CRYPTONYM

"Thomas Bernhard is a god. . . . Prose is his first story collection, originally published in 1967 and, amazingly, not once translated into English until 2010. It was worth the wait. This is Bernhard being Bernhard (as he always was)—the endless paragraphs; the mordant, suicidal, probably insane narrators; the incredible mastery of language. . . . Certainly one of the best things I read this year."

Scott Esposito of The Millions and Conversational Reading weighs in on Thomas Bernhard's Prose (Seagull Books 2010)

Posted by COA at 11:10 AM | Permalink
Posted to Fiction | Reviews | Seagull Books

The Silences of Hammerstein (Seagull 2010), Hans Magnus Enzensberger's genre-bending look at the real-life experiences of German General Kurt von Hammerstein and his wife and children during and after World War II, has been named by Bookslut's Jessa Crispin as one of the best books of 2010.

Posted by COA at 09:28 AM | Permalink
Posted to Awards | Literature | Seagull Books

Congratulations to Sunandini Banerjee from Seagull Books, designer of the cover for Thomas Bernhard's Prose, which the Huffington Post has chosen as one of the "Most Outstanding Book Covers of 2010."

Here's Sunandini in her own words about her approach to book design:

An artwork/book cover must attract one's attention in the marketplace. Sometimes with a scream. Sometimes with a whisper. It could interpret or comment upon or simply hint at the content. There are no rules (for I have absolutely no training in the arts) and there are no limits. A cover is not only a window into a book's world but also into my own. My people, my relationships, my literature, my music, my cinema, my food, my dreams and my nightmares have resulted in me, a specific personality. And elements of this personality are allowed to find their way into everything I create.

Posted by COA at 10:05 AM | Permalink
Posted to Seagull Books

Phew. We are one sleepy Cryptonym. Last week was our twice-yearly sales conference, where representatives from many of the international distributed publishers whose books you see on this blog come to Chicago to brave the snow and ice and chat with us all about their great books coming up in the Spring (Ice cream! Byron! Morrissey! Sex and Terror!) Unfortunately, all those meetings and yummy pizza or falafel lunches mean that we have saved up an entire week's worth of publicity to share with you. So let's not waste another second:

Over on Note Bene Books, Nigel Beale gets the gossip from Iain Stevenson, author of Book Makers from the British Library, on the workaday life of publishing in 20th Century England. Listen to the anecdote-rich podcast here.

Speaking of podcasts, Reaktion author Edward M. Spiers provides an unfortunately timely and informative history of chemical and biological weapons in this recent interview, which you can listen to courtesy of New England Public Radio.

Looking for a book for that engineer who has everything? The New Yorker Book Bench recommends Computer by Paul Atkinson, the "elegant history" book from Reaktion.

For engineers as well as architecture-lovers, city-dwellers, and Chicagoans, the Atlantic chose The Complete Architecture of Adler & Sullivan as one of its Book of the Year runner-ups.

For cloud-gazers and poetry readers, the Prague Post's book blog "Colophon" chose A History of Clouds (Seagull Books) by distinguished German author Hans Magnus Enzensberger as one of its Top 10 Poetry Collections of 2010.

Finally, whiskey-expert and Reaktion author Kevin Kosar tells us what Seagrams 7 has to do with Prohibition in an article on The Smart Set.

Posted by COA at 01:30 PM | Permalink
Posted to British Library | Reaktion | Reviews | Seagull Books

Today, November 23rd, would have been German poet Paul Celan's 90th birthday. Celan 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. But to celebrate his birthday, we should turn to the letters of Ingeborg Bachmann, the celebrated Austrian writer and Celan's former lover. Celan and Bachmann maintained a lengthy and passionate correspondence between 1948 and 1961, the letters from which have been recently translated and published by Seagull Books. Here are some selections from letters on or near Celan's birthday:

Letter 10 Ingeborg Bachmann to Paul Celan, Vienna, 24 November 1949

Dear, dear Paul,
now it is November. My letter, which I wrote in August, is still lying here—everything is so sad. Maybe you have been waiting for it. Would you still accept it now?

I feel that I say too little, that I cannot help you. I should come, look at you, take you out, kiss you and hold you so that you will not drift away. Please believe that I shall come one day and bring you back. It frightens me a great deal to see you floating out into a great sea, but I mean to build a ship and bring you back home from your forlornness. But you must also contribute something to that, and not make it too difficult for me. Time and many other things are against us, but we must not let it destroy what we want to salvage from it.

Write to me soon, please, and tell me whether you still want to hear from me, whether you can still accept my tenderness and my love, whether anything else could help you, whether you still reach for me sometimes and darken me with that heavy dream in which I want to become light.

Try it, write to me, ask me, write everything off your chest that is burdening you!

I am very much with you yours, Ingeborg

Letter 62 Ingeborg Bachmann to Paul Celan, Munich, 22 November 1957

Thursday

It was seven years ago that we last celebrated your birthday together. Foolish and forlorn.

But now I shall sit beside you for a while and give your eyes kisses.

I was going to send you something in Paris, but then I felt that I cannot possibly send you anything there. You would have to conceal it or cause pain once more.

I have your present ready for you here, and you can look for it when you visit me. (Our last letters crossed—to think that this is possible again, or even for the first time!) I am thinking of you, Paul, and you think of me!

Ingeborg

Letter 63 Paul Celan to Ingeborg Bachmann, Paris, 23 November 1957

on 23 November 1957.

Just one line, to thank you, with all my heart, for everything.

To think that we had to hound our hearts to death in the past over such trifles, Ingeborg! Whom were we obeying, tell me, whom?

But now I am coming soon, not for long; for one day, for another—if you want and allow me to.

Let us then go in search of the lamp, Ingeborg, you and I, us.

Paul

Letter 107 Ingeborg Bachmann to Paul Celan, Zurich, 20 November 1958

Paul,

your birthday is near. I cannot make the post be exact to the day and the hour, but we can be.

It is so quiet here. Half an hour has passed since the first sentence, and last autumn is forcing its way into this autumn.

Ingeborg

Posted by COA at 08:50 AM | Permalink
Posted to Features | Poetry | Seagull Books

Little fairy, we had the same notion, we both felt the same concern: neither of us must let too much time pass before sending news.

Read lyrical and fascinating selections from a new translation of Guillame Apollinaire's Letters to Madeleine on the Brooklyn Rail.

Forthcoming from Seagull Books in November, Letters to Madeleine collects for the first time in English the remarkable letters and poems sent by French poet Guillaume Apollinaire to his fiancee Madeleine Pages during World War I. Stationed in the trenches of Champagne, this man of letters, who had been at the forefront of the surrealist movement, was transformed overnight into an artilleryman, and this correspondence bears witness to the typical yet deeply idiosyncratic experience of Apollinaire at an especially crucial moment of his existence as man and artist.

Posted by COA at 03:13 PM | Permalink
Posted to Literature | Poetry | Seagull Books

"Scarcely more breathlessly and desperately can two lovers ever have struggled for words," writes the German newspaper FAZ on this remarkable collection of letters between two of contemporary German literature's most important writers. Cryptonym and Seagull Books are excited to announce that the correspondence of Paul Celan and Ingeborg Bachmann is now available in English.

Collected here are their letters written between 1948 and 1961, and this 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.

The London Review of Books Bookshop celebrated the publication this summer with a reading and discussion led by the translator of the letters, Wieland Hoban, who discussed the lovers' lives and letters with the novelists Toby Litt and Lawrence Norfolk.

This week on Conversational Reading, Scott Esposito gives a nod to the book as well as two recent online reviews—one on Shigekuni and the other on This Space. Finally, readers in English have the opportunity to understand and encounter what Shigekuni calls "an infinite holding between two lovers now separated forever."

Posted by COA at 02:28 PM | Permalink
Posted to Reviews | Seagull Books

Today over at the Constant Conversation Scott Bryan Wilson provides an incredibly helpful checklist with pictures that enumerates all of the English-language translations of Austrian writer's Thomas Bernhard's works. Is your collection complete with the latest Berhnard books—Prose and the forthcoming fable Victor Halfwit? Additional Bernhard titles are also available from the University of Chicago Press.

Posted by COA at 09:00 AM | Permalink
Posted to Features | Fiction | Seagull Books

The catastrophic flooding in Pakistan has forced the American military in the region to shift from armed counterinsurgency to humanitarian relief and aid. This shift is in part a human necessity—to bring food and shelter to those who live in the flood-ravaged regions—but it is also being driven by public relations—to earn the trust and support of the Pakistani people. The Pakistan situation may be one case in which our political motivations are as obvious the human need; but in truth, as Neil Middleton reveals in his forthcoming book from Seagull, most circumstances of "humanitarian assistance," are often belied by their own more strategic and less altruistic motives. A look at his new book, Humanitarian Assistance? Haiti and Beyond, may provide many helpful examples for how the current situation in Pakistan may conclude.

Posted by COA at 08:06 AM | Permalink
Posted to Features | Politics and Current Events | Seagull Books

Summer may be slipping all too quickly away. The days are already getting shorter, and it's nearly time for Cryptonym to dry-clean her winter coat and buy new mittens. But it's not yet too late to spend lazy days in the sun sipping iced tea and escaping into another world. This month brings new fiction from Thomas Bernhard, Tariq Ali, and Mahasweta Devi, as well as a screenplay from Jean-Paul Sartre.

First published in German in 1967, the stories that comprise Thomas Bernhard's Prose were written at the same time as his early novels Frost, Gargoyles, and The Lime Works, and they display the same obsessions, restlessness, and disarming mastery of language. Martin Chalmers's outstanding translation, which renders the work in English for the first time, captures the essential personality of Bernhard's voice. The narrators of these stories lack the strength to do anything but listen and then write, the reader in turn becoming a captive listener, deciphering the traps laid by memory—and the mere words, the never ending words with which we try to pin it down.

In Fear of Mirrors, a novel from esteemed political writer Tariq Ali, a man loses his job when he refuses to renounce socialist beliefs in the newly unified Germany—and as a result wants to explain to his alienated son what their family's long and passionate involvement with communism has really meant. The story he tells is of Ludwik, a Polish secret agent, and Gertrude, Vlady's mother, whose desire for Ludwik is matched only by her devotion to the communist ideal. As the plot unfolds through the political upheavals of the twentieth century, Vlady describes the hopes aroused by the Bolshevik revolution and discovers the almost unbearable truth about the family's betrayal.

Originally published in India in 1956 and now back in print in English, The Queen of Jhansi traces the history of the growing resistance to the British in India, while building a detailed picture of Lakshmibai— the Queen of Jhansi, a legendary Indian heroine who led her troops against the British in the uprising of 1857. Simultaneously a history, a biography, and an imaginative work of fiction, this book is a valuable contribution to the reclamation of history and historiography by feminist writers.

Set in Malaya during the British protectorate, Typhus centers on the improbable couple formed by a disgraced former doctor, Georges, who has sunk to the lowest depths of a highly stratified colonial society, and Nellie, a down-at-heel nightclub singer, whose partner succumbs to the typhus epidemic sweeping the country. Though it does not shy from the explosive issues of colonialism and race that are implicit in its setting, this screenplay is both a turbulent love story in the best traditions of Western popular cinema and an existentialist tale of moral redemption.

Posted by COA at 12:26 PM | Permalink
Posted to Fiction | Press Releases | Seagull Books

Today is Bastille Day, or, as it is known in France, La Fete Nationale, a celebration commemorating the storming of the Bastille prison in Paris on July 14, 1789. And though it’s a pity we’re not partying along the Champs-Elysees, we here at Cryptonym would like contribute to the festivities with a list celebrating all things French.

The first title, especially fitting for the occasion, is Visualizing the Revolution by Hubertus Kohle and Rolf Reichardt. An innovative and lushly illustrated study, Visualizing the Revolution surveys the rich and multifaceted visual culture of the French Revolution, exploring its creation and how it conveyed the new revolutionary sensibilities of the era. Unlike most studies on art of the French Revolution, Visualizing the Revolution embraces a wide range of artistic genres—including prints, architecture, painting, and sculpture—and also draws upon archival documents to investigate the period’s aesthetic concerns. The authors break new ground in methodology and interpretative practice as they tease out the web of connections between these various historical artifacts and argue for the central place of the arts in the transmission of ideas and the political manipulation of the populace.

Staying with the visual arts, Studies in French Cinema looks at the development of French screen studies in the United Kingdom over the past twenty years and the ways in which innovative scholarship in the UK has helped shape the field in English- and French-speaking universities. Covering a wide range of key films—contemporary and historical, popular and auteur—the volume provides an invaluable overview for students and scholars of the state of French cinema and French film studies at the beginning of the twenty-first century.

Next on the list: Sartre. A list celebrating all things French is incomplete without a nod to the twentieth-century French intellectual. Penned in 1943–44 as a commission for French filmmakers Pathe, Sartre’s screenplay Typhus centers on the improbable couple formed by the disgraced former doctor Georges, who has sunk to the lowest depths of a highly stratified colonial society, and Nellie, a down-at-heel nightclub singer, whose partner succumbs to the typhus epidemic sweeping the country. Set in Malaya during the British protectorate, Typhus is both a turbulent love story in the best traditions of Western popular cinema and an existentialist tale of moral redemption that shares many fascinating parallels with Albert Camus’s novel The Plague.

And finally, the wine. Wine drinking culture has traditionally been a source of pride for the French. In fact, to many it is an essential part of what it means to be French. In Wine Drinking Culture in France, Marion Demossier examines wine consumption in France since the 1970s, arguing that it cannot be separated from the wider cultural context in which it takes place but also revealing how recent social, economic, and political forces have transformed wine’s role in constructing France’s national identity.

And so concludes our all things French list on this Bastille Day. Click here and here to celebrate with more of our French titles.

Posted by COA at 12:21 PM | Permalink
Posted to Features | Intellect Books | Reaktion | Seagull Books | University of Wales Press

Mahasweta Devi, author of Bait, a collection of stories about the Bengali underworld, and The Queen of Jhansi, a fictionalized biography of a legendary Indian heroine, both from Seagull Books recently gave an insightful interview with InfoChange Human Rights. Many of Devi's works draw on the language and culture of Bengal, and this interview provides fascinating context for her writings while expanding upon her thoughts on the current social inequalities in Indian society and how citizens can find a voice against this injustice.

Posted by COA at 01:47 PM | Permalink
Posted to Features | Literature | Seagull Books

Despite publishing some of the biggest names in contemporary philosophy and literature, Seagull Books often first attracts readers through their remarkable and striking book design. This distinctive and unforgettable style is the work of one extraordinary woman—Sunandini Banerjee—and a new exhibit highlights her gorgeous book designs. And even if you can't make it to Calcultta for the exhibition, you can purchase your very own Sunandini Banerjee design from our online bookshop.

Naveen Kishore of Seagull tells more:
Imagine yourself as a Frenchman in a Paris bookstore. Or a Japanese book-buyer in Tokyo. Oslo? New York? And Berlin? And, oh yes, in Delhi and Bombay and Hyderabad and Vadodara. Pick up a Seagull book. Look at it. "Hear" the cover design resonate in your head. Like the literature you grew up reading. Even further back, like the tales your grandmother told you. And yet it is in an "alien" language. So what is it about the design of our books that makes you feel that it was done for you. Specially.

The power of association that goes across the marketplace of languages because of the bells it rings. The "cultures" it conjures up; the shared "humou;" the "colours of the seasons;" the "clothes and the festivals;" the "customs and the rituals." Good design gets under your skin, any skin.

Not just in India for the Indians. Nor simply for the Americans in America. For the world.

The Art of the Book celebrates Seagull's passion for good design through a recent series of digital collages and book covers created by our designer Sunandini Banerjee.

The Art of the Book
Digital Collages by Sunandini Banerjee
Opening Saturday, 19 June 2010, 6.30 pm at the Seagull Arts and Media Resource Centre
36C. S. P. Mukherjee Road, Calcutta 700 025 (second left after Bhowanipur Thana).
On view every day, from 11 am to 8 pm, until Saturday, 17 July 2010.

Born and brought up in Calcutta, Sunandini Banerjee graduated from the Department of English Literature, Jadavpur University, in 2000, the year in which she joined Seagull Books as an editorial assistant. Now, 10 years later, she is both Senior Editor and Graphic Designer, Seagull Books. She has no formal training in the arts.

There will be approximately 50 works on display. Digital collages that were inspired by a diverse range of titles published by Seagull Books over the last year. Created entirely on the computer, combining photographs, paintings, sculpture, woodcuts, line-drawings, magazine clippings, and text, these collages are both an interpretation of and a response to a wide range of texts, ranging from the poetical to the philosophical to the political. Each collage is printed on archival paper and is part of an edition of 7. Each collage is available for sale. Also available on this occasion will be each of Seagull’s publications at a special 28% discount.

Posted by COA at 09:30 AM | Permalink
Posted to Features | Seagull Books

The forthcoming June 10th issue of the New York Review of Books features a wonderful review of The Silences of Hammerstein, a work of both fiction and biography from Germany's esteemed writer Hans Magnus Enzensberger. Adam Kirsch writes that "the book's idiosyncratic power comes from the fact that it is not just a work of history, but a record of the author's struggle to understand and judge that history."

The Sunday Times (UK) included a playful yet serious review of Philip Carr-Gomm's A Brief History of Nakedness: "As Philip Carr-Gomm reveals in his academic romp through two millenniums of public exhibitionism from the ancient Greeks to animal-rights activists, you can be naked anywhere. You are only nude if someone is watching. Nakedness on its own is straightforward—it's the context and the audience of nudity that make it interesting."

Posted by COA at 10:49 AM | Permalink
Posted to Cultural Studies | Fiction | History | Reaktion | Reviews | Seagull Books

A new video is now online of Salil Tripathi, who was interviewed by the Moral Courage Project at the NYU Robert F. Wagner Graduate School of Public Service about his book Offence: The Hindu Case, part of the Manifestos of the 21st Century Series, published by Seagull Books in collaboration with the Index on Censorship. A recent look at Tripathi's thoughts on Hindu fundamentalism is also available on the Wall Street Journal Live Mint site.

Hindu fundamentalism in India from The Moral Courage Project on Vimeo.

Posted by COA at 10:27 AM | Permalink
Posted to Features | Religion | Seagull Books

The online literary journal Little Stars has published a short story from the darkly comic Austrian writer Thomas Bernhard. "Two Tutors," which appears for the first time in English, is taken from the forthcoming collection Prose, which will be published by Seagull Books in June. Read the story here and listen to Thomas Bernhard in 1968 read passages aloud on YouTube.

Posted by COA at 02:00 PM | Permalink
Posted to Features | Fiction | Seagull Books

Seagull Books, publisher of many extraordinary books by Sartre, Todorov, Baudrillard, Thomas Bernhard, Tariq Ali, and others, is excited to announce the creation of a new blog of insightful commentary. Features so far include a thought-provoking analysis by Talal Asad on suicide bombings and revealing interviews with Hans Magnus Enzensberger discussing his recent work, The Silences of Hammerstein. The video from these interviews can also be seen on Seagull's new YouTube Channel. Find out more about their books and the challenging and provocative ideas of their authors by following them on Twitter.

Posted by COA at 02:04 PM | Permalink
Posted to Seagull Books

Congratulations to Seagull author Hans Magnus Enzensberger, winner of the Sonning Prize for "commendable work for the benefit of European culture."

Posted by COA at 12:53 PM | Permalink
Posted to Press Releases | Seagull Books

The wires and webs are buzzing with news about many of our client presses, and here's your chance to partake of the excitement—

Just in time for the November 9th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall, Tariq Ali will be talking about the past and future of communism at the Harvard Book Store on November 10th at 7:00 pm. Visit the store for more details.

In contrast, an icon of capitalist splendor—Las Vegas—will be on display October 29, 2009 to February 5, 2010 when the Yale School of Architecture presents an exhibit on Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown's Las Vegas Studio.

If you've seen Bright Star, the new film on John Keats and Fanny Brawne and are eager to learn more about one of the original Romantics, you should check out this new podcast featuring Stephen Hebron, author of John Keats: A Poet and His Manuscripts, discussing what Keats's letters and poems reveal about his creative process.

Fred Czarra, author of Spices: A Global History, reveals his good taste and love of flavor in an article by the Southern Maryland News.

Creatures great and small, covered in fur or scales, get a full treatment in The Chronicle Review's look at Reaktion's Animal Series.

Over at Jews for Justice for Palestinians, Brian Klug discusses his new book from Seagull, Offence: The Jewish Case.

Finally, the excitement is only just beginning for Seagull's new translation of short stories from one of the most unique and significant fiction writers of the 20th Century, Thomas Bernhard.

Posted by COA at 12:01 PM | Permalink
Posted to Art and Architecture | Author Events | British Library | Features | Food | Literature | Politics and Current Events | Reaktion | Reviews | Seagull Books | Verlag Scheidegger & Spiess

An article on LiveMint.com highlights Naveen Kishore, the founder of one of our newest client presses, Seagull Books. You can listen to an interview with Naveen on the website as well. Based in Calcutta, Seagull's list of art, philosophy, and literature titles includes such distinguished authors as Slavenka Drakulic, Jean-Paul Sartre, Tariq Ali, Guillaume Apollinaire, and Paul Celan. Read more about Seagull here.

And check out an excerpt from one of their newest books, Portraits by Jean-Paul Sartre in the August issue of Harper's Magazine

Posted by COA at 11:33 AM | Permalink
Posted to Features | Seagull Books