Bøger udgivet af Seagull Books London Ltd

A compelling memoir that focuses on the intersectionality of race and sexuality experienced by a gay Asian man living in a white world.   Born to Chinese-Cambodian parents in France, Jean-Baptiste Phou has pursued a diverse artistic career since 2008. Through his public views and artistic works, he has focused mainly on the experiences of Asians in France. Up until now, he's always been careful not to raise issues of sexuality-in particular, his homosexuality.   In this searing memoir, Phou faces his fears and shame to examine the role his ethnic origin has played in the construction of his sexual identity and his romantic relationships in a predominantly white environment. An astute observer of the various ways in which his body has been perceived, Phou explores how these perceptions have shaped his relationship with himself and others. How does a marginalized person develop emotionally and build, reclaim, and express their sexuality? Drawing on various works of history, sociology, gender studies, literature, and popular culture, Phou sensitively examines various strategies developed in response to this question.   Being gay in a largely straight world is difficult but being Asian within this sexual minority can be a doubly oppressive experience. Coming Out of My Skin deftly tackles this challenge and aspires for a reconciliation that can empower people of sexual and racial minorities to joyfully inhabit their bodies.

A tense sociopolitical novel exploring power, violence, and morality in 1970s India.  The Murderer's Mother takes readers to the late 1970s in the Indian state of West Bengal, where the Communist Party-led Left Front has just been voted into power.  It tells the story of Tapan, who has been installed as a gang leader by the most powerful man in the locality in order to kill "unwanted obstacles," which he does, one after another. Tapan knows there is no other way he can earn a living, but at the same time, he is desperate to protect his family. He tries to stop petty crime and assaults on women, even as he protects his patron's interests. Through the dissonance, he becomes both a feared and revered figure, but his patron's game becomes clear: now the murderer, too, must be eliminated.

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 transforms into a meditation that bridges an ecological consciousness to the sexual and the homoerotic. The poems in Beachlight expose revelations about the nature of desire, inviting readers to walk beside--and inside--them, reminding us of what we gain when we abandon ourselves to nature and exhorting us to reclaim our primordial connections to the world and to one another.

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. Since the publication of his first collection in 1980, Zaqtan's presence as a poet has evolved with the same branching and cumulative complexity as his poems--an invisible system of roots insistently pushing through the impacted soil of political and national narratives. Strangers in Light Coats is the third collection of Zaqtan's poetry to appear in English. It brings together poems written between 2014 and 2020 drawn from six volumes of poetry. Catching and holding the smallest particles of observation and experience in their gravity, the poems sprout and grow as though compelled, a trance of process in which fable, myth, and elegy take form only to fall apart and reconfigure, each line picked apart by the next and brought into the new body.

An exploration by an artist and writer duo of a fundamental constant in the history of humankind: rage, and its impact on the world. Rage and obstinacy are close relatives--and fundamental categories in the work of both Georg Baselitz and Alexander Kluge. In World-Changing Rage, these two accomplished German creators explore links and fractures between two cultures through two media: ink and watercolor on paper, and the written word. The long history of humankind is also a history of rage, fury, and wrath. In this book, Baselitz and Kluge explore the dynamism of rage and its potential to rapidly grow and erupt into blazing protests, revolution, and war. The authors also reflect the melancholy archetype of the Western hero (and his deconstruction) against the very different heroic ethos of the Japanese antipodes. More powerful than rage, they argue, is wit, as displayed in the work of Japanese master painter Katsushika Hokusai. In this volume, Baselitz repeatedly draws an image of Hokusai, depicting him with an outstretched finger, as if pointing towards Europe in a mixture of rage, wrath, irony, and laughter, all-too-fleetingly evident in his expression. A unique collaboration between two of the world's leading intellectuals, World-Changing Rage will leave every reader with a deeper appreciation of the human condition.

A reissue of a comic and tragic play that asks just how much of our life we could--or would--change if we got another chance. In this play by Swiss playwright and novelist Max Frisch, a middle-aged behavioral researcher Kürmann is given the opportunity to start his life over at any point he chooses and change his decisions and actions in matters both serious and mundane--He could save his marriage, become politically active, take better care of his health, or even change the color of his living room furniture. Despite his intention to apply the wisdom he has acquired with age, Kürmann finds himself inexorably trapped in the same decisions. Ultimately proving fatal, Kürmann's life game interrogates how much of our own path is shaped by seemingly random factors and how much is in fact predetermined by our own limited, conditioned selves. The play's central idea--that our lives are nothing but a self-conscious play with imaginary identities--is brilliantly captured in Biography's dramaturgical form, setting up a theatre rehearsal as the metaphor for the endless possibilities and variables of the game of life. Frisch's own revised, dramatically heightened version of his play celebrates not only the theatre as a form of self-expression but also the human condition in all its potential and limitations as it showcases both comic and tragic outcomes that define all our lives.

Dark stories of failed dreams and contemporary desperation in Los Angeles. In a rundown Los Angeles apartment building--the titular Starlite Terrace--Patrick Roth unfurls the tragic linked stories of Rex, Moss, Gary, and June, four neighbors, in a sort of burlesque of the Hollywood modern. In each of their singular collisions with fame, Roth's dark prose presages a universal and mythical fate of desperation. In "The Man at Noah's Window," Rex shares the story of his father, a supposed hand double for Gary Cooper in High Noon. In "Eclipse of the Sun," Moss, who lives in fear of the next holocaust, awaits a visit from the long-lost daughter he has tracked down. In "Rider on the Storm," Gary, a rock drummer and born-again Christian, who "almost played" on the Turtles' 60s-hit "Happy Together," strives to find an escape from his personal guilt. And in "The Woman in the Sea of Stars," June, a former Hollywood studio secretary whose husband once cheated on her with Marilyn Monroe, makes the best of a disconnected life until she emerges reborn through ashes strewn in the illuminated swimming pool of the Starlite Terrace. In each of these four tales of wannabes and almost-weres, Roth's L.A. portraits unfold in rare style, and, in Krishna Winston's masterful translation, the hopeless, loveless perversion of an Ed Ruscha-inspired California becomes a compelling pageant of all-American grotesques that is not to be missed.

A meticulously researched book that collects twelve playscripts written by European Jews imprisoned in the Terezín ghetto during the Holocaust. The concentration camp and Jewish ghetto at Terezín, or Theresienstadt, in what is now the Czech Republic, was a site of enormous suffering, fear, and death. But amid this horrific period, there was also a thriving and desperately vibrant cultural life. While the children's drawings and musical pieces created in the ghetto have become justly famous, the prisoners' theatrical works, though a lesser-known aspect of their artistic endeavors, deserves serious attention as well. Performing Captivity, Performing Escape collects twelve theatrical texts--cabaret songs and sketches, historical and verse dramas, puppet plays, and a Purim play--written by Czech and Austrian Jews. Together these works reveal the wide range of ways in which the prisoners engaged with and escaped from life in the ghetto through performance. The anthology opens with an insightful prologue by novelist Ivan Klíma, who was interned in the ghetto as a child and contains a detailed introduction by editor Lisa Peschel about the pre-war theatrical influences and wartime conditions that inspired the theater of the ghetto. The array of theatrical forms collected in this anthology speaks of the prisoners' persistence of hope in a harrowing time and will be a moving read for students and scholars of the Holocaust.

An experiment with the sonnet form by one of the foremost French poets of his generation. Yves Bonnefoy has wowed the literary world for decades with his diffuse volumes. First published in France in 2008, The Anchor's Long Chain is an indispensable addition to his oeuvre. Enriching Bonnefoy's earlier work, the volume, translated by Beverley Bie Brahic, also innovates, including an unprecedented sequence of nineteen sonnets. These sonnets combine the strictness of the form with the freedom to vary line length and create evocative fragments. Compressed, emotionally powerful, and allusive, the poems are also autobiographical--but only in glimpses. Throughout, Bonnefoy conjures up life's eternal questions with each new poem. Longer, discursive pieces, including the title poem's meditation on a prehistoric stone circle and a legend about a ship, are also part of this volume, as are a number of poetic prose pieces in which Bonnefoy, like several of his great French predecessors, excels. Long-time fans will find much to praise here, while newer readers will quickly find themselves under the spell of Bonnefoy's powerful, discursive poetry.

Carefully perched somewhere between tragedy and grotesque, high-pitched and squeamish, Jelinek's play, On the Royal Road, brings into focus the phenomenon of right-wing populism, which spreads like a virus and has a lasting effect on global politics. Nobel Prize winner Elfriede Jelinek is known as a writer who works in response to contemporary crises and cultural phenomena. Perhaps none of her works display that quality as clearly as On the Royal Road. Three weeks after Donald Trump's election, Jelinek mailed her German editor the first draft of this play, which turns out to be a stunningly prescient response to Trump and what he represents. In this drama, we discover that a "king," blinded by himself, who has made a fortune with real estate, golf courses, and casinos, suddenly rules the United States, and the rest of the people of the world rub their eyes in disbelief until no one sees anything anymore. As topical as the evening news, yet with insight built on a lifetime of closely observing politics and culture, On the Royal Road brings into focus the phenomenon of right-wing populism, which spreads like a virus and has a lasting effect on global politics. Carefully perched somewhere between tragedy and grotesque, high-pitched and squeamish, Jelinek in this work questions her own position and forms of resistance.

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 his alter ego. A gang of homeless kids driven from a cellar by tenants using it as a shelter from the war. A German couple who 'rented a womb' in Ukraine, whose child is now stuck in Kyiv. A teenager partnered with a Valkyrie for the distribution of lavash in besieged Mariupol delays his flight until it is too late. A Russian academic mounting a protest in the center of Moscow dressed in a costume from Swan Lake. They may not be soldiers at the front, but for the characters in these stories, life will never again be as it was before the Russian invasion of Ukraine. In this collection of short stories--two set in Ukraine, two in the West, and one in Russia--Czech author Jan Nemec has produced a work of remarkable immediacy.

A major collection of essays and interviews from an iconic 20th-century philosopher in five volumes, now all available together in paperback. Roland Barthes was a restless, protean thinker. A constant innovator--often as a daring smuggler of ideas from one discipline to another--he first gained an audience with his pithy essays on mass culture and then went on to produce some of the most suggestive and stimulating cultural criticism of the late twentieth century, including Empire of Signs, The Pleasure of the Text, and Camera Lucida. In 1976, this one-time structuralist outsider was elected to a chair at France's preeminent Collège de France, where he chose to style himself as a professor of literary semiology until his death in 1980. The greater part of Barthes's published writings has been available to a French audience since 2002, but now, translator Chris Turner presents a collection of essays, interviews, prefaces, book reviews, and other journalistic material for the first time in English and divided into five themed volumes. Volume four, Signs and Images, gathers pieces related to his central concerns--semiotics, visual culture, art, cinema, and photography--and features essays on Marthe Arnould, Lucien Clergue, Daniel Boudinet, Richard Avedon, Bernard Faucon, and many more.

A major collection of essays and interviews from an iconic 20th-century philosopher in five volumes, now all available together in paperback.   Roland Barthes was a restless, protean thinker. A constant innovator‿often as a daring smuggler of ideas from one discipline to another‿he first gained an audience with his pithy essays on mass culture and then went on to produce some of the most suggestive and stimulating cultural criticism of the late twentieth century, including Empire of Signs, The Pleasure of the Text, and Camera Lucida. In 1976, this one-time structuralist outsider was elected to a chair at France‿s preeminent Collÿge de France, where he chose to style himself as a professor of literary semiology until his death in 1980.   The greater part of Barthes‿s published writings has been available to a French audience since 2002, but now, translator Chris Turner presents a collection of essays, interviews, prefaces, book reviews, and other journalistic material for the first time in English and divided into five themed volumes. Volume two, The “Scandalâ€? of Marxism, contains a wide range of his more overtly political writings, with an emphasis on his early work and the serious national turbulence in the French 1950s.

A major collection of essays and interviews from an iconic 20th-century philosopher in five volumes, now all available together in paperback.   Roland Barthes was a restless, protean thinker. A constant innovator‿often as a daring smuggler of ideas from one discipline to another‿he first gained an audience with his pithy essays on mass culture and then went on to produce some of the most suggestive and stimulating cultural criticism of the late twentieth century, including Empire of Signs, The Pleasure of the Text, and Camera Lucida. In 1976, this one-time structuralist outsider was elected to a chair at France‿s preeminent Collÿge de France, where he chose to style himself as a professor of literary semiology until his death in 1980.   The greater part of Barthes‿s published writings has been available to a French audience since 2002, but now, translator Chris Turner presents a collection of essays, interviews, prefaces, book reviews, and other journalistic material for the first time in English and divided into five themed volumes. Volume three, Masculine, Feminine, Neuter, consists of his writing on literature, covering his peers and influences, writers in French and other languages, contemporary and historical writers, and world literature.Â

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 from the Underworld, Sinan Antoon works in that tradition, observing the detritus of his home city, Baghdad, where he survived two wars‿the Iran-Iraq War of 1980 and the First Gulf War of 1991‿and which, after he left, he watched from afar being attacked during the US invasion in 2003.  Antoon‿s poems confront violence and force us not to look away as he traces death‿s haunting presence in the world. Nature offers consolation, and flowers and butterflies are the poet‿s interlocutors, but they too cannot escape ruin. Composed in Arabic and translated into English by the poet himself, Postcards from the Underworld is a searing meditation on the destruction of humans, habitats, and homes.

The first English translation of Yves Bonnefoy's account of his life as a traveler.  The Wandering Life is a poetic culmination of Yves Bonnefoy's wanderings and characterizes the final twenty-five years of his work. Bonnefoy was an ardent traveler throughout his life, and his journeys in foreign countries left a profound imprint on his work. The time he spent in Italy, translating Shakespeare's work in England, in universities in the United States, in India with Octavio Paz, and more, affected his poetry in discernible ways and inspired The Wandering Life. Interweaving verse and prose-vignettes that range from a few lines in length to several pages-this volume is a fitting capstone to Bonnefoy's oeuvre and appears in English translation for the first time to mark the centenary of Yves Bonnefoy's birth.

A unique and modern approach to money, wealth, greed, and financial ignorance presented via a story of a family in the Munich suburbs. The Federmanns live a pleasant but painfully normal life in the Munich suburbs. All that the three children really know about money is that there's never enough of it in their family.   Every so often, their impish Great-Aunt Fé descends on the city. After repeated cycles of boom and bust, profligacy and poverty, the grand old lady has become enormously wealthy and lives alone in a villa on the shore of Lake Geneva. But what does Great-Aunt Fé want from the Federmanns, her only surviving relatives? This time, she invites the children to tea at her luxury hotel where she spoils, flummoxes, and inspires them. Dismayed at their ignorance of the financial ways of the world, she gives them a crash course in economics that piques their curiosity, unsettles their parents, and throws open a whole new world. The young Federmanns are for once taken seriously and together they try to answer burning questions: Where does money come from? Why are millionaires and billionaires never satisfied? And why are those with the most always showered with more?   In this rich volume, the renowned poet, translator, and essayist Hans Magnus Enzensberger turns his gimlet eye on the mechanisms and machinations of banks and politicians-the human greed, envy, and fear that fuels the global economy. A modern, but moral-less fable, Money, Money, Money! is shot through with Enzensberger's trademark erudition, wit, and humanist desire to cut through jargon and forearm his readers against obscurantism.

A collection of unique, profound, and witty stories that relate animals' peculiarities to human attitudes. Animals is a collection of short stories in which each story takes a peculiar item about animals that appears, like fables, to shine a spotlight on different aspects of human behavior-like caterpillars digging their own graves, sharks in need of artificial respiration, ducks that keep an eye out for hungry predators even in their sleep. It is a treat to watch Eva Menasse spin these observations into scenes of people battling their everyday anxieties and doubts. An old tyrant realizes that he is unable to prevent his wife's worsening dementia from erasing his own past as it erases hers. A mother who tries to protect a Muslim child from hostile accusations finds that her own boundaries between good and evil begin to blur. A woman realizes how starkly her father's traumatic past has shaped her quirky habits and deepest fears. Combining biting wit, mystery, and melancholy, these tales are the work of a masterful storyteller.

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 symphony of the Berlin metropolis. And there is a question holding out off the coast of Lampedusa: Can shining sheep be used as night storage for the dark hours, when we are overwhelmed with fears of God, of a gym teacher with a whistle, of mothers with eyes as black as coal? In devastating sequences, Sandig charts the reality of an abused child, victims of contemporary war, or a fourteenth-century Madonna. Full of humor, musicality, lightness, and rage, Shining Sheep is not just visual poetry-it has loops in your ear and filmic explosions of imagery for all your senses.