Last season, Seagull Books published the first three volumes in a new series collecting essays and interviews by the late French thinker Roland Barthes. This season they'll bring the five-volume set to completion with the publication of "Masculine, F...

Dominique Edde met novelist and playwright Jean Genet in the 1970s. And she never forgot him. "His presence", she writes, "gave me the sensation of icy fire. Like his words, his gestures were full, calculated and precise... Genet's movements mimicked...

One of the central figures from a remarkable generation of French-language poets, Pierre Chappuis has thus far only been represented in English translation in fragments: a few poems here and there in magazines, online reviews, and anthologies. "Like...

Novelist Zakes Mda has made a name for himself as a key chronicler of the new, post-apartheid South Africa, casting a satirical eye on its claims of political unity, its rising black middle class, and other aspects of its complicated, multiracial soc...

Werner Braunig was once regarded as the great hope of East German literature – until an extract from "Rummelplatz" was read before the East German censorship authorities in 1965, and fierce opposition summarily sealed its fate. The novel's sin? It pa...

Writing in the long Bengali tradition exemplified by Rabindranath Tagore and Sukumar Ray, Annada Shankar Ray created poetry of ingenious rhyme and sound patterns, startling yet apt metaphors and descriptions, and dazzlingly imaginative subjects that...

After several years abroad, a young man returns to his hometown to seek the man he calls master. This master, a brilliant philosopher, had made the young man into a disciple before sending him out into the world to put his teachings into practice. Re...

Recorded during Jorge Luis Borges's final years, this second volume of his conversations with Osvaldo Ferrari provides a wide-ranging reflection on the life and work of Argentina's master writer and favorite conversationalist. In "Conversations: Volu...

Alice Attie's inaugural volume of poetry is an invitation to collectively "bend into silence as we bend into words". In "These Figures Lining the Hills", readers enter an eloquent, philosophically poignant space where we slip into the folds of langua...

One of the foremost poets of the French Resistance, Rene Char has been hailed by Donald Revell as "the conscience of modern French poetry". Translated by Mark Hutchinson, "The Inventors" is a companion volume to Char's critically acclaimed "Hypnos"....