Essays exploring the lasting impact of Habib Tanvir's pioneering theatre which blended tradition with modernity in the post-Independence Indian theatre scene.
 
This collection of essays delves into the profound legacy of Habib Tanvir (1923–2009), a luminary in the post-Independence Indian theater scene. Tanvir's decades-long contributions as a director, poet, playwright, and actor are explored by a diverse group of scholars, practitioners, and peers. The book examines his pivotal role in founding the Naya Theatre in 1959, a pioneering group blending rural traditions with contemporary theatre, challenging conventional norms.
 
Against the backdrop of contemporary societal and political shifts, the essays reflect on Tanvir's fearless resistance against the right wing in his later years, particularly his challenges to religious dogma and caste discrimination in works like Ponga Pandit. The collection also emphasizes the enduring impact of Tanvir's seminal work, Charandas Chor, highlighting its adaptability across varied cultural landscapes.
 
With international contributors, the book expands beyond national borders, showcasing Tanvir's impact on global theatre and cross-cultural collaborations. The essays in this volume assert Tanvir's continued relevance, positioning his ideals as a guiding force for India amid evolving cultural and political landscapes.

One of Italy's best-known contemporary philosophers and leftists offers a literature-informed take on our contemporary political situation.

During the dramatic course of the twentieth century, amid the clash of the titans which marked that era, humanity could still think in terms of partisan struggles in which large masses took sides against one another. The new millennium, by contrast, appears to have opened under the guise of generalized insecurity, which pertains not only to the historical and social situation, or to one’s personal psychological predicament, but to our very being. The Earth’s current faltering and the twilight of every convention that might govern it—where roles, images, and languages become confused by a lack of direction and distance—were already powerfully prophesied in Shakespeare’s Hamlet, and later in the works of Kafka and Beckett. In Hamletics, Massimo Cacciari, one of Italy’s foremost philosophers and leftist political figures, establishes a dialogue between these fateful authors, exploring the relationship between European nihilism and the aporias of action in the present.

Set in the 1970s and ’80s, The Hangman’s House narrates the life and times of a Hungarian family in Romania. Those were extraordinary times of oppression, poverty and hopelessness, and Andrea Tompa’s latest novel depicts everyday life under the brutal communist dictatorship of Nicolae Ceaușescu, referred to by the narrator as an unnamed “one-eared hangman.” Ceaușescu is omnipresent throughout the story—in portraits in classrooms and schoolbooks, in the empty food stores, in TV programs, in obligatory Party demonstrations. Most insidiously, he is present in the dreams and nightmares of common people, who, in this cruel period of history, become cruel to one another, just like the dictator.
 
Our narrator, a teenage “Girl,” observes life through tangled, almost interminable sentences, trying to understand and process the many questions in her life: why her family is falling apart; why her mother has three jobs; why her father becomes an alcoholic; why her grandmother dreams of “Hungarian times”; and, most troubling, why there is persecution all around. Brutal though the times are, Girl’s narration is far from a mere indictment. It is suffused with love, tenderness and irony.
 
Written by a woman and featuring a young woman narrator, The Hangman's House focuses intently on how women play the principal roles in holding together the resilient fabric of society. Evocative of the celebrated wry humor that distinguishes the best of Hungarian literature, Tompa’s novel is a tour de force that will introduce a brilliant writer to English-language readers.

A collection of inventive and surprising short stories from one of India’s most prominent countercultural writers.
 
In this wildly inventive collection of Nabarun Bhattacharya’s stories, we meet characters such as a trigger-happy cop in an authoritarian police state, a man who holds on to a piece of rope from a deadly noose, a retired revolutionary thrilled by delusions of grandeur, and people working for a corporation that arranges lavish suicides for a price. Ranging from scathing satires of society to surreal investigations of violence and love, these stories are also a window onto the political and social climate in Bengal, tracing both pan-Indian developments like the 1975 Emergency and local ones like militant-leftist Naxalism and the decades-long Communist reign in the state. Expertly translated from the Bengali, Hawa Hawa and Other Stories is a journey through the mind of one of the most daring countercultural writers of India, one with particular resonance in these chaotic times.

Traditional African narrative forms combined with European modernism.
 
The stories comprising The Healer, Marek Vadas’s first collection, which was originally published in 2006, are steeped in the culture, rituals, and traditions of Africa, blurring the boundaries between dream and reality and peopled with characters whose gender, shape, skin color or even memories may change at a stroke. Nevertheless, Vadas refuses to exoticize this world, and many of the stories, told in pared-down language, blend mythical elements with realistic depictions of harsh living conditions, economic deprivation, and colonial oppression. The narratives unfold from the perspective of their protagonists—children (often orphaned), and men struggling to make ends meet and trying in vain to resist the allure of strong women endowed with magic powers. As a Slovak writer focusing on the African continent, Vadas is a rare voice that helps to build bridges between very different cultures, and now his writing is introduced to the global anglophone readership.
 

A unique blend of fiction and biography that explores the fascinating life of early-twentieth-century Czech photographer František Drtikol.

Have you ever wondered what a story written by a beam of light would be like? The story would be ordinary, but the course of events extraordinary.  Its hero would be a photographer, a guardian of light. And, naturally, the tale would be full of shadow.
 
A History of Light delves into the fascinating life of František Drtikol (1883–1961), an important figure in early-twentieth-century photography who is all but forgotten in contemporary times. A dandy from a small mining town, a world-famous photographer whose business went bankrupt, a master of the nude who never had much luck with women, a mystic and a Buddhist who believed in communism—a man whose numerous contradictions were evident externally and synthesized internally.

A unique blend of fiction and biography, this novel vividly portrays Drtikol’s life, tracing the diverse stages of his career and offering detailed, almost encyclopedic insights into the times and places pivotal to his journey. Acclaimed Czech author Jan Němec narrates the story in the uncommon second-person singular, speaking directly to his subject. Fresco-like, this novel is an artistic and spiritual Bildungsroman that covers over half a century, bringing to life the silver mines of Príbram, Jugendstil Munich, and the Bohemianism of the First Czechoslovak Republic. Drtikol’s role as a photographer is set against the turbulent history of Central Europe through the two World Wars, and the events of those five decades form a riveting backdrop for an exploration of the artist’s work.

A strong and courageous novel that deftly tackles psychosis.

In Melbourne, Australia, a woman in her late thirties is diagnosed with her third episode of psychosis, amounting to schizophrenia. What follows is a frenzied journey from home to a community house to a hospital and out again. Sanya, the protagonist, finds herself questioning the diagnosis of her sanity or insanity, as determined and defined by a medical model which seems less than convincing to her. Having studied psychology herself, she wonders whether, even if the diagnosis is correct to some extent, the treatment should be different. Sanya tells her story in a deceptively calm, first-person voice, using conversations as the primary narrative mode, as she ponders if and when the next psychotic episode will materialize.

Based on real-life events and originally written in Bengali, Hospital is a daring first novel that unflinchingly depicts the precarity of a woman living with psychosis and her struggles with the definition of sanity in our society.
 

One of Europe’s greatest living philosophers, Giorgio Agamben, analyzes the life and work of one of Europe’s greatest poets, Friedrich Hölderlin.

What does it mean to inhabit a place or a self? What is a habit? And, for human beings, doesn’t living mean—first and foremost—inhabiting? Pairing a detailed chronology of German poet Friedrich Hölderlin’s years of purported madness with a new examination of texts often considered unreadable, Giorgio Agamben's new book aims to describe and comprehend a life that the poet himself called habitual and inhabited.
 
Hölderlin’s life was split neatly in two: his first 36 years, from 1770 to 1806; and the 36 years from 1807 to 1843, which he spent as a madman holed up in the home of Ernst Zimmer, a carpenter. The poet lived the first half of his existence out and about in the broader world, relatively engaged with current events, only to then spend the second half entirely cut off from the outside world. Despite occasional visitors, it was as if a wall separated him from all external events and relationships. For reasons that may well eventually become clear, Hölderlin chose to expunge all character—historical, social, or otherwise—from the actions and gestures of his daily life. According to his earliest biographer, he often stubbornly repeated, “nothing happens to me.” Such a life can only be the subject of a chronology—not a biography, much less a clinical or psychological analysis. Nevertheless, this book suggests that this is precisely how Hölderlin offers humanity an entirely other notion of what it means to live. Although we have yet to grasp the political significance of his unprecedented way of life, it now clearly speaks directly to our own.