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Art today is in deep crisis. Criticism seems to have abandoned any notion of evaluation, the public has been denied the possibility of understanding, and aesthetics have lost all legitimacy. Formerly,

One of the foremost thinkers of his generation, Furio Jesi began to publish scholarly essays in academic journals at the age of fifteen. By the time of his early death in 1980, he had accumulated a bo

The international community of letters mourns the recent death of Yves Bonnefoy, universally acclaimed as one of France’s greatest poets of the last half-century. A prolific author, he was often consi

Last season, Seagull Books published the first three volumes in a new series collecting essays and interviews by the late French thinker Roland Barthes. This season they’ll bring the five-volume set t

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

Celebrated Indian playwright Mahesh Elkunchwar has experimented with many forms of dramatic expression in a career that now spans more than four decades, producing works that range from the realist to

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 ar

The Popular and the Public brings together a range of international scholars to examine how popular culture has shaped the public sphere, providing an alternative space for political debate in 19th an

Last season, Seagull Books published the first three volumes in a new series collecting essays and interviews by the late French thinker Roland Barthes. This season they’ll bring the five-volume set t

Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben is the rare writer whose ideas and works have a broad appeal across many fields, and his devoted fans are not just philosophers, but readers of political and legal theory, sociology, and literary criticism as well. In March 2009, Agamben was invited to speak in Paris’ Notre-Dame Cathedral in the presence of the Bishop of Paris and a number of other high-ranking church officials. His resulting speech, a stunningly lucid and provocative look at the history and state of the Church and its role in society, is presented here. The Church and the Kingdom is at once a pointed attack on the institutional structure of the Catholic Church and a theoretical excursus on the concepts of messianic time and economy. Presenting an exegesis of certain key passages in the New Testament, Agamben examines the philology and philosophy at the root of the Church and of its earthly reign. With its examinations of the foundational texts

A towering figure in twentieth-century theater in India, Habib Tanvir was an actor, director, and playwright, working in Hindi and Urdu. He founded the Naya Theater in 1959, through which he created r

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,

At a time when Turkey is struggling for its secular identity, resisting the influence of ISIS, and finding itself at the heart of the European refugee crisis, Ozen Yula, accomplished Turkish playwrigh

An anthology of seven contemporary Israeli plays, written by established and emerging Israeli playwrights and theatre creators. The collection offers a look into the variety of Israeli drama, theatre,

In this book, Sumanta Banerjee analyzes the development of the folk culture of Calcutta’s urban poor following the establishment of the British colonial system in Bengal. Consisting primarily of

Pablo Picasso and Gertrude Stein. Few can be said to have had as broad an impact on European art in the twentieth century as these two cultural giants. Pablo Picasso, a pioneering visual artist, creat

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

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

Since premiering his pioneering linguistic experiment I Love XXX in Beijing nearly twenty-five years ago, Meng Jinhui has been credited with revitalizing Chinese theater by popularizing the avant-gard

Bhaskar Chakrabarti’s poetry is synonymous with the romantic melancholia inherent to Calcutta. His trenchant poetic voice was one of the most significant to emerge in the 1960s and ’70s—perhaps the mo

In this volume of sixteen essays, D. R. Nagaraj, the foremost non-Brahmin intellectual to emerge from India’s non-English-speaking world, presents his vision of the Indian caste system in relation to

We live in a world where material products have increasingly become vehicles for intangible symbolic and aesthetic messages. A very sizeable marketing and advertising industry produces only images and

In the aftermath of 9/11, the United States government came to apply a practice outlawed in Europe in the eighteenth century and prohibited by the Geneva Conventions and by the United Nations Conventi

In Everything: And Other Performance Texts from Germany, Matt Cornish gathers texts drawn from performances by five of the most renowned theater collectives working today: andcompany&Co., Gob Squa

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

“Not writing is always a relief and sometimes a pleasure. Writing about what cannot be written, by contrast, is the devil’s own job.”In this unusual text, a blend of essay, fiction,

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

Known for his brilliantly dark fictional visions, László Krasznahorkai is one of the most respected European writers of his generation and the winner of the 2015 Man Booker International

Bangladesh in 1971 showed vividly, and terribly, the deadly effects of war. Piles of corpses, torture cells, ash and destruction everywhere in the wake of the Pakistani army’s attacks on Bengali

Over the centuries, Muharram observances have travelled far from their origins at Karbala---a windswept desert plain that is now a town in present-day Iraq---where Hussein, the beloved grandson of the

Brahmins named Iftikar, Buddhist rites in Hindu Shiva temples, Indian maidens dressed like Arabian harem girls - right from the birth of cinema, international movies have been wildly inventive in thei

The BBC commissioned Tariq Ali to write a three-part TV series on the circumstances leading to the overthrow, trial and execution of Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto, the first elected prime minister of Pakistan.

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

Odissi holds iconic status as one of the eight classical dance forms recognized and promoted by the Indian government. This book traces the dance’s transformation from its historical role as a r

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

Hasan Azizul Huq is known for his stories that bring a powerful social consciousness to bear on the lives of ordinary people in contemporary Bangladesh—but doing so with surprising twists to wha

First published in Italian in 1968, The World Saved by Kids was written in the aftermath of deep personal change and in the context of what Elsa Morante called the “great youth movement exploding agai

The relationship between cinema and modernity in the Indian context is both complex and multifaceted. In this volume, some of the leading names in film and cultural studies explore its many dimensions