logo for Seagull Books
Name and Image
An Essay on Walter Benjamin
Gianni Carchia
Seagull Books, 2024
An insightful study of Walter Benjamin, one of the most important philosophers of the twentieth century, by the Italian philosopher Gianni Carchia.
 
Name and Image crystalizes Gianni Carchia’s lifelong pursuit of the infinite philosophical object in the method and thought of one of the most important philosophers of the twentieth century: Walter Benjamin. This intellectual biography touches upon the philosophy of language, historiography, aesthetics, temporality, and transcendental philosophy.
 
The book has the singular distinction of being both Gianni Carchia’s first and last work. In the spring of 1999, shortly before the resurgence of the disease that would lead to his death, Carchia began revising the graduate thesis he had defended at the University of Turin in 1971 with the title Truth and Language in the Young Walter Benjamin. At age twenty-four, the young scholar already demonstrated the incisive, axiomatic style of a master. The final version, retitled Name and Image, would become his testament. With a remarkable inversion, beginning and end seem to conjoin here in an authentically philosophical act, as though all the motifs of Carchia’s late thought—the conception of philosophy as event and witness, critique of method, and messianic finality—resonated together for the first time in this youthful text. The physiognomy of Benjamin that opens the work is the self-portrait of a figure who stands out ever more as one of the most just voices in twentieth-century Italian philosophy.
 
[more]

front cover of The Nameless Day
The Nameless Day
Friedrich Ani
Seagull Books, 2018
Now in paperback, the thrilling, psychological tale of a twenty-year-old cold case and the detective committed to solving it.

After years on the job, police detective Jakob Franck has retired. Finally, the dead—with all their mysteries—will no longer have any claim on him.

Or so he thinks. On a cold autumn afternoon, a case he thought he’d long put behind him returns to his life—and turns it upside down. The Nameless Day tells the story of that twenty-year-old case, which began with Franck carrying the news of the suicide of a seventeen-year-old girl to her mother, and holding her for seven hours as, in her grief, she said not a single word. Now her father has appeared, swearing to Franck that his daughter was murdered. Can Franck follow the cold trail of evidence two decades later to see whether he’s telling the truth? Could he live with himself if he didn’t?

A psychological crime novel certain to thrill fans of Henning Mankell and Jo Nesbo, The Nameless Day is a masterpiece, a tightly plotted story of contemporary alienation, loss, and violence.
[more]

front cover of Naming the Dawn
Naming the Dawn
Abdourahman A. Waberi
Seagull Books, 2018
The poems in this new volume by Abdourahman A. Waberi are introspective and inquisitive, reflecting a deep spiritual bond—with words, with the history of Islam and its great poets, with the landscapes those poets walked, among which Waberi grew up. The sage yearns here for the simplicity of each individual moment to somehow become eternal, for the histories and people that are part of him—his mother, his wife, his unborn child, the sacred texts that ground his being—to come together harmoniously within him, and to emerge through his words. Lyrical and personal, but with powerful historical and cultural resonances, these poems are the work of a master at the height of his powers.
 
[more]

front cover of Nationalism in India
Nationalism in India
Past and Present
Irfan Habib
Seagull Books, 2024
A persuasive redefinition of nationalism by one of the most eminent historians of India.
 
What makes a people living in a mere “geographical expression” a nation? From the French Revolution onwards, the word “nation” came to denote a people who wish to be collectively free. But free from what—colonial rule and inequality? Or religious and cultural diversity?
 
In this timely and succinct essay, Irfan Habib charts India’s struggle to consolidate a nationalist identity, to identify what it sought to be free from. Even as the colonial regime denied the very possibility of nationalism in the subcontinent, opposition to British rule fomented just such a sentiment. But resistance against colonial exploitation alone could not unify the Indian people. Internal inequalities—caste, poverty, religious bigotry—remained (and still remain) to be tackled.
 
[more]

front cover of Necklace/Choker
Necklace/Choker
then, meanwhile, now./a small novel in fragments/
Jana Bodnárová
Seagull Books, 2021
An engrossing novel about the lives in a small Slovak town during the tumultuous twentieth century.

In this highly acclaimed novel, Jana Bodnárová offers an engrossing portrayal of a small Slovak town and its inhabitants in the north of the country against the backdrop of the tumultuous history of the twentieth century. As Sara, the protagonist of Necklace/Choker, returns to her native town after many years in exile to sell the old family house and garden, she begins to piece together her family’s history from snippets and fragments of her own memory and the diaries of her artist father, Imro. A talented painter, he survived the Holocaust only to be crushed by the constraints imposed on his art by Stalinist censorship, and Sara herself was later driven into exile after dreams of socialism with a human face were shattered by the Soviet-led invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968.
 
Through their stories, and that of Sara’s friend, Iboja, the daughter of a hotelier, readers will be immersed in key moments of Slovak history and their bearing on the people in this less familiar part of Central Europe.
[more]

front cover of Nevermore
Nevermore
Cécile Wajsbrot
Seagull Books, 2024
A meditation on loss and recovery through the act of translation and its recuperative powers.

An unnamed translator mourning the loss of a close friend retreats to Dresden to translate the “Time Passes” section of Virginia Woolf’s novel To the Lighthouse. Translating this lyrical evocation of time and its devastations in a city with which the writer has no connections and where neither her language nor Woolf’s are spoken offers an interruption to the course of her life. She immerses herself in this prose poem of ephemerality. 

The narrator delves into phrases from “Time Passes” and subjects them to the inexact science and imperfect art of translation. This, in turn, leads her to wide-ranging reflections on other instances of loss, destruction, and recovery—the Chernobyl disaster, the High Line in New York City, the bombing of Dresden and Wallmann’s commemorative Bell Requiem Dresden, the evacuation of the Hebridean island Foula, Hiroshi Sugimoto’s photographs of seascapes, Debussy’s “La cathédrale engloutie,” and Ceri Richards’s series of paintings by the same name. She reflects on places that are destined for decay and yet are returning to life, broken worlds in which there is still strength for a new beginning. In Tess Lewis’s visionary English translation, Cécile Wajsbrot’s lyrical exploration of the role of the writer and translator becomes an exquisite meditation on loss and recovery.
 
[more]

front cover of No Storm, Just Weather
No Storm, Just Weather
Judith Kuckart
Seagull Books, 2023
An engaging exploration of romance focusing on disparate ages of lovers.

Sunday evening, Tegel Airport, Berlin: A woman strikes up a conversation with a man, Robert Sturm, who is thirty-six years old and eighteen years her junior. He is on his way to Siberia and will return the following Saturday. She cannot wait . . .

In 1981 she came to West Berlin as an eighteen-year-old to study medicine and met Viktor, who was twice her age. Though he opened the world up to her, he remained closed himself. At the turn of the millennium and thirty-six, she meets Johann. He is thirty-six too. They try to make a life together, but their jobs aren’t the only things that are precarious. Saturday morning, Tegel Airport again: For six days, her everyday life and her memories have become entwined. Why are the men in her life always thirty-six? Is she still the person she remembers? Or, being someone who knows their way around the mind, is she in fact what she has forgotten?
 
[more]

front cover of Noah
Noah
A Novel of the Boom Times
Hugo Loetscher
Seagull Books, 2012
As the current global recession stubbornly persists and financial experts around the world struggle to prevent further financial collapse, everyone has a theory about how to save the economy. But perhaps no idea that has been proffered is as radical or as unique as what Hugo Loetscher imagines in his novel Noah. In this book, first published in German in 1967, the eponymous Old Testament hero fuels his local economy with a prescient plan to build the Ark. Though no one around him seriously believes in the coming flood, everyone is more than willing to do business with him:  “The people of Mesopotamia had never had it so good. There had been an economic miracle.” It is boom time in Mesopotamia, and the economy is flourishing; but as with many financial bubbles, scandal and demise are not far out of sight.  An ancient legend retold in light of capitalist reality, Noah is a witty, delightful and thought-provoking parable of our times.
 
Hugo Loetscher (1929–2009), widely known as the most cosmopolitan of Swiss writers due to his travels and journalistic work in Latin America and Asia, has until now been known mainly by readers in his home country, where he has been the recipient of its most prestigious literary prize. This attentive and engaging translation makes available to a new audience an incredibly timely and entertaining work.
[more]

front cover of Notebooks, Volume 1, 1998-99
Notebooks, Volume 1, 1998-99
Anselm Kiefer
Seagull Books, 2015
“For a long time, it was not clear if I would become a writer or an artist,” says Anselm Kiefer, whose paintings and sculptures have made him one of the most significant and influential artists of our time. Since he was awarded the Peace Prize by the German Book Trade in 2008, his essays, speeches, and lectures have gradually received more attention, but until now his diary accounts have been almost completely unknown. The power in Kiefer’s images, however, is rivaled by his writings on nature and history, literature and antiquity, and mysticism and mythology.

The first volume of Notebooks spans the years 1998-1999 and traces the origins and creative process of Kiefer’s visual works during this period. In this volume, Kiefer returns constantly to his touchstones: sixteenth-century alchemist Robert Fludd, German romantic poet Novalis, Martin Heidegger, Ingeborg Bachmann, Robert Musil, and many other writers and thinkers. The entries reveal the process by which his artworks are informed by his reading—and vice versa—and track the development of the works he created in the late 1990s. Translated into English for the first time by Tess Lewis, the diaries reveal Kiefer’s strong affinity for language and let readers witness the process of thoughts, experiences, and adventures slowly transcending the limits of art, achieving meaning in and beyond their medium.
 
Praise for Kiefer

 “His works recall, in this sense, the grand tradition of history painting, with its notion about the elevated role of art in society, except that they do not presume moral certainty. What makes Kiefer’s work so convincing . . . is precisely its ambiguity and self-doubt, its rejection of easy solutions, historical amnesia, and transcendence.”—New York Times

“Wordiness for Kiefer is painterliness. The library and the gallery, the book and the frame inseparable, even interchangeable, in his monumental archive of human memory. Not since Picasso’s Guernica have pictures demanded so urgently that we studiously reflect and recollect in their presence.”—Simon Schama
[more]

front cover of Notes for a Young Gentleman
Notes for a Young Gentleman
Toby Litt
Seagull Books, 2017
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.
[more]


Send via email Share on Facebook Share on Twitter