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Gathers 35 years of Iraqi poet Sala Al Hamdani's writings

On the eve of the 2007 general elections in Morocco, writer, academic, and former cabinet minister Abdallah Saaf embarked on several road trips across the country to get a feel for how its citizens had fared since Mohammed VI's accession to the throne. A Significant Year is the result: an analysis of the political and sociological state of the Moroccan nation on the eve of a crucial moment in the post-Hassan II period, but also a travelogue that describes what the author saw and heard on his travels in the summer months leading up to the epochal vote. Through Saaf's eyes, we see the country's varied regions and its urban and rural landscapes. We meet Moroccans from all walks of life, such as a waiter at a favorite cafe, a car-park attendant who recognizes the author from TV, and fellow writer and intellectual Abdelkabir Khatibi. Behind the deceptive simplicity of the book's narrative structure, readers will find in A Significant Year an insightful and nuanced portrayal of modern Morocco's many complexities.

This lyrical novel, set in the surroundings of the Palestinian village of Zakariyya, weaves a narrative rich in sensory detail yet troubled by the porousness of memory. It tells the story of the relationship between two figures of deep mythical resonance in the region, Yahya and Zakariyya, figures who live in the present but bear the names--and many traits--of two saints. Ranging from today into back to pre-1948 Palestine, the book presents both a compelling portrait of a contemporary village and a sacred geography that lies beyond and beneath the present state of the world. Sensual, rich in allusion, yet at the same time focused on the struggles of today, Where the Bird Disappeared is a powerful novel of both connection and dispossession.

A first-person narration of the events around the last days of Alexander the Great, told by Phyllis, a cook in the young king's army.

At the heart of Pulcinella is Agamben's exploration of an album of 104 drawings, created by Giovanni Domenico Tiepolo (1727-1804) near the end of his life, that cover the life, adventures, death, and resurrection of the title character.

The story of an adolescent boy's erotic and sentimental education in 1930s Fascist Italy.

Thousands upon thousands of books have been written about Immanuel Kant since his death. None, let's be clear, have been quite like what we have here. In Party Fun with Kant, Nicolas Mahler tells the story of Kant--and his fellow serious-minded figures from the history of philosophy--with a comic edge. With his witty visual style and clever wordplay, he delves into their lives and emerges with hitherto unknown scenes that show them in a new (and far less serious) light. We go to parties with Kant, visit an art exhibition with Hegel, shop at the supermarket with Nietzsche, and go to the cinema with Deleuze, and celebrate the dream wedding with de Beauvoir. In each case, we come away knowing more about the life, thoughts, and feelings of the philosopher--getting to know them as people rather than as stony-faced figures long since robbed of any existence beyond their ideas. The result is pure fun, but with plenty of insight, too.

In Eulogy for the Living, Wolf recalls with crystalline precision the everyday details of her life as a middle-class grocer's daughter, and the struggles within the family--struggles common to most families, but exacerbated by the rise of Nazism.

Aleppo is Alice Attie's home city, where her grandparents were born, and with the poems in Under the Aleppo Sun, she takes us there to the months before Assad unleashed his attack in 2011.

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 summers for decades.

"Tarkovsky for me is the greatest," wrote Ingmar Bergman. Andrey Tarkovsky only made seven films, but all are celebrated for its striking visual images, quietly patient dramatic structures, and visionary symbolism. Time within Time is both a diary and a notebook, maintained by Tarkovsky from 1970 until his death. Intense and intimate, it offers reflections on Dostoyevsky, Tolstoy, Hermann Hesse, Thomas Mann, and others. He writes movingly of his family, especially his father, Arseniy Tarkovsky, whose poems appear in his films. He records haunting dreams in detail and speaks of the state of society and the future of art, noting significant world events and purely personal dramas along with fascinating accounts of his own filmmaking. Rounding out this volume are Tarkovsky's plans and notes for his stage version of Hamlet; a detailed proposal for a film adaptation of Dostoyevsky's The Idiot; and a glimpse of the more public Tarkovsky answering questions put to him by interviewers.

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 the pithy, even lyrical advice a young soldier leaves behind after a mission gone wrong, Notes for a Young Gentleman is no exception. Its brilliantly creative form, and the epigrammatic genius Litt displays in its creation, nonetheless can't hide the powerful, emotional story at its heart: of a young soldier parachuting toward a beautiful, moonlit country house on a mission . . . of betrayal. The house? Marlborough. The target? Winston Churchill, an old friend of his father. A brilliant, at times dizzying but always heartfelt exploration of love, revenge, and the essence of a gentleman, Notes for a Young Gentleman is classic Toby Litt: wholly new and wholly unforgettable.

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 from his job in Sharm el Sheik reconstructing the coral reefs of the Red Sea using synthetics, he reflects on both the brief time he sees remaining ahead and on everything that has happened already in his life to which he can never quite resign himself. We see his slow bureaucratic trudge as a civil servant, long summer vacations on a Greek island, his twisted relationship with his first boss, the turmoil and panic attacks he faced during the student uprisings in 1968 that pushed him away from philosophy and into engineering, and his fearful childhood as a postwar evacuee. A close-up portrait of an ordinary existence, Life in Peacetime offers a new look at the postwar era in Italy and the fundamental contradictions of a secure, middle-class life.

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 woman who feels she is too black to fit in when living in mainland France, yet at the same time not dark-skinned enough to feel truly accepted in the Caribbean. Her sense of dislocation manifests itself at first in a turn to a mythical idea of Mother Africa; later, she moves to Martinique with a new boyfriend and thinks she may have finally found her place--but instead she is soon pregnant, isolated, and lonely. Soon her only reliable companion is her neighbor, Ma Cidalise, who regales her in Creole with supernatural tales of wizards. Rehvana, meanwhile, watches her dream of belonging fade, as she continues to refuse to accept her multicultural heritage.

A moving work of fiction from one of the most important writers of postwar Austrian and German literature. Born in 1921 to a Jewish mother, Ilse Aichinger (1921-2016) survived World War II in Vienna, while her twin sister Helga escaped with one of the last Kindertransporte to England in 1938. Many of their relatives were deported and murdered. Those losses make themselves felt throughout Aichinger's writing, which since her first and only novel, The Greater Hope, in 1948, has highlighted displacement, estrangement, and a sharp skepticism toward language. By 1976, when she published Bad Words in German, her writing had become powerfully poetic, dense, and experimental. This volume presents the whole of the original Bad Words in English for the first time, along with a selection of Aichinger's other short stories of the period; together, they demonstrate her courageous effort to create and deploy a language unmarred by misleading certainties, preconceived rules, or implicit ideologies.

A lyrical requiem for Mayröcker's late partner, the writer Ernst Jandl. 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 immediately began attempting to come to terms with his death in the way that poets struggling with loss have done for millennia: by writing. Requiem for Ernst Jandl is the powerfully moving outcome. In this quiet but passionate lament that grows into a song of enthralling intensity, Mayröcker recalls memories and shared experiences, and--with the sudden, piercing perception of regrets that often accompany grief--reads Jandl's works in a new light. Alarmed by a sudden, existential emptiness, she reflects on the future, and the possibility of going on with her life and work in the absence of the person who, as we see in this elegy, was a constant conversational and creative partner.

Originally published as Der fliegende Berg, S. Fischer Verlag GmbH, Frankfurt am Main, 2006.

"This publication was supported by a grant from the Goethe-Institut, India"--page facing title page.

The author, a giant of Austrian literature, has produced decades of fiction, poetry, and drama. In this work, he returns to the land of his birth, the Austrian province of Carinthia. There on the Jaunfeld, the plain at the center of Austria's Slovenian settlement, the dead and the living of a family meet and talk.

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 India, then, beginning in 1962, president of the country.

IN

A monologue delivered by the female character in Samuel Beckett's play Krapp's Last Tape.

Cees Nooteboom, best known for his novel "The Following Story", is one of the most distinguished and significant authors of the Netherlands. This book draws on Nooteboom's personal reflections - his arsenal of memories, dreams, fantasies, landscapes, stories, and nightmares - and presents a set of prose poems that complements Neumann's work.

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. On the Detective Story presents Eisenstein's elaborate study, in four essays and fragments, of the use of dialectical thinking in the creation of art and literature. Drawing on major works from Shakespeare, Tolstoy, Balzac, Gogol, Mayakovsky, Dostoevsky, and more, and ranging from folk tales to contemporary detective stories, it shows the keenly analytic quality of Eisenstein's mind when it turned to questions of creative work.

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. The Short-Fiction Scenario presents a master-class on turning a short story into an effective film. Delivered as a series of lectures at the State Institute of Cinematography, it details two parallel scripts drawn from the same story; at each point of difference, Eisenstein explains why one works better.