Seagull Books London Ltd – förlag

A poetically written and bitterly sweet memoir about nature, death, life in Palestine, and the universal concept of home.Palestinian writer Hussein Barghouthi was in his late forties when he was diagnosed with lymphoma. He had feared it was HIV, so when the cancer diagnosis was confirmed, he left the hospital feeling a bitter joy because his wife and son would be spared. The bittersweetness of this reaction characterizes the alternating moods of narration and reflection that distinguish this meditative memoir, Among the Almond Trees.  Barghouthi’s way of dealing with finality is to return to memories of childhood in the village of his birth in central Palestine, where the house in which he grew up is surrounded by almond and fig orchards. He takes many healing walks in the moonlit shadows of the trees, where he observes curious foxes, dancing gazelles, a badger with an unearthly cry, a weasel, and a wild boar with its young—a return not only to the house but to nature itself. The author decides to build a house where he would live with his wife and son, in whom he sees a renewal of life. The realization of his impending death also urges him to vocalize this experience, and he relates the progress of the disease at infrequent intervals. And, ultimately, he details the imaginative possibility of a return to life—to the earth, where he would be buried among the almond trees.

The Blue Light is an autobiographical novel in chapters and vignettes that travels through memory, time, and language.Hussein Bargouthi tells his story with Bari, a Turkish American Sufi, during Bargouthi’s years as a graduate student at the University of Washington in the late 1980s. The Blue Light has several beginnings and many returns—from Beirut’s traumatic sea to musings on color and identity, from Buddhist paths to Rajneesh disciples, from military rule to colonial insanity, from drug addiction to sacred rock. Written and lived between Arabic and English, this is a unique book whose depth is as clear as its surface. It will tempt you to dismiss it as it compels you to devour it for illumination. Merging memoir with fiction, and the hallowed with the profane, The Blue Light is a meditation on and liberation from madness—a brilliant, inimitable literary achievement.

An erudite exploration of transgressive language from the Renaissance by one of Europe’s greatest living philosophers. This book explores how early modern authors broke linguistic boundaries, creating new words and languages that challenged traditional grammar and lexicon, providing historical insight into today’s debates on the politics of language.  Through a scholarly analysis by Giorgio Agamben, the text delves into the boundary-shifting language of the Renaissance, exemplified by giants like Pantagruel and Gargantua, whose outsized bodies mirror the vastness of their speech. The macaronic language invented by Teofilo Folengo, blending Latin and vernacular, embodies a linguistic rebellion that transforms language into a tangible, unruly force. Featuring illustrations from the Songes drolatiques de Pantagruel and Folengo’s Baldo, this volume offers a vivid portrayal of language as a physical, dynamic entity that defies grammatical norms.

Winner of the 2019 Palestine Book Awards Translation Prize.This lyrical novel, set in the surroundings of the Palestinian village of Zakariyya, weaves a narrative rich in sensory detail yet troubled by the porousness of memory. It tells the story of the relationship between two figures of deep mythical resonance in the region, Yahya and Zakariyya, figures who live in the present but bear the names-and many traits-of two saints. Ranging from today back to pre-1948 Palestine, the book presents both a compelling portrait of a contemporary village and a sacred geography that lies beyond and beneath the present state of the world. Sensual, rich in allusion, yet at the same time focused on the struggles of today, Where the Bird Disappeared is a powerful novel of both connection and dispossession

The year is 323 bce. King Alexander of Macedonia--Alexander the Great--lies paralyzed by poison in his palace in Babylon. He is thirty-two years old, had Aristotle as a mentor, and is the greatest military commander the world has ever seen. At the other end of the palace, Phyllis, a cook for Alexander's army, sits locked in a room, arrested on suspicion of being the poisoner. All of her adult life she has lived in the field--and for a long period of time was Alexander's lover. Who has poisoned the king? Phyllis is allowed to live as long as she writes down everything she knows about Alexander. She tells a brutal story of the violent daily life in the war, about the planning of the expansion into the Arabian Peninsula, about an invisible library containing marvelous manuscripts and discoveries, and about the passion between a cook and a king. With The Invisible Library, Thorvald Steen interweaves known and unknown, relying on facts until they run out, then building his story on what is probable, to tell the story of a little-known period in the life of one of the most renowned figures in history. The result is an existential and inspired novel that goes to the heart of the human experience--who are we in war, in love, during the final days of life?

A patient, genealogical investigation of the dichotomies that are foundational to the Western philosophical tradition.We are so used to distinguishing between the possible and the real, between essence and existence that we do not realize that these distinctions, which seem so obvious to us, are the result of a long and laborious process that has led to the splitting of being—the “matter” of thought—into two fragments that are both conflicting and intimately intertwined.This book argues that the ontological-political machine of the West is based on the splitting of this “matter,” without which neither science nor politics would be possible. Without the partition of reality into essence and existence and into possibility and actuality, neither scientific knowledge nor the ability to control human action—which characterizes the historical power of the West—would have been possible.If we could not suspend the exclusive concentration of our attention on what immediately exists (as animals seem to do), to think and define its essence, Western science and technology would not have experienced the advances that characterize them. And if the dimension of possibility disappeared entirely, neither plans nor projects would be thinkable, and human actions could be neither directed nor controlled. The incomparable power of the West has one of its essential presuppositions in this ontological machine.

The first complete publication of Robert Walser’s poems translated into English.Admired by the likes of Kafka, Musil, and Walter Benjamin and acclaimed “unforgettable, heart-rending” by J. M. Coetzee, Swiss writer Robert Walser (1878–1956) remains one of the most influential authors of modern literature. Walser left school at fourteen and led a wandering and precarious existence while producing poems, stories, essays, and novels. In 1933, he abandoned writing and entered a sanatorium, where he remained for the rest of his life. “I am not here to write,” Walser said, “but to be mad.”  This first collection of Walser’s poems in English translation allows English-speaking readers to experience the author as he saw himself at the beginning and the end of his literary career––as a poet. The book also includes notes on dates of composition, draft versions of the printed poems, and brief biographical information on characters and locations that appear in the poems and may not be known to readers. Few writers have ever experienced such a steady rise in their reputation and public profile as Walser has seen in recent years, and this collection of his poems will help readers discover a unique writer whose off-kilter sensibility and innovations in form are perfectly suited to our fragmented, distracted, bewildering era.

An analysis of how a political myth is taken and treated as a metaphor that reflects how a country like Germany built its own destiny.In the decades before the rise of the Third Reich, “Secret Germany” was a phrase used by the circle of writers around the poet Stefan George to describe a collective political and poetic project: the introduction of the highest values of art into everyday life, the secularization of myth and the mythologization of history. In this book, Furio Jesi takes up the term in order to trace the contours of that political, artistic, and aesthetic thread as it runs through German literary and artistic culture in the period—which, in the 1930s, became absorbed by Nazism as part of its prophecy of a triumphant future. Drawing on thinkers like Carl Jung and writers such as Thomas Mann and Rainer Maria Rilke, Jesi reveals a literary genre that was transformed, tragically, into a potent political myth.

A seminar, a sixteenth-century heretical text, and the art of slow reading—this is historical research as you’ve never seen it before.Patience Games: A Seminar on the 'Benefit of Christ' invites readers into the unpredictable world of scholarly discovery, where interpretation is not a straight path but a labyrinth of dialogue revision. At the heart of this book is a seminar held forty years ago at the University of Bologna, where students wrestled with The Beneficio di Cristo, the incendiary sixteenth-century text that questioned Church authority and championed salvation through grace alone. This is not a neatly packaged historical study, however—it is an unfiltered look at the errors and insights that emerge in the collective process of reading and debating a text.Through shifting hypotheses and the sheer unpredictability of research, Patience Games dismantles the illusion of scholarship as a sterile pursuit, revealing instead a messy, deeply human endeavor. Blending sharp analysis with wit and self-irony, the book makes a compelling case for the continued importance of slow reading—even in an age where knowledge is just a click away.

An inquiry into the origins of language and articulation, exploring how the transformation of the human voice shaped history, politics, and thought.What does it mean to have a voice—and how does it shape what it means to be human? In The Human Voice, Giorgio Agamben embarks on a profound exploration of how the human voice transforms from mere sound into meaningful articulation, setting humans apart from the animal world. Tracing this transformation through ancient grammar and the history of writing, he unpacks the intricate relationship between voice and language, and the living being and the speaking subject.Through a meticulous philosophical inquiry, Agamben reconstructs the mechanisms by which articulation turns expression into knowledge, revealing how the voice is the way we define humanity. This study reaches beyond linguistics, touching on politics and history, as it interrogates the enduring question of what—and who—is considered fully human.

Now in paperback, The Book of Sleep is a landmark in contemporary Arabic literature.What is sleep? How can this most unproductive of human states—metaphorically called death’s shadow or considered the very pinnacle of indolence—be envisioned as action and agency? And what do we become in sleep? What happens to the waking selves we understand ourselves to be?Written in the spring of 2013, as the Egyptian government of President Mohammed Morsi was unraveling in the face of widespread protests, The Book of Sleep is a landmark in contemporary Arabic literature. Drawing on the devices and forms of poetry, philosophical reflection, political analysis, and storytelling, this genre-defying work presents us with an assemblage of fragments that combine and recombine, circling around their central theme but refusing to fall into its gravity.“My concern was not to create a literary product in the conventional sense, but to try and use literature as a methodology for thinking,” El Wardany explains. In this volume, sleep shapes sentences and distorts conventions. Its protean instability throws out memoir and memory, dreams and hallucinatory reverie, Sufi fables and capitalist parables, in the quest to shape a question. The Book of Sleep is a generous and generative attempt to reimagine possibility and hope in a world of stifling dualities and constrictions.

Known for his brilliantly dark fictional visions, Laszlo Krasznahorkai is one of the most respected European writers of his generation and the winner of the 2015 Man Booker International Prize. Here, he brings us on a journey through China at the dawn of the new millennium. On the precipice of its emergence as a global power, China is experiencing cataclysms of modernity as its harsh Maoist strictures meet the chaotic flux of globalism. What remains of the Middle Kingdom's ancient cultural riches? And can a Westerner truly understand China's past and present--or the murky waters where the two meet? Destruction and Sorrow beneath the Heavens is both a travel memoir and the chronicle of a distinct intellectual shift as one of the most captivating contemporary writers and thinkers begins to engage with the cultures of Asia and the legacies of its interactions with Europe in a newly globalized society. Rendered in English by award-winning translator Ottilie Mulzet, Destruction and Sorrow beneath the Heavens is an important work, marking the emergence of Krasznahorkai as a truly global novelist.

Distinguished philosopher Giorgio Agamben offers an archaeological inquiry into the problem of scriptural interpretation. The problem of interpreting Scripture—above all, sacred scripture, but ultimately any form of writing—coincides with the very history of Western culture. It is no surprise, then, that an archaeological inquiry such as the one proposed here—on the problem of interpretation from Origen to Auerbach, from the Talmud to Benjamin—might hold unexpected revelations.Essential reading for scholars of theology, religious studies, and hermeneutics interested in the history of scriptural interpretation, The Spirit and the Letter highlights how the interpretation of Scripture reveals itself as inseparable from ethics and politics.

Bibhutibhushan Bandyopadhyay was one of the greatest writers in modern Bengali literature, best known for his autobiographical novel Pather Panchali, which, along with another of Bandyopadhyay’s books, formed the basis for Satyajit Ray’s classic Apu Trilogy. In this semi-autobiographical novel, Satyacharan is a young graduate in 1920s Calcutta, who, unable to find a job in the city, takes up the post of a ‘manager’ of a vast tract of forested land in neighboring Bihar. As he is increasingly enchanted and hypnotized by the exquisite beauty of nature, he is burdened with the painful task of clearing this land for cultivation. As ancient trees fall to the cultivator’s axe, indigenous tribes—to whom the forest had been home for millennia—lose their ancient way of life. The promise of ‘progress’ and ‘development’ brings in streams of landless laborers, impoverished schoolmasters and starving boys from around the region, and the narrator chronicles in visionary prose the tale of destruction and dispossession that is the universal saga of man’s struggle to bend nature to his will. Written in 1937–39, and now available in English translation, Aranyak is an unforgettable account of hard lives in a place of vanishing beauty, preserved here for all time by a brilliant artist.

For more than three decades, artist William Kentridge has explored in his work the nature of subjectivity, the possibilities of revolution, the Enlightenment's legacy in Africa, and the nature of time itself. At the same time, his creative work has stretched the boundaries of the very media he employs. Though his pieces have allowed viewers to encounter the traditions of landscape and self-portraiture, the limits of representation and the possibilities for animated drawing, and the labor of art, a guide to understanding the full scope of his art has been available until now. For five days, Kentridge sat with Rosalind C. Morris to talk about his work. The result That Which Is Not Drawn;is a wide-ranging conversation and deep investigation into the artist's techniques and into the psychic and philosophical underpinnings of his body of work. In these pages, Kentridge explains the key concerns of his art, including the virtues of bastardy, the ethics of provisionality, the nature of translation and the activity of the viewer.And together, Kentridge and Morris trace the migration of images across his works and consider the possibilities for a revolutionary art that remains committed to its own transformation. "That's the thing about a conversation," Kentridge reflects. "The activity and the performance, whether it's the performance of drawing or the performance of speech and conversation, is also the engine for new thoughts to happen. It's not just a report of something you know." And here, in this engaging dialogue, we at last have a guide to the continually exciting, continually changing work of one of our greatest living artists.

The work of poet Georg Trakl, a leading Austrian-German expressionist, has been praised by many, including his contemporaries Rainer Maria Rilke and Else Lasker-Schuler, as well as his patron Ludwig Wittgenstein. Wittgenstein famously wrote that while he did not truly understand Trakl's poems, they had the tone of a "truly ingenious person," which pleased him.A Skeleton Plays Violin comprises the final volume in a trilogy of works by Trakl published by Seagull Books. This selection gathers Trakl's early, middle, and late work, none of it published in book form during his lifetime. The work here ranges widely, from his haunting prose pieces to his darkly beautiful poems documenting the first bloody weeks of World War I on the Eastern Front. Book Three of Our Trakl the series that began with Trakl's first book Poems and his posthumously published Sebastian Dreaming also includes translations of unpublished poems and significant variants.Interpolated throughout this comprehensive and chronological selection is a biographical essay that provides more information about Trakl's gifted and troubled life, especially as it relates to his poetry, as well as the necessary context of his relationship with his favorite sibling, his sister Grete, whose role as a muse to her brother is still highly controversial. Trakl's life was mysterious and fascinating, a fact reflected in his work. A Skeleton Plays Violin should not be missed.

Maryse Conde is one of the best-known and most beloved French Caribbean literary voices. The author of more than twenty novels, she was shortlisted for the Man Booker International Prize in 2015 and has long been recognized as a giant of black feminist literature. While Conde has previously published an autobiography of her childhood, What Is Africa to Me? tells for the first time the story of her early adult years in Africa years formative not only for her, but also for African colonies appealing for their own independence.What Is Africa to Me? traces the late 1950s to 1968, chronicling Conde's life in Sekou Toure's Guinea to her time in Kwame N'Krumah's Ghana, where she rubbed shoulders with Malcolm X, Che Guevara, Julius Nyerere, and Maya Angelou. Accusations of subversive activity resulted in Conde's deportation from Ghana. Settling down in Senegal, Conde ended her African years with close friends in Dakar including, filmmakers, activists, and Haitian exiles, before putting down more permanent roots in Paris.Conde's story is more than one of political upheaval, however; it is also the story of a mother raising four children as she battles steep obstacles, of a Guadeloupean seeking her identity in Africa, and of a young woman searching for her freedom and vocation as a writer. What Is Africa to Me? is a searing portrait of a literary genius it should not be missed.

Pyotr Pavlensky turns state violence into his medium—now, in his own words, he reveals the theory behind the fire.Pyotr Pavlensky’s Subject–Object Art Theory is both a manifesto and a method—an incendiary redefinition of what art can and should be in an era of increasing repression. Known for his radical public events, such as setting fire to government buildings, stitching his lips shut, or nailing his own body to the ground, Pavlensky has been called a provocateur. In this book, he offers his own framework: subject–object art, a practice that redefines the position of art with respect to power and forces state mechanisms to work for art.Venturing past the confines of political art, he examines the historical intersections of art and power, situating his work within a lineage of radical avant-garde movements. Whether seen as a guide or an act of defiance in itself, Subject–Object Art Theory urges the reader to rethink artistic freedom but as a means of bringing art back to its true independence.

Paul Celan (192070) is one of the best-known German poets of the Holocaust; many of his poems, admired for their spare, precise diction, deal directly with its stark themes. Austrian writer Ingeborg Bachmann (192673) is recognized as one of postWorld War II German literature's most important novelists, poets and playwrights. It seems only appropriate that these two contemporaries and masters of language were at one time lovers, and they shared a lengthy, artful and passionate correspondence.Collected here for the first time in English are their letters written between 1948 and 1961. Their correspondence forms a moving testimony of the discourse of love in the age after Auschwitz, with all the symptomatic disturbances and crises caused by their conflicting backgrounds and their hard-to-reconcile designs for living-as a woman, as a man, as writers. In addition to the almost 200 letters, the volume includes an important exchange between Bachmann and Gisele Celan-Lestrange, who married Celan in 1951, as well as the letters between Paul Celan and Swiss writer Max Frisch, who was Bachmann's lover for four years. 'Wieland Hoban has worked with accuracy and determination to capture the nuances of style and register, which include oblique awkwardness (Celan) and self-assuredness (Bachmann), alongside infinite courage and astounding strength (Celan-Lestrange). The translation reads well, with just a slight edge of the original diction remaining to remind readers that we are witnessing a different time and place, and way of perceiving the world. . . . This is an important addition tot he work in translation of two major post-war writers.'- Times Literary Supplement'This book is highly recommended. You cannot possibly be disappointed by it, especially if you are familiar with these writers' literary output, each of which left the world a completely original, masterful, and highly influential body of work. The letters move from youthful heartbreak and poetical exuberance to the destructive later exchanges between two people who cannot trust one another although they are, until the end, drawn to each other. It's not a book you read and shelve. It's a book to read and reread, a book to treasure.'- Shigekuni. Read the lengthy, detailed and enligtening review of the book here.'Correspondence, rendered perfectly in English by Wieland Hoban, traces [Celan and Bachmann's] letters, telegrams, and book inscriptions to one another, color-coded and augmented by hundreds of footnotes. Like other volumes from Seagull Books, it's physically gorgeous, with a pleasingly compact trim size. Reading Correspondence feels like an indulgence. It also feels disorienting. The world of the letters and the world of their authors' real lives are askew in a sometimes jarring way, so that the emotional content of the letters reads almost as fiction.'- Aaron Belz, Books & Culture

Western culture has been marked by deep divisions between action and contemplation, intervention and passivity, decisiveness and withdrawal. Conceived as radical opposites, these terms structure the history of religion, philosophy and political theory, and have left their imprint on the most intimate processes of individual decision-making and geo-political strategies. But Joseph Vogl argues for a third way: a mode of thought that doesn't insist on these divisive either/ors. Neither an active refusal to engage with the world nor a consistent strategy of resistance, tarrying, as defined by Vogl, defers, multiplies and suspends the strictures of decision-making. Vogl's readings of texts by Freud, Schiller, Sophocles, Musil and Kafka provide rich examples of how to resist the binary of activity and passivity through tarrying. The first extended analysis of tarrying as a mode of subversion, this book presents provocative new readings of major works of world literature and thought.

A lyrical travelogue charting Tomas Espedal’s journeys to and ruminations around the world, from his native Norway to Istanbul and beyond.  “Why travel?” asks Tomas Espedal in Tramp, “Why not just stay at home, in your room, in your house, in the place you like better than any other, your own place. The familiar house, the requisite rooms in which we have gathered the things we need, a good bed, a desk, a whole pile of books. The windows giving on to the sea and the garden with its apple trees and holly hedge, a beautiful garden, growing wild.”  The first step in any trip or journey is always a footstep—the brave or curious act of putting one foot in front of the other and stepping out of the house onto the sidewalk below. Here, Espedal contemplates what this ambulatory mode of travel has meant for great artists and thinkers, including Rousseau, Kant, Hazlitt, Thoreau, Rimbaud, Whitman, Giacometti, and Robert Louis Stevenson. In the process, he confronts his own inability to write from a fixed abode and his refusal to banish the temptation to become permanently itinerant.  Lyrical and rebellious, immediate and sensuous, Tramp conveys Espedal’s own need to explore on foot—in places as diverse as Wales and Turkey—and offers us the excitement and adventure of being a companion on his fascinating and intriguing travels.

A crucial text at the intersection of history and philosophy in twentieth-century Italy.On December 29, 1918, the Spartakus League, a Marxist revolutionary movement, rose up in Germany calling for an end to class rule by the bourgeoisie. Massive demonstrations followed and more than 500,000 Berliners took to the streets in January—only to be crushed by police and anticommunist paramilitary troops. Several leaders of the Spartakus League were killed and the revolt was quashed.Through a detailed reconstruction of the events of that bloody winter, historian and critic Furio Jesi recasts our understanding of a foundational political difference—revolt or revolution? Drawing on a deep reserve of literary sources like Brecht, Eliade, Dostoyevsky, and Mann, Jesi outlines a uniquely incisive phenomenology of revolt that distinguishes between the purposeful historical temporality of revolution and the suspension of time that marks a revolt. This edition also includes an essay on the politics of time and revolution by Rosa Luxemburg, a founding leader of the Spartakus League.

Clément Rosset bridges highbrow philosophy with everyday life, using pop culture to illuminate complex metaphysical issues.As a maverick philosopher unafraid of challenging the ideas and methods of his colleagues, Clément Rosset’s work attempts to connect sometimes lofty academic philosophy with the concerns of everyday life. For decades, he has worked to illuminate some of the most obscure metaphysical issues, often using popular film, theatre, novels, and comic books to illustrate his ideas, and as a result, he has gained a reputation as both a happy sage and a singular mind.   In The Real and Its Double, expertly translated by Chris Turner, Rosset takes on the question of the Real and humanity’s natural ability to sidestep and bypass it. The key to this type of evasion, Rosset suggests, is a certain form of oracular thinking that lies buried in the origins of Western metaphysics and psychology. Here, Rosset eschews the prolix and paradoxical psychological theories of Derrida and Lacan in favor of an exceptional lucidity that speaks to his Nietzschean-tragic love of life.   If good philosophy can be defined as expressing complicated things in a simple way, then here, in one of his best-known works, Rosset has proven himself a master.

A man scours the town he left fifty years ago for some modest evidence of past joys. Javed, who has returned to Lahore from East Pakistan, won't speak of what he witnessed in his time away. In her dreams, an old woman boards a train full of dead ancestors. A sage who cannot control his anger must seek out a butcher for redemption. Mahaban, once the home of monkeys, is now a city filled with human beings. Sheherzad, who once told Emperor Shaharyar one thousand and one stories, is now an old woman who has forgotten her fantastical yarns. The fifteen stories in The Death of Sheherzad ably represent Intizar Husain's oeuvre, defying narrative tradition and exploring the past, specifically the Partition of India, as a means of unraveling the present. He imaginatively revisits a syncretic, tolerant, pluralistic past to analyze why the tide turned so irreversibly. Questioning everything faith, violence, society Husain probes the horrors of Partition in a manner as oblique as it is trenchant. Imbued with dark wit and literary brilliance, these stories at once shock, agitate, and entertain.

A timely book addressing the burning concerns of our times, from the excesses of capitalism to the global crisis of leadership.  There is widespread agreement, across a voluble political spectrum and around the planet, that we live in times of intensifying insecurity and turmoil. If ours is an age of transition, its direction is anything but certain. Momentous transformations in ecology, geopolitics, and everyday life are shadowed by a suffocating sense of stasis. The limits to capital and the limits of nature are entangled in frightful ways, while the profoundly obsolete form of leadership, domination, and conflict exacerbate an already baleful situation. And yet struggles for liberation have not been quelled. Terms of Disorder confronts this moment by probing some of the defining terms in the modern vocabulary of emancipation, with the aim of testing their capacity to name and orient collective action set on abolishing the present state of things. Ranging from communism to leadership, the eleven keywords addressed in this book provide a set of interlocking points of entry into the common task of forging a political language capable of navigating our disorientation. If, as Gramsci famously noted, the interregnum is a time when the new struggles to be born while the old order is moribund, we may wish to heed Cedric Robinson’s call to “choose wisely among the dying.”

Poetic prose meditations translated superbly into English.  Austrian poet Friederike Mayröcker is widely considered one of the most important European poets of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. The last book of hers to be published during her lifetime, as mornings and moosgreen I. Step to the window is an elliptical and, if at times cryptic, deeply personal, playful, and highly poetic collection of experiences, memories, dreams, desires, fears, visions, observations, and peregrinations through landscapes both real and imagined. The volume bears witness to her unique late lyrical style of pyrotechnical cut-up. Among many others, her beloved Derrida, Duchamp, Hölderlin, and Jean-Paul all appear, almost like guides, as Mayröcker bravely makes her way through infirmity, old age, and loneliness, prolonging her time as a prolific writer as much as possible.

A bold meditation on endurance as interruption rather than progress, offering a radical rethinking of time, agency, and survival.  On Persistence is an exploration into the elusive, unruly force of endurance—not as moral virtue or capitalist work ethic, but as a temporal and affective structure that resists assimilation. In these wide-ranging philosophical and literary essays, Rebecca Comay interrogates what it means to persist when progress stalls and resolution fails to arrive. Engaging figures from Freud to Beckett, Proust to Benjamin, Hamlet to Niobe, Comay tracks the strange temporality of suspended life: interminable mourning, unfinished projects, the persistence of the past, the undead stirrings of the death drive. What emerges is a radically different model of time—neither static nor teleological, but a form of interruption that opens space for rethinking agency, grief, resistance, and repair.  On Persistence offers a profound meditation on what it means to endure—and to endure differently—in a time that demands something else of us.

Martin Mosebach’s novel What Was Before opens with a young couple enjoying a moment of carefree intimacy. Then the young woman, turning slightly more serious, asks her lover that fateful question, one that sounds so innocent but carries toxic seeds of jealousy: What was your life like before you met me? The answer grows into an entire book, an elaborate house of cards, filled with intrigue, sex, betrayal, exotic birds, and far-flung locations.Set against the backdrop of Frankfurt’s affluent suburbs, this elliptical tale of coincidence and necessity unfolds through a series of masterly constructed vignettes, which gradually come together to form a scintillating portrait of the funny, tender, and destructive guises that love between two people can assume and the effect it has on everyone around them. Hailed in Germany as the first great social novel of the twenty-first century, What Was Before is an Elective Affinities for our time.

In contemporary Norwegian fiction Tomas Espedal’s work stands out as uniquely personal; it can be difficult to separate the fiction from Espedal’s own experiences. In that vein, his novel Against Art is not just the story of a boy growing up to be a writer, but it is also the story of writing. Specifically, it is about the profession of writing—the routines, responsibility, and obstacles. Yet, Against Art is also about being a father, a son, and a grandson; about a family and a family’s tales, and about how preceding generations mark their successors. It is at once about choices and changes, about motion and rest, about moving to a new place, and about living.Praise for the Norwegian Edition“One of the most beautiful, most important books I've read for years.”—Klassekampen “Espedal has written an amazingly rich novel, which will assuredly stand out as one of the year’s best and will also further fortify the quality of Norwegian literature abroad.”— Adresseavisen “Against Art attacks literature while at the same time being intensely literary. Our greatest sorrows and torments, the individual experiences often so anemic in art, find a voice of their own.”—Morgenbladet “Against Art moves me with its maternal history and proves yet again that Tomas Espedal writes great novels.”—Dag og Tid