The concentration camp and Jewish ghetto at Terezín, or Theresienstadt, in what is now the Czech Republic, was a site of enormous suffering, fear, and death; but in the midst of this was a thriving and desperately vibrant cultural life. While the children’s drawings and musical pieces created in the ghetto have become justly famous, the prisoners’ theatrical works, though a lesser-known aspect of their artistic endeavors, deserves serious attention as well.
Performing Captivity collects eleven theatrical texts―cabaret songs and sketches, historical and verse dramas, puppet plays, and a Purim play―written by Czech and Austrian Jews. Together these works reveal the wide range of ways in which the prisoners engaged with and escaped from life in the ghetto through performance. The anthology opens with an insightful preface by novelist Ivan Klíma, who was interned in the ghetto as a child, and contains a detailed introduction by editor Lisa Peschel about the pre-war theatrical influences and wartime conditions that inspired the theater of the ghetto.
 The array of theatrical forms collected in Performing Captivity speaks of the prisoners’ persistence of hope in a harrowing time and will be moving reading for students of the Holocaust.

Performing Captivity, Performing Escape: Cabarets and Plays from the Terezin/Theresienstadt Ghetto (In Performance)

Arts & Photography

PESCHEL, LISA

Performing Arts

Seagull Books

“Nippon Wars” and Other Plays provides a unique and fascinating window into the last thirty years of Japan’s dynamic theater scene.  This collection of plays from renowned Japanese theater artist Takeshi Kawamura gathers together for the first time in English several of his most important plays.  Nippon Wars and The Lost Babylon explore Japan’s popular culture during and after the economic bubble of the late 1980s and capture the culture’s apocalyptic, but sublime essence. The intertextual work Hamletclone examines the violent complications and stultifying inertia of contemporary politics. Two of Kowamura’s more recent plays, Aoi and Komachi, look at how memories of the past remain in our consciousness. Also included in this collection is the tragedy The White House in the Hills of Argos,where myths of ancient Greece and Japan’s popular culture collide. With an introductory essay by a specialist in contemporary Japanese theater, Peter Eckersall, and translations by leading scholars and artists, “Nippon Wars” and Other Plays provides an essential look into Japan’s contemporary theater scene.

Nippon Wars and Other Plays (In Performance)

Kawamura, Takeshi

Humor & Entertainment

Based on fieldwork carried out in West Bengal, Sailing on the Sea of Love is a pioneering study of the songs of the Baul —a Bengali religious sect, widely beloved for its enchanting music. Charles Capwell describes the role Baul song plays in the lives of the Bauls themselves and in the experience and imagination of their fellow Bengalis. He also examines the sometimes enigmatic texts of the songs as well as their musical components and performance elements.  Sailing on the Sea of Love provides an overview of the fundamental beliefs and practices of the Bauls and how the changing reception of the Bauls by the larger Bengali society illustrates the evolving nature of tradition. The author that reflects on the startling recent developments that have brought this sect from the relative obscurity of a regional culture to an international audience. This new edition is accompanied by two CDs of Baul music.

Sailing on the Sea of Love: The Music of the Bauls of Bengal

Capwell, Charles

Music

Photographer Pedro Meyer is one of the pioneers of contemporary  photography and was an early leader in its digital revolution. In A Kind of Touching Beauty  his lens is focused on the American city, capturing its growth and  transition through the 1980s and ’90s. Alongside Meyer’s striking images  that distill the spirit of the city, the book presents essays by  Jean-Paul Sartre. Originally published as part of The Aftermath of War  and based upon Sartre’s extended visit to America in 1945, the essays  create a parallel journey with Meyer’s photographs—the same cities are  seen at a different time, through a different cultural lens. Marked by a philosopher’s vision and a writer’s sensitivity,  Sartre’s meditations on America are at once poetic and incisive. As he  travels the length and breadth of the country, Sartre discovers the soul  of American cities, so distinct from the spirit of urban Europe:  “Everyone is free here. . . . The cities are open. They are open to the  world and to the future. That is what gives them all an air of  adventure; and . . . a kind of touching beauty.” Together, the photographs and essays articulate the enduring  essence of American urban existence—its relationship with time, with  labor and humanity, and with the open spaces that are emblematic of  America.

A Kind of Touching Beauty: Photographs of America by Pedro Meyer, Text by Jean-Paul Sartre

Meyer, Pedro

Sartre, Jean­Paul

Photography & Video

Austrian writer Ingeborg Bachmann (1926–73) is recognized as one of the most important novelists, poets, and playwrights of postwar German literature. As befitting such a versatile writer, her War Diary is not a day-by-day journal but a series of sketches, depicting the last months of World War II and the first year of the subsequent British occupation of Austria. These articulate and powerful entries—all the more remarkable taking into account Bachmann’s young age at the time—reveal the eighteen-year-old’s hatred of both war and Nazism as she avoids the fanatics’ determination to “defend Klagenfurt to the last man and the last woman.” The British occupation leads to her incredible meeting with a British officer, Jack Hamesh, a Jew who had originally fled Vienna for England in 1938. He is astonished to find in Austria a young girl who has read banned authors such as Mann, Schnitzler, and Hofmannsthal. Their relationship is captured here in the emotional and moving letters Hamesh writes to Bachmann when he travels to Israel in 1946. In his correspondence, he describes how in his new home of Israel, he still suffers from the rootlessness affecting so many of those who lost parents, family, friends, and homes in the war. War Diary provides unusual insight into the formation of Bachmann as a writer and will be cherished by the many fans of her work. But it is also a poignant glimpse into life in Austria in the immediate aftermath of the war, and the reflections of both Bachmann and Hamesh speak to a significant and larger story beyond their personal experiences.Praise for the German Edition“A minor sensation that will make literary history. Thanks to the excellent critical commentary, we gain a sense of a period in history and in Bachmann’s life that reached deep into her later work. . . . What makes these diary entries so special is . . . the detail of the resistance described, the exhilaration of unexpected peace, the joy of freedom.”—Die Zeit

War Diary (The German List)

Biographies & Memoirs

BACHMANN, INGEBORG

Historical

There are few if any voices more distinct in contemporary French literature than that of Pascal Quignard, a prolific writer of rare erudition and elegance. Essayist, critic, translator, novelist and musician, Quignard attempts here an ambitious amalgam of his many artistic styles in a fragmentary work that defies the idea of genre. And his daring was rewarded in 2002 when The Roving Shadows became the first non-novel in more than sixty years to win the Goncourt Prize, France’s most prestigious literary award. The first book in Quignard’s Last Kingdom series, The Roving Shadows can be read as a long meditation on reading and writing that strives to situate these otherwise innocuous activities in a profound relationship to sex and death. Writing and reading can in fact be linked to our animal natures and artistic strivings, to primal forces and culturally persistent fascinations. With dexterity and inventiveness, Quignard weaves together historical anecdotes, folktales from the East and West, fragments of myth, and speculative historical reconstructions. The whole, written in a musical style not far removed from that of Couperin, whose piano composition Les Ombres errantes lends the book its title, coheres into a work of literature that reverberates in the psyche long after one has laid it down.The Roving Shadows is a rare and wondrous tour de force that cements Quignard’s reputation in contemporary world literature. Available now for the first time in English, this boldly adventurous work will find a new and welcoming audience.

The Roving Shadows (The French List)

Literature & Fiction

QUIGNARD, Pascal

History & Criticism

In This Strange Idea of the Beautiful, François Jullien explores what it means when we say something is beautiful. Bringing together ideas of beauty from both Eastern and Western philosophy, Jullien challenges the assumptions underlying our commonly agreed upon definition of what is beautiful and offers a new way of beholding art. Jullien argues that the Western concept of beauty was established by Greek philosophy and became consequently embedded within the very structure of European languages. And due to its relationship to language, this concept has determined ways of thinking about beauty that often go unnoticed or unchecked in discussions of Western aesthetics. Moreover, through globalization, Western ideals of beauty have even spread to cultures whose ancient traditions are based upon radically different aesthetic foundations; yet, these cultures have adopted such views without question and without recognizing the cultural assumptions they contain. Looking specifically at how Chinese texts have been translated into Western languages, Jullien reveals how the traditional Chinese refusal to isolate or abstract beauty is obscured in translation in order to make the works more understandable to Western readers. Creating an engaging dialogue between Chinese and Western ideas, Jullien reasseses the essence of beauty.

This Strange Idea of the Beautiful (The French List)

Jullien, François

Cees Nooteboom, best known for his novel The Following Story,is one of the most distinguished and significant authors living in the Netherlands today. Self-Portrait of an Other is one of the most unique and innovative works in his oeuvre. Written in response to and published together with a series of drawings by the Berlin-based artist Max Neumann, the book draws on Nooteboom’s personal reflections —his arsenal of memories, dreams, fantasies, landscapes, stories and nightmares— and presents a set of prose poems that complements and echoes Neumann’s work. Full of striking scenes and disturbing images, the poems, driven by the logic of dreams, create the self-portrait of the title. Available now for the first time in English, Self-Portrait of an Other brings together both the images and the text inspired by them, creating an unusual and creative poetic collection. Praise for Nooteboom“[Nooteboom’s] books seem metaphors for art itself.”—Ed Park, Village Voice

Self-Portrait of an Other: Dreams of the Island and the Old City

Neumann, Max

NOOTEBOOM, CEES.

“Not writing is always a relief and sometimes a pleasure. Writing about what cannot be written, by contrast, is the devil’s own job.”In this unusual text, a blend of essay, fiction, and literary genealogy, South African novelist Ivan Vladislavic explores the problems and potentials of the fictions he could not bring himself to write. Drawing from his notebooks of the past twenty years, Vladislavic records here a range of ideas for stories—unsettled accounts, he calls them, or case studies of failure—and examines where they came from and why they eluded him. In the process, he reveals some of the principles that matter to him as a writer, and pays tribute to the writers— such as Walser, Perec, Sterne, and DeLillo—who have been important to him as both a reader and an author. At the heart of the text, like a brightly lit room in a field of debris, stands Vladislavic’s Loss Library itself, the shelves laden with books that have never been written. On the page, Vladislavic tells us, every loss may yet be recovered. An extraordinary book about both the nature of novels and the process of writing, The Loss Library will appeal to anyone seeking to understand the almost magical and mythical experience of breathing life into a new work of fiction. Praise for Vladislavic “In the tradition of Elias Canetti, a tour de force of the imagination.”—André Brink “The prose is stunning. It gives the impression of the words and the phrases having been caught from the inside—as though the author lives on the other side of language, where every word is strange and dancing, and the way they are put together produces complicated patterned exchanges like minuets.”—Tony Morphet

The Loss Library and Other Unfinished Stories (The Africa List)

VLADISLAVIC, Ivan

World Literature

The fall of the Berlin Wall marked the beginning of the collapse of the Soviet Union, as well as many other communist totalitarian regimes around the world. But it would be naive to assume that this historic, symbolic event and its aftermath have completely rid the world of totalitarianism. Instead, we should ask, what is the totalitarian experience and how does it survive today? This is the imposing question raised by acclaimed philosopher and writer Tzvetan Todorov in this compact, highly personal essay. Here, he recounts his own experiences with totalitarianism in his native Bulgaria and discusses the books he has written in the last twenty years that were devoted to examining such regimes, such as Voices from the Gulag, his influential analysis of Stalinist concentration camps. Through this retrospective investigation, Todorov offers a historical look at communism. He brings together and distills his extensive oeuvre to reveal the essence of totalitarian ideology, the characteristics of daily life under communism, and the irony of democratic messianism. Bringing his thoughts and insights up to the present, Todorov explores how economic ultraliberalism may be considered just another form of totalitarianism. And his conclusion leads us to ask ourselves another challenging question: Are liberal democratic societies actually totalitarian experiences in disguise? “In this honed, finely calibrated essay, Todorov refutes the notion that good can be imposed by force. More efficient is to embody one’s values and demonstrate their worth. . . . This is a concise and eloquent defence of what makes us truly human.”—Age, on Torture and the War on Terror

The Totalitarian Experience (The French List)

Politics & Social Sciences

TODOROV, TZVETAN

Politics & Government

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