from "Mount Fuji" A draughtsman's draughtsman, Hokusai at 70 thought he'd begun to grasp the structures of birds and beasts, insects and fish, of the way plants grow, hoped that by 90 he'd have "penetrated to their essential nature". And more, by 100...

Making Luis de Gongora's work available to contemporary English-language readers without denying his historical context, "Selected Poems of Luis de Gongora" presents him as not only one of the greatest and most complex poets of his time, but also the...

People have long imagined themselves as rooted creatures, bound to the earth – and nations – from which they came. In "Rootedness", Christy Wampole looks toward philosophy, ecology, literature, history, and politics to demonstrate how the metaphor of...

"October Aubade" If I slept too long, forgive me. A north wind quickened the window frames so the room pitched like a moving train and the pillow's whiff of hickory and shaving soap conjured your body beside me. So I slept in the berth as th...

For decades, Roger Grenier has been charming readers with compact, erudite books that draw elegant connections between our lives and our love of the arts. Whether he's turning to literature and philosophy to help us see our canine companions anew in...

The Greek playwright Aristophanes (active 427-386 BCE) is often portrayed as the poet who brought stability, discipline, and sophistication to the rowdy theatrical genre of Old Comedy. In this groundbreaking book, situated within the affective turn i...

Not for sale in Estonia! "The Pig is the Sun..." So begins Oskar Panizza's outrageously heretical and massively erudite essay on the pig, originally published in 1900 in his journal Zurich Discussions. Moving from the Rig Veda to the Edda to Ovid,...

Toby Litt is best known for his "hip-lit" fiction, which, in its sharing of characters and themes across numerous stories and novels, has always taken an unusual, hybrid form. In "Mutants", he applies his restless creativity to nonfiction. The book b...

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 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...