April 30, 1945, marked an end of sorts in the Third Reich. The last business day before a national holiday and then a series of transfers of power, April 30 was a day filled with contradictions and bewildering events that would forever define global...

A poet, philosopher, essayist, playwright, actor, and director, Antonin Artaud was a visionary writer and a major influence within and beyond the French avant-garde. A key text for understanding his thought and his appeal, "50 Drawings to Murder Magi...

Laura Wilmote is a television journalist living in Paris. Her life couldn't be better – a stimulating job, a loving boyfriend, interesting friends – until her phone rings in the middle of one night. It is C., an old school friend whom Laura recently...

Swiss novelist Catherine Colomb is known as one of the most unusual and inventive francophone novelists of the twentieth century. Fascinated by the processes of memory and consciousness, she has been compared to that of Virginia Woolf and Marcel Prou...

When he was seven years old, Palestinian poet Ghassan Zaqtan moved with his family to a Karameh refugee camp east of the River Jordan. That camp – a center of Palestinian resistance following the Six-Day War and the site of major devastation when Isr...

On its publication in German, "Against the World" was hailed as an immediate classic. "One of the most spectacular debuts of recent decades", said Kulturspiegel, while Der Spiegel went even farther: "Against the World is the book of books". Now Engli...

In recent years, the refugee problem has become impossible to ignore, as multiple crises in the Middle East and Africa have driven thousands of desperate people to attempt Mediterranean crossings in hopes of reaching Europe, and safety. Many have die...

The ten plays in this collection offer unprecedented grassroots perspectives on the jubilation, terror, hope, and heartbreak of mass uprising as seen during and in the wake of the Tahrir Square demonstrations. Collectively tracing events as they unfo...

Originally published in Italian in 1965, "A Test of Powers" was immediately seen as one of the central texts of Italian intellectual life. By the time of the 1968 student revolts, it was clear that Franco Fortini had anticipated many of the themes an...

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...