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 l
I enjoyed success too early, married the wrong man, and hung out with the wrong people; too many men have liked me, and I’ve liked too many men. Frank and refreshing,&
In Easterine Kire’s stories, the boundaries between magic and reality drift away, leaving us to marvel at simple yet fantastical folktales about human connection. The title story in this collect
Northern Spain is the only part of Western Europe where anarchism played a significant role in political life of the twentieth century. Enjoying wide-ranging support among both the urban and rural wor
We learn more every year about the damaging effects of solitary confinement. This unquestionably cruel and unusual punishment leaves prisoners with no human contact, sometimes for years at a time, and
In these times of heartbreaking violence, clashing religions, and a seemingly never-ending narrative of dichotomy between East and West, wonder at the religion and culture of the Middle East can be in
The thirteen stories of Michael Krüger’s The God behind the Window capture the poignancy and cynicism of late life through tales of misanthropic old men full of the mixture of wisdom a
Stella Vinitchi Radulescu’s poetry dwells in spaces of paradox, seeking out the words, metaphors, and images that capture both the peaceful stillness of snow and the desperate cry of human exper
For a fifteen-year-old, falling in love can eclipse everything else in the world, and make a few short weeks feel like a lifetime of experience. In Love Writ Large, Navid Kermani captures those intens
Norway. The 1800s. Endre must to take over the family farm from his father—his father, who swings the sickle and sharpens the scythe, and says this is the only way in which rocks and stones and
In our era of mass migration, much of it driven by war and its aftermath, A Slap in the Face could not be more timely. It tells the story of Karim, an Iraqi refugee living in Germany whose right to as
The Open-Winged Scorpion and Other Stories is a collection of ten powerful Bengali short stories, all translated into English for the first time. Hailing from Murshidabad district in West Bengal, Abul
Iraqi poet Salah Al Hamdani has lived a remarkable life. The author of some forty books in French and Arabic, he began life as a child laborer, with little or no education. As a political prisoner und
The year is 323 bce. King Alexander of Macedonia—Alexander the Great—lies paralyzed by poison in his palace in Babylon. He is thirty-two years old, had Aristotle as a mentor, and is the gr
This lyrical novel tells the story of a young man living in Egypt in the 1990s, a time of great turmoil. We see student riots at Cairo University, radical politics, and the first steps towards the mak
Cees Nooteboom wrote the poems that make up Monk’s Eye on two islands: he began them on the Dutch island of Schiermonnikoog and finished them on the Spanish island of Minorca, where he has spent
Written for young children, Delhi Thaatha is a biography of Dr. Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan, a much-loved teacher and world-renowned philosopher who served as the first vice president of the Republic of
The poems in this new volume by Abdourahman A. Waberi are introspective and inquisitive, reflecting a deep spiritual bond—with words, with the history of Islam and its great poets, with the land
As the Syrian war has raged over the past several years, the world has watched in horror. And that horror is particularly concentrated on the city of Aleppo, which has been subject to almost incompara
The poems of Ulrike Almut Sandig are at once simple and fantastic. This new collection finds her on her way to imaginary territories. Thick of It charts a journey through two hemispheres to “the
In the decades before the rise of the Third Reich, “Secret Germany” was a phrase used by the circle of writers around the poet Stefan George to describe a collective political and poetic p
When Life in Peactime opens, on May 29, 2015, engineer Ivo Brandani is sixty-nine years old. He’s disillusioned and angry—but morbidly attached to life. As he makes a day-long trip home fr
Arwa Salih was a member of the political bureau of the Egyptian Communist Workers Party, which was founded in the wake of the Arab–Israeli War and the Egyptian student movement of the early 1970
“I now no longer use the better words.” Ilse Aichinger (1921–2016) was one of the most important writers of postwar Austrian and German literature. Born in 1921 to a Jewish mother, s
A young woman who has been living abroad returns to her hometown of Frankfurt am Main in Germany. Her sister Ines—a beautiful, impetuous painter—who still lives there, soon appears and promptly asks f
Austrian poet and playwright Ernst Jandl died in 2000, leaving behind his partner, poet Friederike Mayröcker—and bringing to an end a half century of shared life, and shared literary work. Mayröcker i
The Dancing Other takes readers to France and Martinique to reveal the struggles of people who belong both places, but never quite feel at home in either. Suzanne Dracius tells the story of Rehvana, a
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
Toby Litt is one of that rare breed of fiction writers who never writes the same book twice: every time out, he takes an unexpected new tack—and his readers happily follow. ?Told in the form of
In the early 1960s, the Hungry Generation revitalized Bengali poetry in Calcutta, liberating it from the fetters of scholarship and the fog of punditry and freeing it to explore new forms, language, a
To create the poems in this collection, Nobel Prize–winner Herta Müller cut up countless newspapers and magazines in search of striking phrases, words, or even fragments of words, which she
Recorded during Jorge Luis Borges’s final years, this second volume of his conversations with Osvaldo Ferrari provides a wide-ranging reflection on the life and work of Argentina’s master writer and f
It’s the mid-to-late 1800s and the British have banished Wajid Ali Shah—the nawab of Awadh in Lucknow—to Calcutta. To the sound of the soulful melody of the sarangi, the mercurial courtesan Laayl-e Aa
Our taste buds are a powerful way for humans to know beauty and experience beautiful things. In Taste, Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben takes a close look at why the sense of taste has not historic
In 1936, Walter Benjamin defined the revolutionary class as being in opposition to a dense and dangerous crowd, prone to fear of the foreign, and under the spell of anti-Semitic madness. Today, in for
The Book of Mordechai and Lazarus are the first and the second novels by Hungarian writer Gábor Schein. Published together in one volume, this book is the first in Seagull Book’s new Hungarian List se
Bergeners is a love letter to a writer’s hometown. The book opens in New York City at the swanky Standard Hotel and closes in Berlin at Askanischer Hof, a hotel that has seen better days. But between
Originally published in 1965, The Writer and the People was one of the key books in the revitalization and invigoration of the young Left in late-1960s Italy. Aiming to demystify the myth of populism,
Winner of the 2015 Arno Reinfrank Literaturpreis “Ruven Preuk stands apart from the village, on an August day in 1911, and listens.” Thus begins an epic bildungsroman about the life of Ruven Preuk, so
At the Burning Abyss is Franz Fühmann’s magnum opus—a gripping and profoundly personal encounter with the great expressionist poet Georg Trakl. It is a taking stock of two troubled lives, a turbulent
