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

This anthology of six contemporary plays from Turkey captures such global themes as questions of identity, poverty, class conflict, oppression, and&nbsp;displacement while shedding light on current cultural and political matters in Turkey, a country literally at the border of the West and the East that is recovering from military coups and still seeking to establish democracy and human rights.&nbsp; The title play, Mustafa Kaplan?s Solum, deals with questions of home and identity as explored through physical research on the performer?s body. Other plays included are Murathan Mungan?s As on the Page, which utilizes traditional performing techniques of Asia Minor and reveals subtle cultural details about Eastern Turkey; Tuncer Cüceno?lu?s Avalanche, which focuses on events in a village where people who live under fear and oppression take extreme measures to prevent an avalanche; ?ahika Tekand?s Eurydice?s Cry, an adaption of Sophocles? Antigone; Özen Yula?s For Rent, which tells the stories of outcast characters; and Emre Koyuncuo?lu?s Home Sweet Home, which discusses displacement and the homeland. &nbsp; Solum and Other Plays&nbsp;from Turkey&nbsp;includes a comprehensive introduction that contextualizes the plays within contemporary Turkey and examines the diverse aesthetic and stylistic characteristics of each playwright, making this an important resource for scholars of Turkey and theater and performance studies.

Solum and Other Plays from Turkey (In Performance)

Literature & Fiction

Short Stories & Anthologies

“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

These essays by Petra Christine Hardt, head of the rights department at esteemed German publisher Suhrkamp Verlag, offer unique and informed insight into day-to-day practices in the rights and permissions departments of publishing houses. Hardt also addresses key underlying and practical issues, such as the protection of intellectual property, the length of copyright, contract duration, and the appropriate royalty rates for authors.
Rights is an essential plea for contractual values that foster a long-term relationship between an author and his or her publisher. Hardt is focused on balancing the needs of the author with the economic fundamentals of the publishing industry. Her essays include discourses on acquiring, securing, and distributing the rights to a work, the challenges posed by literary agencies, and the growing significance of the Internet as a global marketplace for copyrighted works. Critical examination of these issues is accompanied by realistic proposals for their solution, making this book the perfect reference not only for publishers but also for editors and authors.

Rights: Buying, Protecting, Selling (The German List)

Hardt, Petra Christine

Reference

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

n The Tale of the Talking Face, eminent Indian artist K. G. Subramanyan offers a stinging parable of democracy gone wrong by narrating and illustrating the story of a princess whose autocratic rule brought nothing but suffering to her people, despite her ambition of progress for her country. A thinly veiled satire on the political drama of 1970s' India, The Taleof the Talking Face is a universal record of the ever-deepening crisis of democracy and the threat of totalitarianism. <div>&nbsp;</div> <div>"[Subramanyan's] art is radical in content, open in its approach to style and aesthetic ideas, meeting the proponents of style and craftsmen as equal and reflecting a high standard of artistic skills of different kinds. Cowed down neither by the figurative and non-figurative debate, nor loyalty to a school, which would restrain his originality, he is the quintessential Indian contemporary artist."--Suneet Chopra, Frontline</div> <div>&nbsp;</div> <div>"[Subramanyan has] come to be identified with the play of wit and satire, and with a phantasmagoric theatre of surfaces."--Nancy Adajania, Hindu</div> <div>&nbsp;</div>

The Tale of the Talking Face

Subramanyan, K. G.

History & Criticism

K. G. Subramanyan is one of the most influential Indian artists, teachers, and theorists of the twentieth century. Born in 1924, Subramanyan has lived and worked during a transformative period in Indian history, one shaped by the contradictions of colonialism and nationalism, tradition and modernism, and indigenism and globalization. From 1950 to his retirement from teaching in 1989, he helped shape the aesthetic vision of the art departments at the Maharaja Sayajirao University in Baroda and the Visva-Bharati University in Santiniketan. With great clarity, sensitivity, and wit, he continues to inspire generations of artists and scholars through his prolific writings, lectures, and art. Between Reality and Dream is the first major study to examine the formation and significance of Subramanyan’s polymorphic aesthetic vision of art and culture within the context of modern India. It analyzes the many influences Subramanyan absorbed in India and abroad while elucidating his unique contributions to contemporary Indian art theory and practice. By providing both practical methods for artists and a visionary way of living, Subramanyan’s ideas have shaped the art scene in India for more than half a century.

Between Reality and Dream: The Aesthetic Vision of K. G. Subramanyan

Richardson, Margaret

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)

QUIGNARD, PASCAL

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