A collection of six Bernhard plays, all in English for the first time.

Save Yourself if You Can is a collection of six plays that span the entirety of Thomas Bernhard’s career as a dramatist. The plays collected in this long-awaited addition to Bernhard’s oeuvre in English—The Ignoramus and the Madman, The Celebrities, Immanuel Kant, The Goal Attained, Simply Complicated, and Elizabeth II—traverse somber lyricism and misanthropy to biting satire and glorious slapstick. They explore themes that will be familiar to longtime readers of Bernhardt, but here they are presented in a subtly different register, attuned to the needs of the stage.
 

Lyrical and powerful poems that serve as a powerful reminder of the human cost of war.

“Those who believe in the currency of patience / Were burned out in the alleyway.”

The Screams of War is a visceral collection of poems that confront the realities of contemporary Syria. Akram Alkatreb’s verses capture the sense of the quotidian during war. His words, mere “murmurs engraved on stones,” long for and despair over an irrevocable past. At the heart of Alkatreb’s work lies a preoccupation with trauma and the profound burden of alienation that accompanies exile. Nascent memories are shrouded by the “scars of sleep,” and words find themselves nostalgic for destruction. The ubiquity of violence that Alkatreb channels into his poetry does not tolerate enclaves of innocence. The Screams of War is an unforgettable testament to the resilience of the human spirit and a stark reminder of the harsh realities faced by those trapped in conflict.

An experimental novel that pushes the constraints of language to bear witness to the history of both Germany and the individual.

Jürgen Becker’s The Sea in the Radio is a collection of “journal sentences” divided into three sections called notebooks. In this great concert of a novel, language has been pared down to a minimum: fragments, phrases, and short sentences combine and make up a life both banal and profound. It is a life in which many of the details remain unstated or, as in miniatures, float just beyond the edges of the frame. Though at first the narrative may seem to move in a relatively harmless manner, soon enough we begin to realize that the story to be told may indeed be more unsettling than we had suspected.
 
The Sea in the Radio is a novel that bears witness not only to one’s final years but also to one’s place within history in general and Germany’s cataclysmic twentieth-century past in particular.

Our twice-yearly daylight savings holiday, in which we faithfully, collectively adjust our clocks, is purely human tampering with the calendar. Yet, it is a practice that is embedded in nature’s principles, even as we exact more sunlight for ourselves in an over-organized, technological world. Mirroring this dichotomy, Michael Krüger brings us The Seasonal Time Change, a collection of poems where an exacting eye is cast on nature. The poet’s perspective is observant, stringent, and very human, bringing both intellect and emotion to the page. Translated by Joseph Given, the verses are in turn scrutinizing, wistful of the brutality of nature, and rejoicing in the simple wonder of life.

​Bearing witness to Krüger’s interactions with renowned poets and artists through his time as director of Hanser publishing house, proximity and relationships are ongoing themes in this volume. Together, the poems remind us of our own mortality and of the finiteness of nature, but also our need for celebration even—perhaps especially—in times of darkness.

An enchanting novel of magical realism from a new voice, Kenyan author Wanjikũ Wa Ngũgĩ.

Victoriana is a country ruled by an Emperor-for-Life who is dying from an illness not officially acknowledged in a land where truth and facts are decided by the Emperor. The elite goes along with the charade. Their children are conditioned to conform. It is a land of truthful lies, where reality has uncertain meaning.
 
Mumbi, a rebellious child from the capital of Westville, and her brother are sent to live in rural Hippoland. But what was meant to be a punishment turns out to be a glorious discovery of the magic of the land, best captured in the stories their eccentric aunt Sara tells them. Most captivating to the children is the tale of a porcelain bowl supposed to possess healing powers. Returning to Westville as an adult, Mumbi spreads the story throughout the city and to the entire country. Exhausted by years of endless bleak lies, the people are fascinated by the mystery of the porcelain bowl. When word of its healing powers reaches the Emperor himself, he commands Mumbi to find it for him—with dramatic consequences for everyone in Victoriana.
 
Captivating and enchanting, Seasons in Hippoland plays with the tradition of magic realism. Every image in this novel is a story, and every story is a call for resistance to anyone who tries to confine our imagination or corrupt our humanity.

Lessons in resilience in the second wave of the Covid-19 pandemic in India.

Focusing on the second wave of the Covid-19 pandemic in India between April and December 2021, Rustom Bharucha’s timely essay reflects on four interconnected realities that haunted this ongoing crisis—death, grief, mourning, and extinction. How do we cope with multiple deaths and the dislocation of rituals when the act of mourning is either postponed or denied? What roles do political surveillance, censorship, the regulation of lockdowns, and the sheer indifference to the lives of people play in the containment of civil liberties? Through vivid examples of photography, theater, dance, visual arts, and the cultures of everyday life, this meditative essay illuminates both the horror of the pandemic as well as its unexpected intimacies and revelations of shared suffering. Against the destruction of nature and the disrespect for the nonhuman, The Second Wave offers lessons in resilience through its reflections on the ethos of waiting and the need to re-envision breath as a vital resource of self-renewal and resistance.

Writers’ notebooks sometimes prove more revelatory than diaries or intimate journals. At first they might appear to be rag-and-bone shops of ideas, insights, hesitations, doubts, and records of things seen, heard, read, dreamt. But eventually they coalesce into a labyrinthine map of the creative process. Swiss poet Philippe Jaccottet has faithfully kept notebooks for many decades, and the selections that make up the Seedtime volumes have retained a vividness of insight and discovery despite the passage of time. After all, as the poet himself says, his notebooks are “a collection of delicate seeds with which I try to replant my ‘spiritual forest.’”
 
Seedtime III, which brings this series to a close, records numerous fleeting thoughts, ephemeral experiences, and philosophical observations from a renowned poet well into his seventies, charting the single steps—sometimes forwards, sometimes back—taken in a lifelong attempt to transcend the limits of art. The inconclusive nature of the notebook entries, their tentativeness and lack of resolution, renders them as intriguing and evocative as some of Jaccottet’s best works. In them readers will find a life full of the kind of contemplation that attracts yet eludes most of us in our daily existence.
 

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.
 

A rare autobiographical glimpse into the life and influences of one of Europe's greatest living philosophers.

This book’s title, Self-Portrait in the Studio—a familiar iconographic subject in the history of painting—is intended to be taken literally: the book is a self-portrait, but one that comes into view for the reader only by way of patient scrutiny of the images, photographs, objects, and paintings present in the studios where the writer has worked and still works. That is to say, Giorgio Agamben’s wager is to speak of himself solely and uniquely by speaking of others: the poets, philosophers, painters, musicians, friends, passions—in short, the meetings and encounters that have shaped his life, thought, and writing, from Martin Heidegger to Elsa Morante, from Herman Melville to Walter Benjamin, from Giorgio Caproni to Giovanni Urbani. For this reason, images are an integral part of the book, images that—like those in a rebus that together form another, larger image—ultimately combine with the written text in one of the most unusual self-portraits that any writer has left of himself: not an autobiography, but a faithful and timeless auto-heterography.
 

One might say that the womb of death—the Middle Passage, slavery, and colonization—gave birth to Black populations. Taking this observation as her point of departure, Nathalie Etoke examines Black existence today in her riveting new book, Shades of Black. In a white supremacist world, Black bodies hold a specific position, invested with a range of meaning that maintains them in a fixed role, with a script they did not write. The white world has invented and defined the Black person according to its own interests, endowing her with a bereaved humanity. The Black person is confronted with an essential paradox—exist as Black or as a human being? Does the Black person exist for herself or for the other? In the white world, is the Black race the embodiment of a sub-humanity?

Situated at the crossroads of three countries—Cameroon, France, and, now, the United States—Nathalie Etoke is uniquely positioned for this polyphonic reflection on race. She examines what happens when race obliterates historical, social, cultural, and political differences among populations of African descent from different parts of the world. Focusing on recent and ongoing topics in the United States, including the murder of George Floyd, police brutality, the complex symbolism of Barack Obama and Kamala Harris, Etoke explores the relations of violence, oppression, dispossession, and inequalities that have brought us here, face to face with these existential questions: Are you breathing? Are we breathing?

A collection of vital, melancholic, elemental, and vibrantly contemporary poems.

In the beginning, was the light, or was it the Lumières? In Ulrike Almut Sandig’s latest volume of poetry, it is only a leap from the creation of the world to the symphony of the Berlin metropolis. And there is a question holding out off the coast of Lampedusa: Can shining sheep be used as night storage for the dark hours, when we are overwhelmed with fears of God, of a gym teacher with a whistle, of mothers with eyes as black as coal? In devastating sequences, Sandig charts the reality of an abused child, victims of contemporary war, or a fourteenth-century Madonna. Full of humor, musicality, lightness, and rage, Shining Sheep is not just visual poetry—it has loops in your ear and filmic explosions of imagery for all your senses.

A haunting homage to life and liberty, to society and solitude, and to the binding and unbinding that constitute the weft of our lives.

 

A new translation of one of the earliest volumes of Max Frisch’s innovative notebooks.
 
Throughout his life, the great Swiss playwright and novelist Max Frisch (1911–1991) kept a series of diaries, or sketchbooks, as they came to be known in English. First published in English translation in the 1970s, these sketchbooks played a major role in establishing Frisch as, according to the New York Times, “the most innovative, varied and hard-to-categorize of all major contemporary authors.” His diaries, said the Times, “read like novels and his best novels are written like diaries.”
 
Now Seagull Books presents the first unabridged English translation of Sketchbooks, 1946–1949 in a new translation by Simon Pare. This edition reinstates material omitted from the 1977 edition, including a screenplay for an unmade film. In this first volume, which covers the years 1946 to 1949, Frisch chronicles the intellectual and material situation in postwar Europe from the vantage point of a citizen of a neutral, German-speaking country. His notes on travels to the scarred cities of Germany, to Austria, France, Italy, Prague, Wroclaw, and Warsaw paint a complex and stimulating picture of a continent emerging from the rubble as new fault lines are drawn between East and West. As Frisch completes his final architectural projects and garners early success as a writer, he reflects on theater, language, and writing, and he sketches the outlines of plays, including The Fire Raisers and Count Öderland.
 
Whatever experience he chronicles in the sketchbook—whether it’s a Bastille Day party, an Italian fish market, or a tightrope display amid the ruins of Frankfurt or an afternoon by Lake Zurich with Bertolt Brecht, to take just a few examples—his keen dramatist’s eye immerses the reader in the setting while also probing the deeper significance and motivations underlying the scene. This new translation will serve to draw out the immediacy and contemporary quality of Frisch’s observations from the shadow of his status as a classic author, bringing his work to life for a new audience.

A fresh translation of the second volume of Max Frisch’s diaries.

By the time Swiss author Max Frisch published the second volume of his diaries or sketchbooks, he had achieved international recognition as a writer and dramatist. In this volume, he develops his version of the literary diary as a mosaic of musings on architecture and writing, travelogue, autobiography, and political insight. He considers Cold War tensions as well as the civil rights and anti–Vietnam War movements in the United States. Now middle-aged himself, he looks squarely at men’s evolving attitude to life, love, sex, women, and status. And for all the idyllic descriptions of his new home in Berzona, Frisch becomes increasingly critical of his native Switzerland, in particular the crackdowns on left-wingers and protestors, and receives abuse for his stance. Based on the second German edition that reinstated material that had been removed from the original 1972 version, this fresh and definitive translation brings an important mid-twentieth-century European classic back to life.
 

A plea for bringing democracy to our lived daily experience written in lucid prose.

TheSocial Life of Democracy is a response to the polarization of our times and the crisis in democracy being experienced across the world today. Drawing from B. R. Ambedkar’s view that democracy is not a form of government but more a form of society and mental disposition, this book argues that democracy needs to be seen as a form of social life that must be part of our everyday practice. Noting that the obstacles to realizing Ambedkar’s vision of democracy are both material and conceptual, philosopher Sundar Sarukkai critically examines the meaning of democratic action and the function of democracy in different domains ranging from homes to governments. He also examines its relation to labor, science, and religion, and analyzes the ethical processes that are central to democracy. Finally, clarifying the concepts of truth in politics and the ideas of freedom and choice, he persuasively argues in favor of bringing democracy into our everyday lives rather than leaving it exclusively in the domain of electoral politics.
 
 

Poetry that serves as an evocative portrayal of diverse landscapes and cultures.
 
In these otherworldly poetry sequences, Samira Negrouche reminds us that “all life is movement,” where “time passes through me / beings pass through me / they are me / I am them.” The “I” is representative of one voice, three voices, all voices, all rooted in movement as their bodies brush past one another, brush against thresholds of time and space. Everything is in flux—including the dream-like landscapes at the borders of borders—as the poet seeks to recover parts of self and memory, on both a personal and universal level. In these poems, history-laden locales such as Algiers, Timbuktu, N’Djamena, Cotonou, Zanzibar, Cape Town, and Gorée are evoked. Even the language, expertly and sensitively translated by Nancy Naomi Carlson, refuses to be pinned down, as it loops back on itself. At times contradictory, at times fractured in meaning, syntax, and diction, the playful language is riddled with “restless” verbs. In the end, the “I” takes on prophetic overtones, instilling hope for the future.

A collection of diverse yet interconnected essays from one of the world’s most respected historians.

Carlo Ginzburg has been at the forefront of the discipline of microhistory ever since his earliest works were published to great acclaim in the 1970s. The Soul of Brutes brings together four of Ginzburg’s recent scintillating essays and lectures that testify to the diversity of his thoughts on history and philosophy.
 
“Civilization and Barbarism” resurrects a sixteenth-century debate between two thinkers in Spain about the humanness, or lack thereof, of Native Americans, and highlights the influence of classical thinkers, from Herodotus to Aristotle, and the iterations and interpretations through which their writings have traversed down to the Cinquecento. In “The Soul of Brutes” Ginzburg traces the genealogy of the debate on the rationality of animals and the limits of their imagination, from Plutarch and Aristotle to sixteenth-century thinkers like Pietro Pomponazzi and Girolamo Rorario. Following Montaigne, he provokes, are we to beasts as they seem to us? In “Calvino, Manzoni and the Grey Zone,” Carlo Ginzburg pithily writes about the mental dialogue between Holocaust survivor Primo Levi and two Italians who profoundly influenced Levi’s search for these “unexplored pockets of exception”—his contemporary Italo Calvino and the nineteenth-century novelist and philosopher Alessandro Manzoni. And finally, in “Schema and Bias”, he probes whether the historian can clearly see into the past, peering through the layers of bias, which include their own prejudices, or if relativism is the only path.
 
With several beautifully reproduced color illustrations, The Soul of Brutes will interest not only scholars of history, philosophy, and art, but also general intellectual readers.
 

This collection offers a broad range of Spivak’s recent essays, lectures, and other writings that speak to her groundbreaking work in feminism, deconstruction, Marxism, and subaltern studies.

The pieces collected in Spivak Moving touch on a variety of topics, including her crucial thinking on pan-Africanism and W. E. B. DuBois, reproductive heteronormativity, art and film, class apartheid in education, practices of institutional critique, and the training of imaginative activism through a sustained engagement with the humanities. She moves from a look at the unsystematized first languages of continental Africa into a broader consideration of human rights, international civil society practice, the question of terror, the “freedom” of the academic, and the place of the digital. About half the essays are collected here for the first time and are not found in Spivak’s several published essay collections.

The first English translation of a major work of postwar German poetry.
 
Austrian writer Ilse Aichinger (1921–2016) was a member of the Gruppe 47 writers’ group, which sought to renew German-language literature after World War II. From a wide-ranging literary career that encompassed all genres, Squandered Advice was Aichinger’s sole poetry collection. The book gathers poems written over several decades, yet Aichinger’s poetic voice remains remarkably consistent, frequently addressing us or a third party, often in the imperative, with many poems written in the form of a question. Even though they use free verse throughout, the poems are still tightly structured, often around sounds or repetition, using spare language. Phrases are often fragmentary, torn off, and juxtaposed as if in a collage. Isolated and haunting, the images are at times everyday, at other times surreal, suggesting dreams or memories. The tone ranges from reassuring and gentle to disjointed and disturbing, but the volume was carefully composed by the author into an integral whole, not chronological but following its own poetic logic. This new translation makes Aichinger’s critically acclaimed book, which has inspired poets in the German-speaking world for decades, available to English-language readers for the first time.

Elvio Fachinelli (1928–1989) was a leading Italian psychoanalyst whose clinical, theoretical, and activist work resonated well beyond his discipline. In The Still Arrow, Fachinelli launches an interdisciplinary investigation ranging from anthropology to politics, and from the history of religions to the critique of ideology. 

Originally published in 1979, this book displays Fachinelli’s eclectic methodology. The Still Arrow goes against Freud’s attempt in Totem and Taboo to equate individual psycho-libidinal predicaments with those of whole societies. Yet, it argues that the difference between the two always remains one of degree, not of principle. The vexing problem of their relation is approached through an interrogation of time. From a psychoanalytic standpoint, individual obsessional neurosis is firmly connected to a repudiation of death. But, Fachinelli argues, comparable temporal strategies are also present at the group level, in disparate social and historical contexts, for instance, in the archaic transformation of the dead into ancestors and in what he names 'the fascist phenomenon'.

From this perspective, history is not just the sum of all possible histories but also of impossible ones. Fachinelli delineates an innovative knowledge of time which brings together apparently distant events into a characteristic series. This first English translation of a book by Fachinelli, The Still Arrow introduces a major critical European voice to the larger readership.

A novel of growing up a Hungarian in Romania under Communism.
 
In the novel Story of a Stammer, Gábor Vida asks a fundamental question: Where does stammering come from? In the process of answering this question, he discovers that an entire historical period and an entire world have been stammering, too. Through Vida’s eyes, we see that stammering comprises all the lies accumulated over time and over generations because nobody had ever articulated what they felt or thought, nor done what they really wanted. Nobody, Vida shows, had ever told the truth.
 
Describing life in the 1970s and ’80s under Romanian Communist dictator Nicolae Ceauçescu’s authoritarian regime, Vida writes with disarming honesty, breaking taboos and chronicling the ways in which tyranny and exploitation seep into family relationships. The novel charts the first two decades of a young Hungarian man’s life in Romania, telling a story of coming to terms with a stammer, loneliness, and an unstimulating environment where religion, alcoholism, and suicide are the most common escape strategies. A Bildungsroman, a novel about Transylvania, a chronicle of minority life, a sociological analysis of cultural identity, and ultimately a deeply personal account of a historical era, Story of a Stammer is a major contribution to contemporary Hungarian literature—an unfailingly serious yet humorously delightful witness to a turbulent period in recent history.

A highly anticipated edition of Zaqtan’s work from 2014 to 2020, all in English for the first time.

Ghassan Zaqtan is not only one of the most significant Palestinian poets at work today, but one of the most important poets writing in Arabic. Since the publication of his first collection in 1980, Zaqtan’s presence as a poet has evolved with the same branching and cumulative complexity as his poems—an invisible system of roots insistently pushing through the impacted soil of political and national narratives.

Strangers in Light Coats is the third collection of Zaqtan’s poetry to appear in English. It brings together poems written between 2014 and 2020 drawn from six volumes of poetry. Catching and holding the smallest particles of observation and experience in their gravity, the poems sprout and grow as though compelled, a trance of process in which fable, myth, and elegy take form only to fall apart and reconfigure, each line picked apart by the next and brought into the new body.
 

A brief study of select Western art from Italy’s foremost philosopher.

In Renaissance palaces, the studiolo was a small room to which the prince withdrew to meditate or read, surrounded by paintings he particularly loved. This book is a kind of studiolo for its author, Giorgio Agamben, as he turns his philosophical lens on the world of Western art.
 
Studiolo is a fascinating take on a selection of artworks created over millennia; some are easily identifiable, others rarer. Though they were produced over an arc of time stretching from 5000 BCE to the present, only now have they achieved their true legibility. Agamben contends that we must understand that the images bequeathed by the past are really addressed to us, here and now; otherwise, our historical awareness is broken. Notwithstanding the attention to detail and the critical precautions that characterize the author’s method—they provoke us with a force, even a violence, that we cannot escape. When we understand why Dostoevsky feared losing his faith before Holbein’s Body of the Dead Christ, when Chardin’s Still Life with Hare is suddenly revealed to our gaze as a crucifixion or Twombly’s sculpture shows that beauty must ultimately fall, the artwork is torn from its museological context and restored to its almost prehistoric emergence. These artworks are beautifully reproduced in color throughout Agamben’s short but significant addition to his scholarly oeuvre in English translation.