Bøger i Seagull World Literature serien

A lyrical travelogue charting Tomas Espedal's journeys to and ruminations around the world, from his native Norway to Istanbul and beyond. "Why travel?" asks Tomas Espedal in Tramp, "Why not just stay at home, in your room, in your house, in the place you like better than any other, your own place. The familiar house, the requisite rooms in which we have gathered the things we need, a good bed, a desk, a whole pile of books. The windows giving on to the sea and the garden with its apple trees and holly hedge, a beautiful garden, growing wild." The first step in any trip or journey is always a footstep--the brave or curious act of putting one foot in front of the other and stepping out of the house onto the sidewalk below. Here, Espedal contemplates what this ambulatory mode of travel has meant for great artists and thinkers, including Rousseau, Kant, Hazlitt, Thoreau, Rimbaud, Whitman, Giacometti, and Robert Louis Stevenson. In the process, he confronts his own inability to write from a fixed abode and his refusal to banish the temptation to become permanently itinerant. Lyrical and rebellious, immediate and sensuous, Tramp conveys Espedal's own need to explore on foot--in places as diverse as Wales and Turkey--and offers us the excitement and adventure of being a companion on his fascinating and intriguing travels.

One night in the middle of winter, as deep snow covers the mountains and forests of Austria, a doctor is crossing a ridge from Traich to Foding to see a patient. He stumbles over a body in the darkness and fears it is a corpse. But it's not a corpse at all - in fact, it's wooden-legged Victor Halfwit, collapsed, but still very much alive.

The Austrian playwright, novelist, and poet Thomas Bernhard (1931-89) is acknowledged as one of the major writers of our time. This collection includes seven stories that capture Bernhard's distinct darkly comic voice and vision - often compared to Kafka and Musil - commenting on a corrupted world.

A father, Vlady, loses his job when he refuses to renounce socialist beliefs in the newly unified Germany - and as a result wants to explain to his alienated son what their family's long and passionate involvement with communism has really meant. The story he tells is of Ludwik, a Polish secret agent, and Gertrude, Vlady's mother.

Includes imaginative fables that recount the adventures of six bizarrely gifted child prodigies who wreak havoc on their baffled families.

Lakshmibai, the Queen of Jhansi, a legendary Indian heroine, led her troops against the British in the uprising of 1857, which is widely described as the first Indian War of Independence. This work traces the history of the growing resistance to the British, while building a picture of Lakshmibai as a complex, spirited, full-blooded woman.

A biography of Franz Liszt (1811-86) whose extraordinary career as a composer, conductor, and virtuoso pianist - whose incomparable skill and personal charisma dazzled audiences all over Europe, from London and Paris to Berlin, Moscow, and even Constantinople - made him the nineteenth-century equivalent of a modern international pop star.