Bøger udgivet af Seagull Books London Ltd

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 foresight. But when Youssef participated in the first demonstration in Damascus in 2011, he felt that the uprising against the Bashar al-Assad regime after forty years of silence and fear was "a miracle more powerful than that of the prophet."   While Josephine, a charming young Alawite, gathers in her home a group of youth to fight for their visions of a promising future, a forbidden love story unfolds between two men, Youssef and Mohammad. Meanwhile, young Khalid's love for Josephine is brutally interrupted by the agents of the oppressive regime. Homosexuality clashes with tradition, emancipation with persecution, and feelings with loyalties, leading to an upheaval that sweeps away the destinies of the young as well as that of an entire nation.   Omar Youssef Souleimane's eloquent novel is not only a narrative of the Syrian Revolution; it is also a story about inter-generational conflicts, rebellion, and liberation. With intense, poetic prose, he brilliantly captures the indomitable yearning for freedom that, despite all obstacles and setbacks, always survives in a hopeful person's heart until it's attained.

Challenging conventional notions of racial and regional identity, Léonora Miano provides a fresh perspective on the complexities of self-perception.   In this ground-breaking exploration, French-Cameroonian author Léonora Miano unveils a distinct sensibility shaped by her sub-Saharan African roots, setting her apart from those who identify as Afro-Europeans, or Afropeans, a group forged within the European context. Drawing on her unique perspective, Miano reveals the complexities that determine self-perception and complicate the bonds of identification and solidarity between Afro-Europeans and their sub-Saharan counterparts. Contrasting with France's approach of lumping all citizens of sub-Saharan descent together under an "African" label, the author questions the effectiveness of such categorization in fostering a genuine connection to one's country and assuming responsibility for its future.   Despite the many challenges, Miano finds hope in the Afropean identity-those who embrace the fusion of Africa and Europe within their self-designation-believing it holds the potential to embody a transformative, fraternal, anti-imperialist, and anti-racist societal project. Yet, she acknowledges the persistent struggle for acceptance and understanding in a society grappling with identity tensions. In this powerful narrative, Miano examines the allure of rejection that exists on both sides of the divide, offering a nuanced examination of the delicate balance between cultures, identities, and the pursuit of a utopian vision. Timely and captivating, this book is essential to understanding the Afropean perspective.

Three short story collections that sink into the lives of characters seeking meaning in a post-war world, available in a boxed set.   Sharp as a razor and as subtle as gossamer, Shmuel T. Meyer's masterfully crafted stories evoke unique individual sensibilities and destinies, resonating with the sensual details, smells, tastes, music, and sounds of a specific time and place. And the War Is Over brings together three collections of short stories set on three continents in the aftermath of war: World War II and the Shoah in Grand European Express, the Korean War in The Great American Disaster, and the Arab-Israeli conflict in Kibbutz.   Characters both real and imagined run through a fabric so tightly woven that the threads of history and fiction can barely be separated: the Roman poet Clara who will never write again; Saul, a New York City police detective haunted by memories of the Pusan Perimeter; a brother out to avenge his sister's murder; the son of a former Nazi who joins the Red Army Faction. Tracing moments of encounter, their paths cross those of Allen Ginsberg, Albert Cossery, John Coltrane, and Duke Ellington. Characters travel by train from Venice to Paris, hike up the Val d'Annivers, listen to jazz in Greenwich Village, and ride a motorcycle along the sandy road to Haifa. Under the shadow of war, with death lurking, these multifaceted, evocative lives move in a space between coincidence and fate.

Poetry that serves as an evocative portrayal of diverse landscapes and cultures.   In these otherworldly poetry sequences, Samira Negrouche reminds us that "all life is movement," where "time passes through me / beings pass through me / they are me / I am them." The "I" is representative of one voice, three voices, all voices, all rooted in movement as their bodies brush past one another, brush against thresholds of time and space. Everything is in flux-including the dream-like landscapes at the borders of borders-as the poet seeks to recover parts of self and memory, on both a personal and universal level. In these poems, history-laden locales such as Algiers, Timbuktu, N'Djamena, Cotonou, Zanzibar, Cape Town, and Gorée are evoked. Even the language, expertly and sensitively translated by Nancy Naomi Carlson, refuses to be pinned down, as it loops back on itself. At times contradictory, at times fractured in meaning, syntax, and diction, the playful language is riddled with "restless" verbs. In the end, the "I" takes on prophetic overtones, instilling hope for the future.

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 Levin, the illustrious German-Jewish Berlin literary salon hostess from the early nineteenth century. She penned over ten thousand letters to more than three hundred recipients, including princes, philosophers, poets, family members, and the family cook. Written with a wink at posterity, collected and first published after her passing by her husband, Karl August Varnhagen von Ense, these letters constitute a singular contribution to German literature.   Varied in subject-from family affairs to linguistic, literary, and pressing social concerns-the poignant lyricism of her letters is all the more remarkable when we take into account that High German was not her first language; she grew up speaking, reading, and writing primarily Yiddish. Her shaky social status as a woman and a member of a precarious minority, combined with an astounding lucidity and a rare capacity to put her thoughts into words, made her a force to be reckoned with in her lifetime and thereafter as one of Germany's preeminent women of letters. As we see in I Just Let Life Rain Down on Me, her voice is as fresh and original as that of any of the recognized poets and thinkers of her day. As Rahel herself put it: "[O]ur language is our lived life; I invented mine for my own purposes, I was less able than many others to make use of preconceived turns of phrase, which is why mine are often clumsy, and in all respects faulty, but always true."   Compiled and translated by Peter Wortsman, this rewarding volume affords English-speaking readers the first privileged peek at the mindset of one of Europe's first and foremost women of letters.

An intimate glimpse into the life and letters of Rainer Maria Rilke, one of the most important poets of the twentieth century.   In July 1921, displaced European poet Rainer Maria Rilke sequestered himself in the chateau of Muzot, a thirteenth-century medieval tower perched in the vineyards above the town of Sierre in the Canton Valais, Switzerland. In this sun-flooded landscape of the Rhone Valley, he found beguiling echoes of Spain and his beloved Provence. Here, the Duino Elegies were famously completed and the Sonnets to Orpheus followed.   During this time, Rilke's correspondence also bloomed, and Letters around a Garden collects some of those letters together into English for the first time. One intriguing exchange from 1924 to 1926 was with a young aristocratic Swiss woman Antoinette de Bonstetten, a passionate horticulturist who had been recommended as a potential advisor for the redesign and upkeep of the Muzot rose garden. In twenty-two precious letters originally written in French, Rilke relishes the prospect of their elusive meeting, keenly discusses the plans for his garden, and wittily laments the trials of his plants. Beyond the encomium for Paul Valéry and poignant memory of place are passages of exquisite writing, in which Rilke evokes with trademark sensitivity the delicate relationship between the changing seasons and the natural world of his adopted region. We also witness the loving relationship evolve between these sometime-fugitive correspondents and how questions of solitariness and companionship impinge on one who faces unaccustomed challenges as his health tragically declines.

An unveiling of the presence of captivating figures and creatures throughout history. In this gripping philosophical and cultural exploration, Teresa Präauer sets out to investigate figures of transformation, transmission, and translation-across languages, cultures, genres, media, species, and spaces. Hybrids, chimeras, monsters, and liminal creatures of all sorts inhabit these pages, as indeed they do the pages of the cultural archive from Antiquity and the Middle Ages to the present day: everything from the harpies, ape-men, and cynocephali that inhabit the edges of medieval maps and taxonomies to the Krampuses and Furries that roam through Alpine villages and convention centers today. Yet these chimeras are not aberrations; rather, they reveal an essential truth about culture and artistic expression.   What emerges in Becoming Animal is a kaleidoscopic image of culture as the constant probing of the limits of the sayable, as an unending process of attempting to capture in words and symbols that which cannot be pinned down.

A personal perspective on the challenges of living through a global pandemic. When the COVID-19 pandemic hit, Michael Krÿger was suffering from severe shingles and just beginning treatment for leukemia. Because his immune system was so compromised that even a cough would have knocked him flat, he had to stay away from people. He retired to a wooden house near Lake Starnberg in Germany, and from there he dispatched his poetic messages. Krÿger‿s meditations from quarantine were printed for many months in the magazine of the Sÿddeutsche Zeitung and met with an enthusiastic response. In a Cabin, in the Woods collects fifty tableaux of nature, images of the immediate surroundings of a restricted life that also look beyond the horizon. At the same time, these poems look inward to explore transience, illness, and death. Humorous and melancholy, these are studies of the world made with the tiniest compass‿meditations on nature and the nature of self that touch us all.

A collection of poetic stream-of-consciousness prose meditations by Friederike Mayröcker. Friederike Mayröcker has no time. Not for summary and memory, not for excessive reviewing and reasoning, and certainly not for storytelling. She doesn't even have time for life itself--unless it's writing. What counts, in her view, is only the poetry and "the echoic inventions" of a life that lasted for almost a century, which is preserved in her writings. Widely considered one of the most important European poets of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, Mayröcker passed away in 2021 at the age of ninety-six. On the outside, her life may be subject to the impertinence of the finitude of all human existence. But on the inside, and in its transformation into the eternal moment, life only becomes richer and richer in forms of experience. In radically concentrated language and compellingly beautiful images, Mayröcker presents in this cahier a life that follows only one maxim: "Not just what is written, but existence, too, must be poetic."

Alexander Kluge explores the madcap, multifaceted world of the circus through a global geopolitical lens. The circus has fascinated Alexander Kluge ever since he was a child, and his devotion to it has been preserved throughout his cinematic output and his most recent literary work. In the circus, he finds both the shadow image of work and the epitome of human excellence, from love to war to revolution. As surfaces onto which utopias are projected, these elaborate performances offer a tangible representation of developments within civilization, with its nearly infinite possibilities and sometimes inevitable crashes--from the excited roar of the crowd to death on the floor of the ring. In Circus Commentary, Kluge's montage of modernities moves back and forth through time and space, expressing his unique mix of fictional and non-fictional reports, histories, and stories through semantic fields, images, and film sequences inserted in the book via QR codes. We encounter a broad panorama of perplexed artists and sophisticated surgeons cavorting alongside fighter pilots, sans-culottes drunk with dreams of omnipotence, and, most importantly, animals--to whose superhuman performances, this book creates a lasting memorial.

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 brings together two recent plays by eminent Indian theater personality Shanta Gokhale that address these burning questions. Maili Chadar; or, The Stained Shawl: A Tragedy in Four Acts traces the regression of the protagonist from the idealism of his youth to the cynicism of a man who has but one goal in life-power at all costs. Along the way, he develops a megalomanic sense of destiny for which he is willing to lose all that he has ever loved, in the process becoming an exemplar of the proverbial worm in the apple called democracy. In Truth and Justice: Four Monologues, women from different places and times speak of what men in power have done to them in the name of their hatred for the other-from the Dreyfus affair that rocked France in the nineteenth century to the deadly communal riots in Gujarat and the Sri Lankan Civil War in the early twenty-first century.

A collection of two plays by Indian playwright Satish Alekar.   Satish Alekar is widely considered one of the most progressive and influential playwrights in modern Indian theatre. This volume brings together two of Alekar's plays written over half a century apart, The Grand Exit and A Conversation with Dolly.   In The Grand Exit, written in Marathi in 1974, a dead man insists on being cremated in an old crematorium that will soon be privatized. In this irreverent masterpiece, father and son confront the mundane to honor the former's final wish. A Conversation with Dolly is the most contemporary of Alekar's plays, and his first to be published before it has been performed. In this play, an old man finds himself locked down during the COVID-19 pandemic, surrounded by Amazon boxes, talking and listening to his devoted nurse Dolly. Both plays are followed by interviews with the playwright which shed light on the origins and design of Alekar's dramaturgical genius.

A behind-the-scenes look at the life of filmmaker Mrinal Sen through the eyes of his son Kunal, who grew up immersed in the world of Indian cinema. âEURœNo one remembers when and why I started calling my father Bondhu. It was a strange way to address a father, as the word means âEUR¿friendâEUR(TM) in Bengali. . . . As I got older, I became very self-conscious about such an odd name . . . and yet I cannot explain why I could not switch to the more acceptable Baba or something similar.âEUR? Just as Kunal Sen, son of actor Gita Sen and filmmaker Mrinal Sen, was approaching adolescence, his fatherâEUR(TM)s cinematic celebrity was reaching new heights. In this memoir, Kunal reflects on growing up in a middle-class household in South Calcutta, where his fatherâEUR(TM)s Marxist beliefs and unrelenting urge âEURœto be challenged and contradictedâEUR? often collided with the practical challenges of making a living. Through it all, what emerges is a picture of a familyâEUR(TM)s unyielding commitment to the craft of cinema, the risks each of its members took, and their endearing sense of humor. Celebrating Mrinal SenâEUR(TM)s birth centenary in 2023, Bondhu takes us on an intimate journey of a son attempting to reconcile his fatherâEUR(TM)s public and private selves.

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.

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? Â

This essay examines the history of the Indian subcontinent and the Partition of 1947 from a pedagogical perspective.   How does education shape political rivalry and hostility? The Partition of the Indian subcontinent in 1947‿the violence that followed it, and its living legacy of rival nationalisms‿has made a deep and pervasive impact on education in both India and Pakistan. In Learning to Live with the Past, educationist Krishna Kumar dwells on the complex terrain every history teacher has to navigate: how to make the past come alive without running the risk of creating a desire to lose this “pastness.â€?   Substantiating this question with a wealth of experiences gained from his extensive research on history textbooks, as well as his interactions with students and teachers in both countries, Kumar explores the integral function the discipline of history plays in the project of nation-building. To help children learn to live with the past, Kumar amplifies the need for spaces that create possibilities for inquiries into a “longerâ€? common heritage shared by South Asia without necessarily denying a national narrative or encouraging an urge to undo the past. Â

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.

"A posthumously published Hungarian masterpiece that reflects on fragmented lives."--

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.

A collection of six Bernhard plays, all in English for the first time. Save Yourself if You Can is a collection of six plays that span the entirety of Thomas Bernhard's career as a dramatist. The plays collected in this long-awaited addition to Bernhard's oeuvre in English-The Ignoramus and the Madman, The Celebrities, Immanuel Kant, The Goal Attained, Simply Complicated, and Elizabeth II-traverse somber lyricism and misanthropy to biting satire and glorious slapstick. They explore themes that will be familiar to longtime readers of Bernhardt, but here they are presented in a subtly different register, attuned to the needs of the stage.

A glimpse into the world of young people, modern nomads, roving in search of a new and promising life. The Moon in Foil traces the stories of Petra, Natália, Anka, Mika, Juliana, and Jackie as they go out into the world in search of a better lifeâEUR"or maybe just a different one. In post-communist Europe, they have the freedom to study and work in places their parents couldnâEUR(TM)t even have visitedâEUR"Paris, London, Helsinki, and Budapest. But the reality of that âEURœfreedom,âEUR? they soon discover, is often nothing more than tedious work and poor living conditions. From close looks at the work of a housekeeper at a French hotel, a bartender at an Irish pub, a snowboarding instructor in Slovakia in the winter and an office worker in London in the summer, and a programmer in Helsinki, to explorations of larger topics such as marriage, divorce, and relationships, Zuska KepplováâEUR(TM)s novel is a millennialsâEUR(TM) odysseyâEUR"a search for the self by the postâEUR"Cold War generation.

A riveting novel that is both an indictment and an elegy, a second-person memoir of Nasser's final months in the voice of his former prisoner.   In 1959, at the age of twenty-two, Egyptian novelist Sonallah Ibrahim was imprisoned by Gamal Abdel Nasser's regime. Over the following five years in prison in Egypt's Western Desert, Ibrahim kept diaries that he smuggled out on cigarette papers. In this novel, Ibrahim takes up Nasser as a fictional character tied tightly to real events, offering a window into his daily life in his final years. Ibrahim follows Nasser during the War of Attrition and the aftermath of the 1967 war with Israel and looks back on the events of the previous decades. He also chronicles Nasser at his most vulnerable, detailing a more private set of Nasser's setbacks and defeats: the daily routines of a diabetic suffering from heart trouble in the months before his death. Political events as well as social and economic transformations are narrated through newspaper clippings and archival fragments, painting a portrait of the decline of a man who was once larger than life.

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.

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 a mirror. Every girl hopes to be the chosen one and ride off on a donkey to live in the city. The desert is the domain of men; they believe they see oases and palm trees sagging with fruit, while women see only sand on top of sand. A rapid look-around at the girls in the circle was enough for the traveling rabbi to find the right one. He chooses Yudah because of her name, a contraction of Yahuda, and because she lowered her eyes when he looked at her. The Fiancée Rode In on a Donkey tells Yudah‿s story. Instead of experiencing her dream of being chosen and riding off on a donkey to live in a palace, she finds herself in an encampment of tents swaying in the wind. She also doesn‿t find the Emir, who is battling on other fronts and soon surrenders. Yudah and the rest of his followers are exiled to Ile Sainte-Marguerite, where she pursues a tireless quest for her future husband in France, seeking a man she has never seen. Will the fantastic destiny of the young girl from the desert ever be fulfilled? In lyrical novel after novel, Vénus Khoury-Ghata chooses overlooked individuals from history and brings them back to life on the page. Hauntingly unforgettable, The Fiancée Rode In on a Donkey is yet another poetic narrative from one of the most respected French authors of our times. Â

A moving ode to the Mississippi delta inspired by magical realism and written in vibrant and poetic prose.  Blues in the Blood is an ode to the spring of 1932 in the Mississippi delta, when stifling heat crushed the countryside and threatened the harvest, pervasive injustice ruled the day, and ghostly riders of the Ku Klux Klan spread terror.  A panoramic historical and musical portrait, Blues in the Blood follows a poor young Black couple who believe their love for each other will save them from this devastation. Julien Delmaire introduces us to a gallery of figures: Blacks, Whites, Native Americans, mulattos, landowners, itinerant bluesmen, preachers, witches, corrupt politicians, prisoners, bootleggers, and Legba, the voodoo god, âEURœmaster of crossroads,âEUR? who, like an otherworldly detective, watches over peopleâEUR(TM)s destinies. As the story unfolds, a world is reborn: the delta, the birthplace of the blues, in which oppressed women and men rediscover the voices and rhythms of their humanity. Â

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 Zakariyya. The novels trace the wandering trajectories and inner lives of characters connected to this village across decades, as well as the vicissitudes of historical change and displacement in the land. Through the return of a middle-aged man to the site of an ancient monastery in the hills near Jericho that he once visited as a boy, the incredibly vivid and surprising stories of Hind, a stage actress and brilliant storyteller, the stories of tortuous routes of checkpoints and bureaucratic blockages, and decades of Occupation, Zaqtan creates a narrative of personal reckoning and reflection. The vectors of memory and historical reflection interweave in this dreamlike narrative, which delivers a singularly powerful depiction of subjective and collective experience in the face of devastating and sweeping historical change.