic entanglements, and sporting competition that seems to hold the fate of the world hanging in the balance. Ariel Magnus leaves no stone unturned in his efforts to learn more about his grandfather and the country to which he emigrated in the 1930s. Chess with My Grandfather is a playful, genre-shifting novel combining tales of international espionage, documentary evidence, and family lore. In this extraordinary book, Magnus blends fact and fiction in a delirious exploration of a dark period of history, family, identity, the power of art and literature and, of course, the fascinating world of chess. Â

Written during the final stages of the Indian Independence movement, between the gloom and angst of the interwar period and at the cusp of the beginning of modern India, Bhuwaneshwar‿s short stories both capture the melancholy of the time and ask what it means to be human in an indifferent and amoral world. These stories are truly an event in the history of modern Hindi literature‿his work marks a complete break from the neo-romanticism and mysticism of his predecessors and contemporaries and establishes him as the definitive founder of the modern Hindi short story. His stories are populated with lonely characters from all walks of life: doctors, students, nomadic communities, acrobats, single mothers, soldiers returning from war, neglected children, and more. They are people living on the margins, introspecting their own anxieties and existence in an increasingly uncertain world set in places as far apart as hill stations, anonymous Indian villages, highways, railway compartments, and small towns in France. This new collection includes all of Bhuwaneshwar‿s twelve published short stories, none of which have been translated into English before now. Cinematic and peerless, these tales combine images, sketches, sounds, fragments, dialogues, and frame-narrative techniques of Indian folktales, ultimately creating a montage of modern Indian psyche not found in any other work of Hindi literature. Nearly a century old, Bhuwaneshwar‿s stories read like they were written in modern day, dealing with questions and anxieties that continue to haunt and reappear, much like his iconic wolves, in the twenty-first century.   Â

Set in the 1970s and ‿80s, The Hangman‿s House narrates the life and times of a Hungarian family in Romania. Those were extraordinary times of oppression, poverty and hopelessness, and Andrea Tompa‿s latest novel depicts everyday life under the brutal communist dictatorship of Nicolae CeauÈ¿escu, referred to by the narrator as an unnamed “one-eared hangman.â€? CeauÈ¿escu is omnipresent throughout the story‿in portraits in classrooms and schoolbooks, in the empty food stores, in TV programs, in obligatory Party demonstrations. Most insidiously, he is present in the dreams and nightmares of common people, who, in this cruel period of history, become cruel to one another, just like the dictator.   Our narrator, a teenage “Girl,â€? observes life through tangled, almost interminable sentences, trying to understand and process the many questions in her life: why her family is falling apart; why her mother has three jobs; why her father becomes an alcoholic; why her grandmother dreams of “Hungarian timesâ€?; and, most troubling, why there is persecution all around. Brutal though the times are, Girl‿s narration is far from a mere indictment. It is suffused with love, tenderness and irony.   Written by a woman and featuring a young woman narrator, The Hangman's House focuses intently on how women play the principal roles in holding together the resilient fabric of society. Evocative of the celebrated wry humor that distinguishes the best of Hungarian literature, Tompa‿s novel is a tour de force that will introduce a brilliant writer to English-language readers.

Philippe Jaccottet‿s newest work follows in some ways the approach of Seedtime, his recent two-volume collection of notebooks. Similarly comprising on-the-spot jottings, philosophical reflections, literary commentary, dream narratives and sundry “notes,â€? this book nonetheless differs from the preceding volumes in that the Swiss poet includes more personal material than ever before. Drawing on unpublished notebooks from the years 1952‿2005, Jacottet offers here passages about his family, the death of his father-in-law and of his mother, his encounters with other major poets‿such as René Char, Francis Ponge, Jean Tardieu, and his friends Yves Bonnefoy and André du Bouchet‿and his trips abroad, as well as, characteristically, his walks in the countryside around the village of Grignan, in the south of France, where he has lived since 1953. For a poet who has been notoriously discreet about his life, this book offers unexpected glimpses of the private man. Above all, the entries in this notebook show how one of the greatest European poets grapples with the discouraging elements of existence, counterbalancing them by recording fleeting perceptions in which “something else,â€? almost like a threshold, seems present. Â

One of South Africa‿s best-known writers during the apartheid era, Alex La Guma was a lifelong activist and a member of the South African Communist Party and the African National Congress. Persecuted and imprisoned by the South African regime in the 1950s and 60s, La Guma went into exile in the United Kingdom with his wife and children in 1966, eventually serving as the ANC‿s diplomatic representative for Latin America and the Caribbean in Cuba. Culture and Liberation captures a different dimension of his long writing career by collecting his political journalism, literary criticism, and other short pieces published while he was in exile.   This volume spans La Guma‿s political and literary life in exile through accounts of his travels to Algeria, Lebanon, Vietnam, Soviet Central Asia, and elsewhere, along with his critical assessments of Paul Robeson, Nadine Gordimer, Maxim Gorky, Alexander Solzhenitsyn, and Pablo Neruda, among other writers. The first dedicated collection of La Guma‿s exile writing, Culture and Liberation restores an overlooked dimension of his life and work, while opening a window on a wider world of cultural and political struggles in Africa, Asia, and Latin America during the second half of the twentieth century. Â

Widely considered to be among the most important Italian poets of the twentieth century, Sandro Penna was born and raised in Perugia but spent most of his life in Rome. Openly gay, Penna wrote verses celebrating homosexual love with lyrical elegance. His writing alternates between whimsy and melancholia, but it is always full of light. Juggling traditional Italian prosody and subject matter with their gritty urban opposites in taut, highly concentrated poems, Penna‿s lyrics revel in love and the eruption of Eros together with the extraordinary that can be found within simple everyday life. There is something ancient in Penna‿s poetry, and something Etruscan or Greek about the poems, though the landscape is most often of Rome: sensual yet severe, sinuous yet solid, inscrutable, intangible, and languorous, with a Sphinx-like and sun-soaked smile. Penna‿s city is eternal‿a mythically decadent Rome that brings to mind Paris or Alexandria. And though the echoes resound‿from Rimbaud, Verlaine, and Baudelaire to Leopardi, D‿Annunzio, and Cavafy‿the voice is always undeniably and wonderfully Penna‿s own. Â

Cargo Hold of Stars is an ode to the forgotten voyage of a forgotten people. Khal Torabully gives voice to the millions of indentured men and women, mostly from India and China, who were brought to Mauritius between 1849 and 1923. Many were transported overseas to other European colonies. Kept in close quarters in the ship's cargo hold, many died. Most never returned home. With Cargo Hold of Stars, Torabully introduces the concept of 'Coolitude' in a way that echoes Aimé Césaire's term 'Negritude, ' imbuing the term with dignity and pride, as well as a strong and resilient cultural identity and language. Stating that ordinary language was not equipped to bring to life the diverse voices of indenture, Torabully has developed a 'poetics of Coolitude' a new French, peppered with Mauritian Creole, wordplay, and neologisms--and always musical. The humor in these linguistic acrobatics serves to underscore the violence in which his poems are steeped. Deftly translated from the French by Nancy Naomi Carlson, Cargo Hold of Stars is the song of an uprooting, of the destruction and the reconstruction of the indentured laborer's identity. But it also celebrates setting down roots, as it conjures an ideal homeland of fraternity and reconciliation in which bodies, memories, stories, and languages mingle--a compelling odyssey that ultimately defines the essence of humankind.