SEAGULL BOOKS

(H/B) THE CHURCH AND THE KINGDOM
Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben is the rare writer whose ideas and works have a broad appeal across many fields, and his devoted fans are not just philosophers, but readers of political and legal theory, sociology, and literary criticism as well. In March 2009, Agamben was invited to speak in Paris' Notre-Dame Cathedral in the presence of the Bishop of Paris and a number of other high-ranking church officials. His resulting speech, a stunningly lucid and provocative look at the history and state of the Church and its role in society, i...
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(P/B) NIPPON WARS AND OTHER PLAYS
Nippon Wars' and Other Plays provides a unique and fascinating window into the last 30 years of Japan's dynamic theatre scene. This collection of plays from renowned Japanese theatre artist Takeshi Kawamura gathers together for the first time in English several of his most important plays. Nippon Warsand The Lost Babylon explore Japan's popular culture during and after the economic bubble of the late 1980s and capture the culture's apocalyptic but sublime essence. The intertextual work Hamletclone examines the violent complications and st...
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(H/B) THE IDEA OF COMMUNISM
November 9, 2009, will mark twenty years since the fall of the Berlin Wall, the monumental event that signaled the beginning of the end of Communism in the former Soviet Union. Why was this collapse of Communism considered final, while the many failures of capitalism are considered temporary and episodic? In The Idea of Communism, Tariq Ali addresses this very question. The idea of Communism, argues Ali, was simple and noble. The Communist Manifesto, which advocated the creation of a society based on the principle of 'from each according t...
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(H/B) DECEMBER
In the historic tradition of calendar stories and calendar illustrations, author and film director Alexander Kluge and celebrated visual artist Gerhard Richter have composed December, a collection of thirty-nine stories and thirty-nine snow-swept photographs for the darkest month of the year. In stories drawn from modern history and the contemporary moment, from mythology, and even from meteorology, Kluge toys as readily with time and space as he does with his characters. In the narrative entry for December 1931, Adolf Hitler avoids a car ...
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(H/B) THE FATE OF RURAL HELL
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 ...
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(H/B) THE EISENSTEIN COLLECTION
Eisenstein was one of the world's greatest filmmakers, theorists and teachers of cinema. His work includes some of the most important films in the history of cinema: Battleship Potemkin, Ivan the Terrible and October. The Eisenstein Collection brings together his key writings in one volume for the first time. This edition covers the period from Eisenstein's dispute over the authorship of his first feature film, The Strike, in 1925 to his film-making and polemical activities during World War II, including his correspondence with Soviet lead...
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(P/B) THE WASTE LAND
In Martin Rowson's The Waste Land, private detective Chris Marlowe is tasked with getting to the bottom of the most impenetrable of all modernist mysteries: namely T. S. Eliot's The Wasteland. Cunningly contrived, this irreverent graphic parody is inspired in equal parts by the classic modernist poem and by the American noir novels of Raymond Chandler. Marlowe, searching for his dead partner's killers, is lured into a web of murder, deceit, lust, despair and, of course, a frantic quest for the Holy Grail. Doped, duped, pistol-whipped, fram...
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(H/B) CARNIVAL AND CANNIBAL
In Carnival and Cannibal, distinguished French philosopher Jean Baudrillard (1929-2007) reflects on many of his most significant ideas concerning the significance of language and the relationship between the technological and the social. In this, one of his final works, Baudrillard identifies two fatal modes in which the world is currently engaged: the carnival and the cannibal, arguing essentially that contemporary society is transfixed by the spectacle of its own cultural creation and self-consumption. Revisiting his most important conce...
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(H/B) CRITICAL ESSAYS
Critical Essays (Situations I) contains essays on literature and philosophy from a highly formative period of French philosopher and leading existentialist Jean-Paul Sartre's life, the years between 1938 and 1946. This period is particularly interesting because it is before Sartre published the magnum opus that would solidify his name as a philosopher, Being and Nothingness. Instead, during this time Sartre was emerging as one of France's most promising young novelists and playwrights-he had already published Nausea, The Age of Reason, The...
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(H/B) INCIDENTS
French philosopher and literary theorist Roland Barthes was one of the leading influences on the post-structuralist movement in twentieth-century literary thought, and some of his best-known works, like S/Z, speak directly to the essential and individual relationship between a reader and a literary text. In Incidents, readers have the privilege of going inside the life and thought of Barthes, through a book that is a testament to Barthes' belief that a literary work should invite the full, active participation of the reader. The essays co...
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(H/B) CORRESPONDENCE
Together Max Frisch and Friedrich Durrenmatt are not only two of the most esteemed Swiss writers of the twentieth century, but arguably two of the most important European writers since World War II. The remarkable letters gathered here document their unique, unlikely, and extraordinary friendship. This collection of correspondence offers a picture of two temperaments that could not have been more different. As their letters show, at first their friendship was tentative, both critical and respectful, as one might imagine of two contemporary...
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(P/B) SOLUM
This anthology of six contemporary plays from Turkey captures such global themes as questions of identity, poverty, class conflict, oppression, and displacement while shedding light on current cultural and political matters in Turkey, a country literally at the border of the West and the East that is recovering from military coups and still seeking to establish democracy and human rights. The title play, Mustafa Kaplan's Solum, deals with questions of home and identity as explored through physical research on the performer's body. Other pl...
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(H/B) THE TRIALS OF SPINOZA
Baruch Spinoza (1632-77) is considered one of the great rationalist thinkers of the seventeenth century. His magnum opus, Ethics, in which he criticized the dualism of Descartes, solidified his reputation and greatly influenced the Enlightenment thinkers who would build from his work. Born in Amsterdam into a family of Sephardic Jews who had to take refuge there after they were expelled from Portugal, the precocious young scholar imbibed skepticism at an early age. By the time he was twenty-four, he had challenged what he called the "fairy...
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(P/B) THE WAR ZONE IS MY BED AND OTHER PLAYS
Yasmine Beverly Rana's The War Zone is My Bed and Other Plays follows journeys of spiritual destruction and redemption from the banks of the Mississippi River and the fallen levees of New Orleans to the conflict-ravaged streets of Sarajevo and Kabul. The characters in Rana's politically charged and moving plays attempt to seek and sustain love in violent circumstances. In the title play, The War Zone is My Bed, a prostitute from Kabul and a journalist from Bosnia stumble through a maze of brutality to find solace within each other. In Blo...
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(H/B) A HISTORY OF CLOUDS

(P/B) CONVERSATIONS WITH GAYATRI CHAKRAVORTY SPIVAK

(H/B) IN HER OWN RIGHT

(P/B) REMEMBERED RHYTHMS
Remembered Rhythms explores the role of music and cultural memory in shaping and creating diasporic identities. With contributions from leading scholars in the fields of ethnomusicology, cultural studies, sociology, and anthropology, the essays range across the musical traditions of the Indian diaspora in Trinidad, the role of Hindi film music in the diaspora, and the music of the African and Jewish diasporas in India. Illustrated throughout with halftones and accompanied by a fascinating CD of musical examples from many of the traditions ...
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(H/B) CONVERSATIONS WITH JEAN-PAUL SARTRE
Jean-Paul Sartre, novelist, playwright, biographer, was undoubtedly one of the greatest philosophers of the 20th century. Above all, however, he was an embodiment of the engag? intellectual, active in a variety of political causes, as well as an individual who attempted to live his life in accordance with the philosophy he professed. These interviews take Sartre on a wide-ranging tour of his philosophy and politics. Here we have Simone de Beauvoir challenging Sartre on his own attitude towards machismo and feminism; and Sartre responding...
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(H/B) EDWARD SAID - CONVERSATIONS WITH