Bøger udgivet af Seagull Books London Ltd

Banaphool--which means wildflower--was the pen name of beloved Bengali writer Balaichand Mukhopadhyay (1899-1979). Wildfire brings together forty-five short pieces by Banaphool that are brilliantly representative of his uncompromising, multifaceted talent. Stark and short, often much too short, some even cryptic, these stories often leave much of the narrative to our imagination. Here we find an irresistible grab bag: utterly whimsical tales, several ghost stories, a few morality fables, some bitterly critical political satires, and a number of stories that examine the plight of those neglected in or rejected by society. The wildflower, Rabindranath Tagore had told the author, has no place in the porcelain vase, nor in the temple--it blossoms by the roadside, unnoticed, except by the creative vision. Identifying with it, Banaphool brings to our notice the worth of the marginal as well as the beauty of the mundane. The perfect introduction to a master writer, Wildfire will enchant and impress English-language readers new to Banaphool's work.

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 Satyajit Ray's classic Apu Trilogy. In this semi-autobiographical novel, Satyacharan is a young graduate in 1920s Calcutta, who, unable to find a job in the city, takes up the post of a 'manager' of a vast tract of forested land in neighboring Bihar. As he is increasingly enchanted and hypnotized by the exquisite beauty of nature, he is burdened with the painful task of clearing this land for cultivation. As ancient trees fall to the cultivator's axe, indigenous tribes--to whom the forest had been home for millennia--lose their ancient way of life. The promise of 'progress' and 'development' brings in streams of landless laborers, impoverished schoolmasters and starving boys from around the region, and the narrator chronicles in visionary prose the tale of destruction and dispossession that is the universal saga of man's struggle to bend nature to his will. Written in 1937-39, and now available in English translation, Aranyak is an unforgettable account of hard lives in a place of vanishing beauty, preserved here for all time by a brilliant artist.

A play that recounts the tragic death of Patrice Lumumba, the first prime minister of the Congo Republic and an African nationalist hero.

Two men talk in Tokyo. One, a Belgian, is a diplomat. The other, Dutch, is a photographer. What, they wonder, is the real face of Japan? How can they get beyond the European idea of the nation and its people--with its exoticism--and see Japan as it truly is? The Belgian has an idea: he helps the photographer find a model to shoot in front of Mount Fuji as the "typical Japanese." The plan works better than either had imagined--in fact, it works too well: the photographer falls in love, neglects his friend and his career, and, feeling out of place and disillusioned in Holland, returns to Japan as often as possible over the next five years. A reunion is planned: the three will meet again at Mount Fuji. Time, it seems, has stood still . . . except the woman has a secret, and plans of her own. This moving novel of obsession and difference is the latest masterwork from one of the greatest European writers working today, redolent with the power of desire and alive to the limits of our understanding of others.

"'Poâesie et photographie' was originally delivered as the Lezione Sapegno for 2009 at the University of Val d'Aoste, The text of that lecture was subsequently published by Nino Aragno of Turin, Italy. The present version is a greatly amended and developed version of the original lecture, which it supersedes."--Page [vi].

"Originally published in Arabic in 1995"--Title page verso.

Alawia Sobh's acclaimed Arabic novel of the Lebanese Civil War is a rare depiction of women's experience across class, sect, and generation in this region-defining conflict. Rich with everyday detail, uncovering the collusions of ordinary and extraordinary violence, and mixing female voices of different ages and beliefs, Sobh's work is not only an illumination of an important historical period at a new scale. It is also a unique meditation on the nature of storytelling. In The Keeper of Stories, stories struggle to survive the erasures of war and to rescue the sweetness of living, and connect the tellers and their audience in sometimes welcome, sometimes maddening ways. The transformation of pain and love into art is both the subject and substance of this necessary new book, sensitively brought into English by a translator who shares aspects of Sobh's background and worked with the author on the translation.

In March 2010, Robert Menasse went to Brussels to begin researching a novel about the European Union. Instead of producing a work of fiction, however, his extended stay in Brussels resulted in The European Courier, a text in which he examines the European community from its beginnings in the transnational "Montanunion" (European Coal and Steel Community, 1951) to the current "financial crisis" of the European Union. In the course of his analysis, Menasse focuses on the institutional structures and forces that work to advance--or obstruct--the European project and its goal of a truly postnational European democracy. Given the internal tensions among the European Commission, the European Parliament, and the European Council, Menasse argues that what is frequently misunderstood as a financial crisis is, in fact, a political one. As Menasse claims in The European Courier, "Either the Europe of nation-states will perish or the project of transcending the nation-states will."

Of the key figures from a remarkable generation of French-language poets--Anne Perrier, Yves Bonnefoy, Philippe Jaccottet, Jacques Dupin, Andre du Bouchet, Jacques Reda, and Pierre-Albert Jourdan--who have poetically scrutinized what might be called "the nature of Nature," Pierre Chappuis (b. 1930) has remained unjustly absent in English except for scattered translations in print magazines, online reviews, and two anthologies. This book rights this situation by making available a generous representative selection of his prolific output, ranging from his pioneering collections of short prose, Blind Distance (1974), and of short verse, Full Margins (1997), through his most recent book of poetry, Cuts (2014). Long celebrated in his native Switzerland, Chappuis delves into questions related to landscape, phenomenology, the essence of life, and the role of the perceiver. He writes with contagious passion, both in his poetic prose (with its sinuous style and parenthetical inserts) and in his--in contrast--succinct, skeletal, haiku-like verse whose titles, like invigorating afterthoughts, are often placed at the end. Two styles fascinate in Chappuis' oeuvre: his stream-like prose with its eddies and rapids and his poetry that captures "bits of wind."

Originally published in 1965, this volume was immediately judged to be one of the main contributions to the intellectual life of the Italian Sixties. Three years later, in 1968, it became clear that it had anticipated many of the themes of the New Left and the student revolt. Ex-partisan, poet, literary critic and teacher, Fortini had been immersed for more than twenty years in the cut and thrust of ideological debate. In these pages, besides discussing problems of cultural organization and the consciousness industry, he described the end of militant anti-fascism and the alliance between progressivism and literature, the end of the social mandate of writers and the beginning of a 'revolution of civilization'. In writing, Fortini did not intend to speak to the young but the young, perhaps in the spirit of contradiction, listened to him. Apart from some of the crucial interventions into the literary and critical debates of the Sixties, the volume includes essays on Kafka, Pasternak, Spitzer, Auerbach, Lukacs, Lu Xun, Proust and Brecht.

Toby Litt is best known for his hip-lit fiction, which, in its sharing of characters and themes across numerous stories and novels, has always taken an unusual, hybrid form. In Mutants, he applies his restless creativity to nonfiction. The book brings together twenty-six essays on a range of diverse topics, including writers and writing, and the technological world that informs and underpins it. Each essay is marked by Litts distinct voice, heedless of formal conventions and driven by a curiosity and a determination to give even the shortest piece enough conceptual heft to make it come alive. Taken as a whole, these pieces unexpectedly cohere into a manifesto of sorts, for a weirder, wilder, more willful fiction.

Jason stops to listen to yet another busker . . . He concludes that it is not for her voice--rather airy and desperate--that her open guitar case is bristling with greenbacks. It is for her strawberry blonde bangs peeping out from under her hat, and her deep blue eyes, and her willowy stature . . . and her bare feet with tan lines drawn by sandals . . . She is trying hard to make her voice sound full-bodied and round, but she was not born for singing. She loses a beat to say "thank you" after Jason deposits a single, and then she tries hard to catch up with the song before it goes out of control. At that moment Jason recognises her. Rachel. Rachel Boucher from Jensen Township . . . Athens County, Ohio, USA. When Rachel Boucher and Jason de Klerk meet again--five years after high school--they immediately renew their friendship. But for Jason their friendship is just a stepping stone to something more--a romantic union that seems to have the blessing of the whole community. That is until Rachel becomes involved with Skye Riley. As Skye and Rachel grow ever closer, Jason's anger at the relationship boils over into violence, violence that turns the community on its head, setting old friends and neighbours against one another. But this is just a taste of things to come as, it turns out, Rachel is pregnant . . .

Sebastian Dreaming comprises the second book in James Reidel's Our Trakl series. Published posthumously in the original German in 1915, this is the second and last collection prepared by Trakl himself. Indeed, the Austrian poet may have tied his own fate to it. During his last days in a military hospital, Trakl had politely requested proofs of Sebastian Dreaming from his publisher and waited a week before overdosing on cocaine. He had been told once before that the war, which drove him into madness, had indefinitely postponed his masterpiece. Now the wait is over for Trakl's book to appear separately and in English. Until now translations of the poems from this collection have appeared in selections and complete volumes. Reidel has chosen to present the book individually, as Trakl wanted his book experienced. To achieve this, a certain verisimilitude in these English renderings has been achieved--even omitting the German facing texts is at work here--for which the translator has gone to great lengths, with an eye for seeing Trakl in his time and place, not only as an early modern poet but one whose strange and intriguing language and setting came from another century and still haunt us in ours.

IN

IN

IN

IN

IN

IN