The second book in Seagull's ambitious series of Georg Trakl's works, "Sebastian Dreaming" was the second, and final, collection prepared for publication by Trakl himself. Published after his death, it was perhaps even tied to it: forced into a milit...

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...

The beauty of the Goucestershire landscape and sky-scape are Alison Brackenbury's commanding theme, her landscapes are historied, the skies always in vivid motion, moving towards elegy. The two World Wars and their poets are present, but also the nea...

The formation of the -Serengeti in Africa, the emergence of homo sapiens, the amazing wildlife, patterns of migration and predation are the themes of the fiercely engaged poems and photographs in this unusual book, which brings to life Tanzania and K...

A woman obsessed with reality TV encounters a sorority girl who has embarked on a very personal scavenger hunt. A man unexpectedly discovers that his father – a seemingly rational man – believes, seriously, in lake monsters. A woman whose husband has...

In Spills Angela Leighton combines poetry, memoir, libretto, short story, prose-poetry and translation, slipping between genres while hearing the conversations between them. "You start from who you are, and walk and walk", she writes, in the spirit o...

"Several Deer" is the debut collection of a young Northern Irish poet. As much indebted to Bob Dylan and Lana Del Rey as to Emily Dickinson and George Herbert, Crothers writes about destruction, consumption, misogyny, gods, sex, failure, and rock 'n'...

In seventeenth-century Boston, Hester Prynne shoulders the scorn of her fellow Puritan townsfolk for bearing a child out of wedlock. For her refusal to name the father of her daughter Pearl, Hester is made to wear a scarlet "A" stitched conspicuously...

When we talk of platonic love or relationships today, we mean something very different from what Plato meant. For this, we have fifteenth and sixteenth-century European humanists to thank. As these scholars – most of them Catholic – read, digested, a...

When Falstaff calls upon the sky to rain potatoes in "The Merry Wives of Windsor", he is highlighting the late sixteenth-century belief that the exotic vegetable, recently introduced to England from the Americas, was an aphrodisiac. In "Romeo and Jul...