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The Abolition of Species
Dietmar Dath
Seagull Books, 2012
The world as we know it is over. Man’s reign on earth has come to an end, and the reign of the animals has begun. The indifferently wise Cyrus Golden the Lion rules the three-city state that is now what remains of Europe. Yet, other forces stir while the king of beasts sleeps—the last struggling human resistance, the Atlanteans with their mysterious undersea plans; the factions of Badger, Fox and Lynx within the empire itself; and, in the jungles across the ocean, a ceramic form of postbiological life. Welcome to the setting of Dietmar Dath’s futuristic novel, The Abolition of Species, presenting an imaginative and highly original take on the decline and rebirth of civilization.

Cyrus the Lion sends the wolf Dmitri Stepanovich on a diplomatic mission, and in the course of his journey he discovers truths about natural history, war, and politics for which he was unprepared. The subsequent war that breaks out in The Abolition of Species will come to span three planets and thousands of years—encompassing treachery and massacres, music and mathematics, savagery and decadence, as well as the terraformation of Mars and Venus and the manipulation of time itself. By turns grandiose, horrific, erotic, scathing, and visionary, The Abolition of Species is a tale of love and war after the fall of man and an epic meditation on the theory of evolution unlike any other.

One of Germany’s most celebrated contemporary writers, Dath has distinguished himself through works that deftly combine popular culture—particularly music—with left-wing politics and the fantastic. The Abolition of Species embodies the best of what Dath is known for and will cement his reputation among English readers excited to discover one of the freshest voices in contemporary literature.
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Pathologies
The Downfall of Johan van Vere de With
Jacob Isräel de Haan
Seagull Books, 2024
One of the first novels to openly explore gay love and eroticism, Pathologies is a lost classic that is now translated into English for the first time.
 
At the start of the twentieth century, Jewish anti-Zionist Jacob Israël de Haan led an eventful life as a poet, journalist, teacher, and lawyer in the Netherlands. His autobiographical novella Pipelines caused a storm of controversy in 1904 with its portrayal of a subject that was considered scandalous at the time—a romantic relationship between two young men. He lost his teaching job, and the entire print run was pulped.
 
In his iconic 1908 novel Pathologies, he once again openly and radically explored the topic of homosexuality. The story centers around adolescent Johan, who lives a secluded life with his father and their elderly housekeeper in a large house. For a while, Johan has been plagued by erotic fantasies about his classmates. When, to make matters worse, he finds himself feeling attracted to his father—first in a dream, and then in real life—he grows desperate. Johan moves out, finding room and board with an older married couple in Haarlem, where he meets René, a young confident artist. Johan falls head-over-heels in love, and the two men enter a sadomasochistic relationship that soon begins to spiral out of control.
 
Johan is one of world literature’s most tragic, troubled young heroes, at par with Goethe’s Werther and Dostoevsky’s Raskolnikov. His struggle to come to terms with his fantasies and desires—rife with taboos that continue to resonate today—forms the beating heart of this daring novel. Written in De Haan’s precise, lyrical prose, Pathologies has lost none of its force more than a century after it was first published.
 
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Understanding Theatre
Marco De Marinis
Seagull Books, 2024
Over the past three decades, theater studies has undergone a radical worldwide development and renewal. This happened through two different yet complementary paths: the first (North American in origin) led to the birth of the discipline of performance studies; the second (European continental) is what Marco de Marinis calls “new theatrology.” New theatrology arises from the dialogue between theatre history and the humanities and social sciences, yet de Marinis also characterizes it by a strong experimental imprint resulting from a close and participatory relationship with theatrical practice and its players.
 
The first part of Understanding Theatre retraces the main steps that brought theater studies to make the transition from performance to the audience to their receptive act, giving proper attention to the documentary element. In the second part, de Marinis tests the new perspective of investigation on some fundamental innovative theatrical experiences of the twentieth century. In this way, the volume collects de Marinis’s essays—written for magazines, conference programs, and edited collections—from a span of almost thirty years and documents key post-semiological developments in how we understand theater today.
 
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As Cruel as Anyone Else
Italians, Colonies and Empire
Angelo Del Boca
Seagull Books, 2024
Reveals a dark chapter in the Italian government’s colonial history that has been largely hidden from view.
 
Between the end of the nineteenth century and over the first half of the twentieth, Italy invaded and occupied the Horn of Africa, Libya, and several other territories. Yet recognition of this history of colonial destruction, racist violence, and genocidal aerial and chemical warfare—carried out not only during the Fascist dictatorship but also under preceding liberal governments—has been consistently repressed beneath the myth that the Italians never truly practiced colonialism.
 
The late journalist, historian, novelist, campaigner, and former Resistance fighter Angelo Del Boca dismantles this myth. He expertly narrates episodes of state violence committed by Italians both abroad—from Ethiopia to Slovenia, from China to Libya—and “at home” during the civil war following Unification in the 1860s or when the anti-Fascist Resistance faced off against the Republic of Salò after 1943. Attentive to the losses and pain suffered by all sides in war, Del Boca deftly demonstrates how such violence was not only a tool of domination but has also been central to creating and shaping an Italian “people.”
 
Drawing on a lifetime of interviews as a special correspondent, decades of work in private and state archives, and his own experiences during the Second World War, Del Boca’s popular and influential work has contributed to overturning views of Italian history. Presenting many historical episodes in English for the first time, As Cruel as Anyone Else provides a key to reading contemporary Italy, its place in international politics, and the disturbing permanence of the far-right within mainstream Italian politics.
 
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Blues in the Blood
Julien Delmaire
Seagull Books, 2023
A moving ode to the Mississippi delta inspired by magical realism and written in vibrant and poetic prose.
 
Blues in the Blood is an ode to the spring of 1932 in the Mississippi delta, when stifling heat crushed the countryside and threatened the harvest, pervasive injustice ruled the day, and ghostly riders of the Ku Klux Klan spread terror.  A panoramic historical and musical portrait, Blues in the Blood follows a poor young Black couple who believe their love for each other will save them from this devastation. Julien Delmaire introduces us to a gallery of figures: Blacks, Whites, Native Americans, mulattos, landowners, itinerant bluesmen, preachers, witches, corrupt politicians, prisoners, bootleggers, and Legba, the voodoo god, “master of crossroads,” who, like an otherworldly detective, watches over people’s destinies. As the story unfolds, a world is reborn: the delta, the birthplace of the blues, in which oppressed women and men rediscover the voices and rhythms of their humanity.
 
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Our Santiniketan
Mahasweta Devi
Seagull Books, 2021
A brief, evocative memoir from one of India’s greatest writers.

“Like a dazzling feather that has fluttered down from some unknown place. . . . How long will the feather keep its colours, waiting? The ‘feather’ stands for memories of childhood. Memories don’t wait.”
 
In Our Sanitikentan, the late Mahasweta Devi, one of India’s most celebrated writers, vividly narrates her days as a schoolgirl in the 1930s. As the aging author struggles to recapture vignettes of her childhood, these reminiscences bring to the written page not only her individual sensibility but an entire ethos.
 
Santiniketan is home to the school and university founded by the foremost literary and cultural icon of India, Rabindranath Tagore. In these pages, a forgotten Santiniketan, seen through the innocent eyes of a young girl, comes to life—the place, its people, flora and fauna, along with its educational environment, culture of free creative expression, vision of harmonious coexistence between natural and human worlds, and the towering presence of Tagore himself. Alongside, we get a glimpse of the private Mahasweta—her inner life, family and associates, and the early experiences that shaped her personality.
 
A nostalgic journey to a bygone era, harking back to its simple yet profound values—so distant today and so urgent yet again—Our Santiniketan is an invaluable addition to Devi’s rich oeuvre available in English translation.
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Mirror of the Darkest Night
Mahasweta Devi
Seagull Books
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 Aasman is playing a dangerous game of love, loyalty, deception, and betrayal. Bajrangi and Kundan, bound by their love for each other and for Laayl-e, struggle to keep their balance. Ranging across generations and geography, the scale of Laayl-e’s story sweeps the devil, a crime lord, and many other remarkable characters into a heady mix.

Mirror of the Darkest Night is almost an aberration in Mahasweta Devi’s oeuvre. Known for her activism and hard-hitting indictment of social inequalities, she pays close attention to detail in this sparkling novel. It offers a rare glimpse of Devi’s talent for telling the sort of story she normally eschewed—and it’s a cracker of a tale.
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Truth/Untruth
Mahasweta Devi
Seagull Books, 2023
A trenchant, darkly humorous, and unsentimental look at Calcutta society.

Set in Calcutta in the mid-1980s, Truth/Untruth is a fast-paced thriller built around the death of the pregnant Jamuna—a maid in a newly affluent residential apartment complex—and Arjun, the upwardly mobile businessman who seduced her. Packed with a cast of colorful characters, this novel is a trenchant, darkly humorous, and unsentimental look at the different segments of Calcutta society: from the middle-class culture vultures to the unscrupulous “promoter” class and the domestic helpers and slum goons who form an intrinsic part of the city’s life. All are implicated in a complex web of guilt and bizarre twists and turns. Sex, lies, death—the great modernist themes—run like a thread through this book, exposing societal greed, lust, corruption, and moral hypocrisy with a sardonic tone that spares none. An unusual novel by an author who is otherwise known for her hard-hitting activist-feminist stories, Truth/Untruth underlines the exploitative vicious cycle that defines urban relations between the haves and have-nots.
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The Murderer’s Mother
Mahasweta Devi
Seagull Books, 2023
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.
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Out of Line and Offline
Queer Mobilizations in '90s Eastern India
Pawan Dhall
Seagull Books, 2020
The 1990s and early 2000s were heady days for Indian queer people and their networks as they emerged from the shadows. They grouped together to deal with covert and overt forms of stigma, discrimination, and violence in different spheres of life. Tracing the life stories of around a dozen queer individuals and their allies from eastern India, Out of Line and Offline dwells on the many ways in which queer communities were mobilized in the first decade of the movement in India, and how such mobilization affected the lives of queer people in the long run. Pawan Dhall draws on in-depth interviews, which generate compelling stories of individual lives and experiences amid a society that was slowly being pressured to change. Dhall also delves into the archives of some of the earliest queer support forums in eastern India to reveal the ways in which the movement developed and grew. A thoroughly researched and poignantly human document, this volume will find an important place in the canon of literature on queer movements across the world.
 
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Selected Poems
Luigi Di Ruscio
Seagull Books, 2023
The first English translation of an Italian poet known for his uncompromising integrity and strong leftist sympathy for the working man.
 
Born in a sub-proletarian ghetto in Italy in 1930 under the fascist regime, Luigi Di Ruscio was an urchin running wild in the countryside, a Communist with clear anarchist leanings, a jack-of-all-trades. In 1957 he emigrated to Oslo, where he worked for forty years in a steel-wire factory, spending his evenings at the typewriter, delving with furious energy into his native Italian. Di Ruscio insisted that whereas the language of power is always a contrived, one-way fabrication, the language of the underprivileged is upfront and direct, aiming straight and sharp for the truth. Caustic as a shopfloor scouring agent, exhilarating in its overabundance, humor, and outspokenness, Selected Poems stands as a testament of tenacity, a record of class struggle, and a vital presence for our times.
 
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Flowers for Otello
On the Crimes That Came Out of Jena
Esther Dischereit
Seagull Books, 2022
A powerful performance text that illuminates incidents of anti-immigrant violence in contemporary Germany.
 
Between 1998 and 2007 a series of killings in Germany, disdainfully styled “doner murders” by the media, were attributed by German police to internecine rivalries among immigrants. The victims included eight citizens of Turkish origin, a Greek citizen, and a German policewoman. Not until 2011 did the German public learn not only that the police had ignored signs pointing to the real perpetrators, a neo-Nazi group called the National Socialist Underground, but also that important files, possibly containing evidence implicating state agencies, had disappeared from the archives of Federal Police and intelligence organizations.
 
Esther Dischereit, one of the preeminent German-Jewish voices of the post-Holocaust generation, takes that failure of the state to protect its citizens from racist violence as the core of her performance text Flowers for Otello: On the Crimes That Came Out of Jena. Seeking an appropriate language with which to meet the bereaved, she also finds a way to raise the blanket of silence that is used by those who would prefer that we forget. Combining witness testimony, myth, and incidents from a history of violence against minorities, Flowers for Otello, in Iain Galbraith’s translation, refuses chaos, instead revealing the chilling, patterned order of tragedy while bringing a great writer’s humanism to the fore.
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Firefly
Jabbour Douaihy
Seagull Books, 2022
A powerful novel of a young man living between Muslim and Christian worlds amid the Lebanese Civil War.
 
Firefly paints a searing portrait of the city of Beirut at the outbreak of the Lebanese Civil War in the early 1970s, as seen through the eyes of its simple, yet perplexing, protagonist, Nizam al-Alami. On Nizam’s national ID card, no religion is listed. Muslim by birth, he is Christian by baptism. As a young boy, he found his way into an orchard while playing, and its owners, Touma and Rakheema, instantly fell for him and agreed to raise him as their own, as a Christian, without much resistance from his Muslim parents.
 
When he is grown, Nizam makes his way to Beirut to study law. Unable to bear the confines of the classroom, he abandons college to explore the city as he pleases. His apartment soon becomes a meeting place for his communist comrades, and he falls in love with Janan, the tormented artist whose dark paintings prophesy the city’s bloody future. When Beirut explodes, and the city is divided into a Christian East and a Muslim West, Nizam’s apartment turns into a hideout for armed militiamen, and Burj Square is emptied of everything except the Martyrs’ Statue that bears witness to the city’s most difficult moments. Nizam, too, bears witness, as he sees the corpses of the civil war’s victims pile up.
 
Jabbour Douaihy takes us through Nizam’s adventures and struggles as he faces stigmatization, homelessness, and violence in a society that considers him an outsider. Like the light-producing, charismatic fireflies that captured his imagination and eluded him as a child, Nizam is the glimmer of hope epitomized by those who reject binary identities in favor of the in-between. But how long, Douaihy asks, can this glimmer of hope truly last?
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The Dancing Other
Suzanne Dracius
Seagull Books
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.
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The Suspended Passion
Interviews
Marguerite Duras
Seagull Books, 2016
A controversial figure of the postwar French literary and cultural scene, Marguerite Duras has exerted a powerful hold on readers around the world. This volume of interviews—hailed on its French publication as Duras’s “secret confession”—offers readers a rich vein of new insight into her work, opinions, life, and relationships.

The interviews that make up the book were conducted in 1987, when Italian journalist Leopoldina Pallotta della Torre met the seventy-three-year-old Duras at her Paris flat and convinced her to sit for a series of conversations. The resulting book was published in Italian in 1989, but it somehow failed to attract a French publisher, and it was quickly forgotten. Nearly a quarter of a century later, however, the book was rediscovered and translated into French, and, it has now become a sensation. In its revealing pages, Duras speaks with extraordinary freedom about her life as a writer, her relationship to cinema, her friendship with Mitterand , her love of Chekhov and football, and, perhaps most significantly, her childhood in pre-war Vietnam, the experiences that propelled her most famous novel, The Lover.

A true literary event, finally available in English, The Suspended Passion is a remarkable document of an extraordinary literary life.
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Soutine’s Last Journey
Ralph Dutli
Seagull Books, 2019
This is a biographical novel that tells the story of Chaim Soutine, a Jewish painter from Belorussia who had to be smuggled back to Paris in 1943.

August 6, 1943. Chaim Soutine, a Jewish painter from Belorussia and a contemporary of Chagall, Modigliani, and Picasso, is hidden in a hearse that’s traveling from a small town on the Loire towards Nazi-occupied Paris. Suffering from a stomach ulcer, he urgently needs a life-saving operation. But the hearse must avoid the occupiers’ checkpoints, and it becomes increasingly likely that he will not survive the journey.
 
In a stream of extraordinary images, the morphine-induced artist hallucinates and remembers his life. He dreams of his childhood in Smilovichi near Minsk; his beginnings as a painter in Vilna; his arrival in 1913 in the art capital of the world, Paris, where he befriends Modigliani; and his survival of years of struggle and finding sudden success, only to be persecuted and forced into hiding when the Nazis invade. Back in the present, the painter believes that the power of milk is the only possible remedy for his ulcer. In his mind, he is traveling to a “white paradise”—a strange clinic where a “god in white” declares him healed but forbids him to paint. But for Soutine, neither paradise nor salvation exists if he cannot paint. So, he begins to paint again in secret, willing to pay the price of discovery.
 
A brilliant biographical novel about childhood, longing, friendship, bodily pain, and the wounds of exile, Ralph Dutli’s Soutine’s Last Journey is ultimately an exploration of language and the power of art.
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Barricade
Utpal Dutt
Seagull Books, 2022
A political play staging the Nazi takeover of Germany with an eye on India.

Although Utpal Dutt is acknowledged as a trailblazer of post-Independence Indian theater, English readers have not had access to the range and wealth of his drama. Barricade is a political play that stages the Nazi takeover of Germany in 1933 with an eye on India. Today, the surge to power of far-right parties and fundamentalist fanaticism across the world means that the co-option of democracy and civil society that led to Nazi fascism can happen again—or indeed has already happened—granting Barricade its immediate urgency. Equipped with an introduction analyzing its historical context, this translation of Barricade is also a very rare product in dramatic literature, collating both the printed original as well as a documented performance of the production directed by Dutt.
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