front cover of The Fate of Rural Hell
The Fate of Rural Hell
Asceticism and Desire in Buddhist Thailand
Benedict Anderson
Seagull Books, 2012
In 1975, when political scientist Benedict Anderson reached Wat Phai Rong Wua, a massive temple complex in rural Thailand conceived by Buddhist monk Luang Phor Khom, he felt he had wandered into a demented Disneyland. One of the world’s most bizarre tourist attractions, Wat Phai Rong Wua was designed as a cautionary museum of sorts; its gruesome statues depict violent and torturous scenes that showcase what hell may be like. Over the next few decades, Anderson, who is best known for his work, Imagined Communities, found himself transfixed by this unusual amalgamation of objects, returning several times to see attractions like the largest metal-cast Buddha figure in the world and the Palace of a Hundred Spires. The concrete statuaries and perverse art in Luang Phor’s personal museum of hell included, “side by side, an upright human skeleton in a glass cabinet and a life-size replica of Michelangelo’s gigantic nude David, wearing fashionable red underpants from the top of which poked part of a swollen, un-Florentine penis,” alongside dozens of statues of evildoers being ferociously punished in their afterlife.
 
In The Fate of Rural Hell, Anderson unravels the intrigue of this strange setting, endeavoring to discover what compels so many Thai visitors to travel to this popular spectacle and what order, if any, inspired its creation. At the same time, he notes in Wat Phai Rong Wua the unexpected effects of the gradual advance of capitalism into the far reaches of rural Asia.
 
Both a one-of-a-kind travelogue and a penetrating look at the community that sustains it, The Fate of Rural Hell is sure to intrigue and inspire conversation as much as Wat Phai Rong Wua itself.
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Fear Reverence Terror
Carlo Ginzburg
Seagull Books, 2017
We are surrounded by images, fairly drowning in them. From our cell phones to our computers, from our televisions at home to the screens that light up while we wait in the grocery store checkout line, images of all kinds are seducing us, commanding us to buy!, scaring us, dazzling us.

Fear, Reverence, Terror invites us to look at images slowly, with the help of a few examples: Picasso’s Guernica, the “Lord Kitchener Wants You” World War I recruitment poster, Jacques-Louis David’s Marat, the frontispiece of Thomas Hobbes’s Leviathan, a cup of gilded silver with scenes from the conquest of the New World. Are these political images, Carlo Ginzburg asks? Yes, because every image is, in a sense, political—an instrument of power. Tacitus once wrote, unforgettably, that we are enslaved by lies of which we ourselves are the authors. Is it possible to break this bond? Fear, Reverence, Terror will answer this question.

Praise for Ginzburg
 
“Ginzburg has many claims to be considered the outstanding European historian of the generation which came of age in the late Sixties. Certainly few have equalled him in originality, variety, and audacity.”—London Review of Books 
 
“Ginzburg’s scholarship is dazzling and profound.”—Publisher’s Weekly 
 
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Feminism in Revolt
An Anthology
Carla Lonzi
Seagull Books, 2023
A comprehensive collection of texts from the most influential and iconic figure of Italian second-wave feminism.
 
Recently rediscovered in Italy and abroad, the works of Carla Lonzi tend to fall under the remit of art history or feminist theory. Art historians focus on the texts written in the 1960s, when Lonzi was still actively working as a critic, whereas feminist scholars engage with her more openly political interventions, published after her declared embrace of a separatist feminism. In 1970 Lonzi decided to leave the art world for good and dedicate herself to her newly founded feminist collective, Rivolta Femminile. While recognizing the break in Lonzi’s life and work, this anthology maps the overall arc of her intellectual and political production, giving equal weight to her seminal contributions to art criticism and her trailblazing feminist writings. A comprehensive collection of texts from the most influential and iconic figure of Italian second-wave feminism, Feminism in Revolt seeks to shed light on Lonzi’s versatile approach to literary genres and compositions by juxtaposing essayistic texts, poems, diary excerpts, and manifestos.
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Festive Devils of the Americas
Edited by Milla Cozart Riggio, Angela Marino, and Paolo Vignolo
Seagull Books, 2015
The devil is a defiant, nefarious figure, the emblem of evil, and harbinger of the damned. However, the festive devil—the devil that dances—turns the most hideous acts into playful transgressions. Festive Devils of the Americas is the first volume to present a transnational and performance-centered approach to this fascinating, feared, and revered character of fiestas, street festivals, and carnivals in North, Central, and South America. As produced and performed in both rural and urban communities and among neighborhood groups and councils, festive devils challenge the principles of colonialism and nation-states reliant on the straight and narrow opposition between good and evil, black and white, and us and them.

Each section of this volume opens with regional maps ranging from the Andes, Afro-Atlantic, and Caribbean, to Central and North America. However, festive devils defy geographical as well as moral boundaries. From Brazil’s Candomblé to New Mexico’s dance halls, festive devils and their stories sustain and transform ancestral memory, recast historical narratives, and present political, social, and cultural alternatives in many guises. Within economic, political, and religious cross-currents, these paradoxical figures affirm the spirit of community within the framework of subversion and inversion found at the heart of the festival world.
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The Fiancée Rode In on a Donkey
Vénus Khoury-Ghata
Seagull Books, 2023
A lyrical novel with a poetic narrative about an overlooked individual in Arab African history.

For two days the rabbi rides on a donkey to find the ideal fiancée. Legs and arms shaved, hands dyed with henna, a girl to be married must shine like a mirror. Every girl hopes to be the chosen one and ride off on a donkey to live in the city. The desert is the domain of men; they believe they see oases and palm trees sagging with fruit, while women see only sand on top of sand. A rapid look-around at the girls in the circle was enough for the traveling rabbi to find the right one. He chooses Yudah because of her name, a contraction of Yahuda, and because she lowered her eyes when he looked at her.

The Fiancée Rode In on a Donkey tells Yudah’s story. Instead of experiencing her dream of being chosen and riding off on a donkey to live in a palace, she finds herself in an encampment of tents swaying in the wind. She also doesn’t find the Emir, who is battling on other fronts and soon surrenders. Yudah and the rest of his followers are exiled to Ile Sainte-Marguerite, where she pursues a tireless quest for her future husband in France, seeking a man she has never seen. Will the fantastic destiny of the young girl from the desert ever be fulfilled?

In lyrical novel after novel, Vénus Khoury-Ghata chooses overlooked individuals from history and brings them back to life on the page. Hauntingly unforgettable, The Fiancée Rode In on a Donkey is yet another poetic narrative from one of the most respected French authors of our times.
 
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A Fine Couple
Gert Loschütz
Seagull Books, 2023
The story of the paradoxical relationship of two parents.

As he clears out his parents’ house, Philipp, a photographer, comes across an object that has played a major role in his parents’ lives. Herta and Georg made a fine couple when they first met. Their son imagines the early days of their relationship and remembers how his father was forced to flee across the inner-German border to the West. When Herta and Philipp joined him a few days later, this could have signaled the start of a new era of happiness, but the seeds of their separation had already been sown. In gentle, probing prose, Gert Loschütz describes how Philipp gradually unravels the paradoxical nature of his parents’ relationship: it was love that destroyed their love. To his astonishment, Philipp discovers that Herta and Georg had been in contact all those years in a way they kept secret even from one another.
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The Fire Above, the Mountain Below
Reinhard Jirgl
Seagull Books, 2020
Reinhard Jirgl’s strikingly individual novel The Fire Above, the Mountain Below demonstrates that he is not only unorthodox in his approach to language, but also difficult to pin down in terms of any genre. Weaving together elements of crime story, Cold War espionage, family tragedy, and a dystopian future, he creates a tapestry of fragile humanity and menacing inhumanity. The investigation of a series of gruesome killings takes a detective inspector into explorations of a secret intelligence programme in former East Germany and the role of a family with a tragic history. The more is uncovered, the more disorienting it becomes, and the reader is drawn into a complex web of discovery and suppression.
 
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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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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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The Flying Mountain
Christoph Ransmayr
Seagull Books, 2019
In a publishing world that is all too full of realist novels written in undistinguished prose, discernible only by their covers, The Flying Mountain stands out—if for no other reason than that it consists entirely of blank verse. And that form is most suitable for the epic voyage Christoph Ransmayr relates: The Flying Mountain tells the story of two brothers who leave the southwest coast of Ireland on an expedition to Transhimalaya, the land of Kham, and the mountains of eastern Tibet—looking for an untamed, unnamed mountain that represents perhaps the last blank spot on the map. As they advance toward their goal, the brothers find their past, and their rivalry, inescapable, inflecting every encounter and decision as they are drawn farther and farther from the world they once knew.

​Only one of the brothers will return. Transformed by his loss, he starts life anew, attempting to understand the mystery of love, yet another quest that may prove impossible. The Flying Mountain is thrilling, surprising, and lyrical by turns; readers looking for something truly new will be rewarded for joining Ransmayr on this journey.
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front cover of For the Dying Calves
For the Dying Calves
Beyond Literature: Oxford Lectures
Durs Grünbein
Seagull Books, 2021
Poetically written and originally given as lectures, this is a moving essay collection from Durs Grünbein.

In his four Lord Weidenfeld Lectures held in Oxford in 2019, German poet Durs Grünbein dealt with a topic that has occupied his mind ever since he began to perceive his own position within the past of his nation, his linguistic community, and his family: How is it possible that history can determine the individual poetic imagination and segregate it into private niches? Shouldn’t poetry look at the world with its own sovereign eyes instead?
 
In the form of a collage or “photosynthesis,” in image and text, Grünbein lets the fundamental opposition between poetic license and almost overwhelming bondage to history appear in an exemplary way. From the seeming trifle of a stamp with the portrait of Adolf Hitler, he moves through the phenomenon of the “Führer’s streets” and into the inferno of aerial warfare. In the end, Grünbein argues that we are faced with the powerlessness of writing and the realization, valid to this day, that comes from confronting history. As he muses, “There is something beyond literature that questions all writing.”
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The Fount of Time
The Last Kindom II
Pascal Quignard
Seagull Books, 2021
Last Kingdom is a set of books that . . . is neither philosophical argumentation nor little disparate, scholarly essays, nor novelistic narrative; gradually, for me, all genres have fallen away.”
 
So writes Pascal Quignard of his monumental book series, Last Kingdom. In the latest volume, The Fount of Time, he focuses on the paradoxically immediate presence in our lives of the deepest, most distant past. He explores this subject through a multitude of mediums: fragments of autobiography; curious folktales; literary snippets; historical anecdotes both classical and modern; ruminations on biology, archaeology, and linguistics. Using all of these forms, he confronts dimensions of human experience which, though customarily conveyed in legend, myth, and dreams, run somehow beneath the everyday world and yet are part of our most tangible reality.
 
To enter Quignard’s horizonless time-space is to embrace a rich vision in which the totality of human history and culture is placed disconcertingly on a single footing. In The Fount of Time we are able to glimpse—whether through obscure cultural detail or unusual anecdote—“another world beneath the world.”
 
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Friendship as Social Justice Activism
Critical Solidarities in a Global Perspective
Edited by Niharika Banerjea, Debanuj DasGupta, Rohit K. Dasgupta, and Jaime M. Grant
Seagull Books
Friendship as Social Justice Activism brings together academics and activists to have essential conversations about friendship, love, and desire as kinetics for social justice movements. The contributors featured here come from across the globe and are all involved in diverse movements, including LGBTQ rights, intimate-partner violence, addiction recovery, housing, migrant, labor, and environmental activism. Each essay narrates how living and organizing within friendship circles offers new ways of dreaming and struggling for social justice.

Recent scholarship in different disciplinary fields as well as activist literature have brought attention to the political possibilities within friendship. The essays, memoirs, poems, and artwork in Friendship as Social Justice Activism address these political possibilities within the context of gender, sexuality, and economic justice movements.
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From the Berlin Journal
Max Frisch
Seagull Books, 2017
The daily journal of a giant of German literature,  touching subjects ranging from everyday life to the political and social conditions in East Germany as viewed from West Berlin.

Max Frisch (1911–91) was a giant of twentieth-century German literature. When Frisch moved into a new apartment in Berlin’s Sarrazinstrasse, he began keeping a journal, which he came to call the Berlin Journal. A few years later, he emphasized in an interview that this was by no means a “scribbling book,” but rather a book “fully composed.” The journal is one of the great treasures of Frisch’s literary estate, but the author imposed a retention period of twenty years from the date of his death because of the “private things” he noted in it. From the Berlin Journal now marks the first publication of excerpts from Frisch’s journal. Here, the unmistakable Frisch is back, full of doubt, with no illusions, and with a playfully sharp eye for the world. 

From the Berlin Journal pulls from the years 1946–49 and 1966–71. Observations about the writer’s everyday life stand alongside narrative and essayistic texts, as well as finely-drawn portraits of colleagues like Günter Grass, Uwe Johnson, Wolf Biermann, and Christa Wolf, among others. Its foremost quality, though, is the extraordinary acuity with which Frisch observed political and social conditions in East Germany while living in West Berlin. 
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Fury
Elfriede Jelinek
Seagull Books, 2022
A new play from Nobel Prize winner Elfriede Jelinek that deals with the 2015 terror attack on the satirical French magazine Charlie Hebdo’s offices in Paris.
 
In Greek mythology, it is Hera who blinds the hero Heracles, so that, in a fit of fury, he kills his own family. In the twenty-first century, the gods have another name. So did the three young men who stormed a magazine’s editorial office and a Jewish supermarket in Paris in January 2015 and murdered twelve people. The blind fury, however, remained and more virulent than ever, not least because the weapons were so much more effective.
 
In this raging text, arguably one of her darkest, Nobel Prize winner Elfriede Jelinek investigates topical political events in the context of enduring history and myths. Fury expresses itself not only multi-voiced and from the changing perspective of Islamist terrorists (and their special hatred of Jews), in the shape of furious German citizens, individual narcissistic humiliation, or brutal distribution battles around the globe. Rather, fury also appears as the motor that has driven people with a devastating force for centuries.
 
With her characteristic linguistic power, Jelinek articulates her own disconcertedness in the face of these crimes. In passing, she returns repeatedly to the contradiction between religious laws against representation and the deluge of images online, where movies of assassination, severed heads, and other atrocities are exhibited for millions to see. Fury is a compact grand epic that starts in primal times and attempts to describe the indescribable, relating the inexplicable in our times.
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