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Mirroring Romania's drastic transition from totalitarianism to Western-style freedom in the late 1980s, Mr. K Released captures the disturbingly surreal feeling that many newly liberated prisoners face when they leave captivity. Employing his trademark playful absurdity, Matéi Visniec introduces us to Mr. K, a Kafkaesque figure who has been imprisoned for years for an undisclosed crime in a penitentiary with mysterious tunnels. One day, Mr. K finds himself unexpectedly released. Unable to comprehend his sudden liberation, he becomes traumatized by the realities of freedom--more so than the familiar trauma of captivity or imprisonment. In the hope of obtaining some clarification, Mr. K keeps waiting for an appointment with the prison governor, however, their meeting is constantly being delayed. During this endless process of waiting, Mr. K gets caught up in a clinical exploration of his physical surroundings. He does not have the courage or indeed inclination to leave, but can move unrestricted within the prison compound, charting endless series of absurd circles in which readers might paradoxically recognize themselves.

Master storyteller Ngugi wa Thiong'o blends myth and folklore with insight into the human psyche and the patterns of politics in this fable of how humans came to walk upright, set to appeal to both adults and children. Sunandini Banerjee illustrates.

A novel in five parts, Only a Lodger . . . And Hardly That puts Vesna Main's power of beautiful observation on full display as she explores how writing stories about one's ancestors is key route to learning about and fashioning one's own identity. While the stories are self-contained, together they form a narrative whole that approaches this age-old idea from five unique perspectives. In "The Eye/I," we meet someone called She, who obsessively tells the story of her childhood and adolescence to an unnamed narrator. "The Acrobat" is a sequence of prose poems, written in the style of magic realism, which tell the story of Maria and her life-changing adolescent encounter with a flying circus performer. The female protagonist of the first section narrates "The Dead," describing the secret life of a grandfather she never truly knew and his unusual habit of sending family members anonymous parcels of carefully chosen books. In "The Poet," she examines four family photographs in order to piece together a story of her other grandfather, the husband of Maria. The final section, "The Suitor," is a first-person narrative told by Mr. Gustav Otto Wagner, an older man who hoped to marry Maria but was ultimately turned down.

Using the same musical sense of language she applies to her translations, Nancy Naomi Carlson masterfully interprets herself in An Infusion of Violets. The sometimes erotic, sometimes melancholy landscapes she creates as the self-appointed sitar's "ragged throat, pitched / between here and when, / caught in quartertones," take our breath away. Carlson describes an interior world where tears can produce "so much salt a body floats away," where "music tuned to loss descends with rain," and where hope is placed in the "kill-cure." Here we encounter Carlson's ex-husbands and luminaries such as Rachmaninoff and Monet, among others. Filled with striking images and sensuous language, An Infusion of Violets is an evocative mix of formal and free-verse poems.

Nations need identities. These are created from perceptions of how societies have evolved. In this, history plays a central role. Insisting on reliable history is therefore crucial to more than just a pedagogic cause. Delicate relationships between the past and present or an exacting understanding of the past, call for careful analyses. Understanding India's past is of vital importance to the present. Many popularly held views about the past need to be critically enquired into before they can be taken as historical. Why is it important for Indian society to be secular? When did communalism as an ideology gain a foothold in the country? How and when did the patriarchal system begin to support a culture of violence against women? Historian Romila Thapar has investigated, analyzed, and interpreted the history that underlies such questions throughout her career. Through the incisive essays in The Past as Present, she argues that it is of critical importance for the Indian past to be carefully and rigorously explained if the legitimacy of the present, wherever it derives from the past, is to be portrayed as accurately as possible. This is particularly crucial given the attempts by unscrupulous politicians, religious fundamentalists, and their ilk to wilfully misrepresent and manipulate the past in order to serve their present-day agendas. The Past as Present is an essential and necessary book at a time when sectarianism, false nationalism, and the muddying of historical facts are increasingly becoming a feature of our public, private, and intellectual lives.

Beginning in the 1960s and ending in the late '80s, this title presents a narrative of a passionate, and ultimately tragic, relationship between Mali and Farid set against the simultaneous decline of Egyptian-Lebanese society. It chronicles the casualties of social conventions, religious divisions, and cultural cliches.

Out of the many tragedies that almost seem to define the first decade of our century, the author has fashioned a richly woven, multilayered tapestry that not only explores the human side but brings out the cultural, historical, social, and political context within which the tragedies occur.

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.

During the late Seventies and Eighties a new logo began to jostle for space with the more traditional landmarks on high streets throughout Britain. It was the badge of a remarkable Third World Bank...the BCCI (Bank of Credit and Commerce International).BCCI soon become a global corporate empire with former US Presidents, ex-British Prime Ministers and a range of dictators on its payroll, all helping with promoting the company.Tariq Ali was the first public voice to warn that the Bank was not all it seemed to be. Indeed, many of its own employees called BCCI the "Bank of Crooks and Cheats Incorporated". Some political analysts also predicted the company¿s collapse. The Bank finally imploded amidst a welter of scandal.This revealing screenplay presents an account of the rise and fall of the Bank of Credit and Commerce International. Here, Ali reveals how BCCI lasted so long, how financial regulators failed to see what was going on and how BCCI pioneered a mode of operation that prepared the way for an even greater financial cataclysm, the fall of Enron.

Baruch Spinoza (1632-77) is considered one of the great rationalist thinkers of the seventeenth century. This title contextualizes Spinoza's philosophy by linking it to the turbulent politics of the period, in which Spinoza was deeply involved.

In recent years, social workers have raised concern about the appearance of a new category among the working poor. This book tells about how we live in geographical space and how work and patterns of domicile affect our status and our inner being.

Few figures in cinema history are as towering as Russian filmmaker and theorist Sergei Mikhailovitch Eisenstein (1898-1948). Not only did Eisenstein direct some of the most important and lasting works of the silent era, including Strike, October, and Battleship Potemkin, as well as, in the sound era, the historical epics Alexander Nevsky and Ivan the Terrible--he also was a theorist whose insights into the workings of film were so powerful that they remain influential for both filmmakers and scholars today. ?Seagull Books is embarking on a series of translations of key works by Eisenstein into English. A fascinating memoir in two volumes, Beyond the Stars--first published by Seagull in 1995 and now available again. Begun as Eisenstein approached fifty, it is full of the famous names of his era, including Charlie Chaplin, Mary Pickford, John Dos Passos, Jean Cocteau, and many more; at the same time, it is a serious book of inquiry about film as a medium, offering countless reflections by Eisenstein on his own work and that of other movie pioneers.

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, and subjects. Shakti Chattopadhyay was a cofounder of the movement, and his poems remain vibrant and surprising more than a half century later. In his "urban pastoral" lines, we encounter street colloquialisms alongside high diction, a combination that at the time was unprecedented. Loneliness, anxiety, and dislocation trouble this verse, but they are balanced by a compelling belief in the redemptive power of beauty. This book presents more than one hundred of Chattopadhyay's poems, introducing an international audience to one of the most prominent and important Bengali poets of the twentieth century.

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 1970s. Written more than a decade after Salih quit the party and left political life--and published shortly after she committed suicide--the book offers a poignant look at, and reckoning with, the Marxism of her generation and the role of militant intellectuals in the tragic failure of both the national liberation project and the communist project in Egypt. The powerful critique in The Stillborn speaks not only to and about Salih's own generation of left activists but also to broader, still salient dilemmas of revolutionary politics throughout the developing world in the postcolonial era.

Dramatist, poet, novelist, and journalist Matei Visniec, born in Romania and living in France since seeking political asylum in 1987, has been one of the most trenchant voices of Europe, condemning the atrocities of totalitarianism as well as excesses of consumer culture. This is an anthology of his dramatic work made available in English.

As the aftershocks of the economic meltdown reverberate throughout the world, and people organize to physically occupy the major financial centers of the West, few experts and even fewer governments have dared to consider a world without the powerful markets that brought on the crash. The author offers a way forward.

Discusses the difference between political and sexual identity and inquires whether psychoanalysis can be considered a radical form of thought that can be used fruitfully in dialogue about political struggle.

A decaying apartment building in post-Wall Berlin is home to Hell, a young woman with a passion for martial arts. When Hell's neighbor disappears she sets out across the city in search of her. In the course of her quest, she falls in love with a bank robber, confronts her own dark memories, and ends up saving more than just her missing neighbor.

Explores the problems and potentials of the fictions the author could not bring himself to write. Drawing from his notebooks, this title records here a range of ideas for stories - unsettled accounts, he calls them, or case studies of failure - and examines where they came from and why they eluded him.

A collection of travel writings by the Swiss-French poet that takes him through war-torn parts of the Middle East, where he attends to scenes of faith and history that often go unremarked amid the turmoil.

Djibril, a young Djiboutian voluntarily exiled in Montreal, returns to his native land to prepare a report for an American economic intelligence firm. Meanwhile, a shadowy, threatening figure imprisoned in an island cell seems to know Djibril's every move.

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, created a prolific and widely influential body of work. Gertrude Stein, an intellectual tastemaker, hosted the leading salon for artists and writers between the wars in her Paris apartment, welcoming Henri Matisse, Ernest Hemingway, and Ezra Pound to weekly events at her home to discuss art and literature. It comes as no surprise, then, that Picasso and Stein were fast friends and frequent confidantes. Through Picasso and Stein's casual notes and reflective letters, this volume of correspondence between the two captures Paris both in the golden age of the early twentieth century and in one of its darkest hours, the Nazi occupation through mentions of dinner parties, lovers, work, and the crises of the two world wars. Illustrated with photographs and postcards, as well as drawings and paintings by Picasso, this collection captures an exhilarating period in European culture through the minds of two artistic greats.

A collection of Jesi's finest essays, ranging from his groundbreaking work on myth and politics to his reflections on time, festivity, and revolt as well as writers such as Rimbaud, Rilke, Lukacs, and Pavese.

Examines the urban poor of nineteenth-century Calcutta.

Explores the hidden logic behind popular religions in nineteenth-century Bengal. This book examines cross-religious cults and the construction of Bengali myths and beliefs about godlings and spirits, approaching them as popular inventions that attempt to make sense of human existence in the face of an overwhelming and often hostile environment.

Dangerous Outcast traces prostitution in Bengal from precolonial times through the arrival of the British, examining how the profession was reordered to suit British desires.