Series: The French List

An engrossing novel about love and grief that introduces an important francophone author to English-speaking readers. Rome, 2014, late summer. While he is reading on his sun-drenched terrace, Giangiacomo’s heart stops. A quick, painless death—something he had always hoped for, his daughter, Elvira, remembers. A few days later, Elvira comes across an unfinished manuscript in her father’s flat. In it,...

London between the wars was a place of anxiety and uncertainty. After the postwar boom of the 1920s, the aftereffects of the stock market crash hit London, and, even as the fortunes of the aristocracy went into decline, there was hunger and a rising tide of virulent fascism. It is in this setting that Max, a French journalist looking for...

When translator Claire Methuen travels back to her hometown of Dinard for a family wedding, she runs into her old piano teacher, Madame Ladon. After befriending the ageing woman, Methuen begins to toy with the idea of a permanent return to live in Brittany. She becomes increasingly obsessed by her childhood sweetheart, Simon Quelen, who, now married and a father,...

A meditation on loss and recovery through the act of translation and its recuperative powers. An unnamed translator mourning the loss of a close friend retreats to Dresden to translate the "Time Passes" section of Virginia Woolf's novel To the Lighthouse. Translating this lyrical evocation of time and its devastations in a city with which the writer has no connections...

Traversing heritage across three continents, this poignant coming-of-age novel chronicles the enduring presence of systemic racism and the resistance to it. Born in Cameroon and raised in the suburbs of Paris, Nathan feels unmoored, as if he does not belong in France. His mother tells him about his great-grandfather who left Cameroon for New Orleans to seek his fortune shortly...

A tragicomic novel that explores deep-seated tensions and social violence in Haiti. After committing an irreparable crime, the narrator of The Emperor waits in his bedroom for the police to arrest him. His past reverberates inside of him like a drum: his youth spent in captivity as a zonbi, under the control of a charlatan Vodou leader, and many an...

“Last Kingdom is a set of books that... is neither philosophical argumentation nor little disparate, scholarly essays, nor novelistic narrative; gradually, for me, all genres have fallen away.” So writes Pascal Quignard of his monumental book series, Last Kingdom. In the latest volume, The Fount of Time, he focuses on the paradoxically immediate presence in our lives of the deepest,...

The year is 1938. The great Russian poet and essayist Osip Mandelstam is forty-seven years old and is dying in a transit camp near Vladivostok after having been arrested by Stalin’s government during the repression of the 1930s and sent into exile with his wife. Stalin, “the Kremlin mountaineer, murderer, and peasant-slayer,” is undoubtedly responsible for his fatal decline. From...

Introducing a refreshing young French voice to English readers, this slim novel is both a riveting love story and an examination of humanity’s assault on the natural world. After a seven-day journey on the South Atlantic Ocean aboard a lobster boat servicing Cape Town, Ida arrives on the island of Tristan. In the little island community, a village nestled on...

We defy augury. There’s a special providence in the fall of a sparrow. If it be now, ’tis not to come … the readiness is all. Under the sign of Hamlet’s last act, Hélène Cixous, in her eightieth year, launched her new book—and the latest chapter in her Human Comedy, her Search for Lost Time. Surely one of the most...

The first and exhaustive biography of twentieth-century leftist philosopher André Gorz. Recognised as one of the most lucid and innovative critics of contemporary capitalism, André Gorz (1923–2007) was known for asking fundamental questions regarding the meaning of life and work. This first biography of a unique figure operating at the confluence of literature, philosophy, and journalism revisits half a century...

Pablo Picasso and Gertrude Stein. Few can be said to have had as broad an impact on European art in the twentieth century as these two cultural giants. Pablo Picasso, a pioneering visual artist, created a prolific and widely influential body of work. Gertrude Stein, an intellectual tastemaker, hosted the leading salon for artists and writers between the wars in...

An intimate glimpse into the life and letters of Rainer Maria Rilke, one of the most important poets of the twentieth century. In July 1921, displaced European poet Rainer Maria Rilke sequestered himself in the chateau of Muzot, a thirteenth-century medieval tower perched in the vineyards above the town of Sierre in the Canton Valais, Switzerland. In this sun-flooded landscape...

A short story collection from Nobel Prize winner J. M. G. Le Clézio offers a poignant and powerful exploration of the lives of the underprivileged and marginalised. J. M. G. Le Clézio's On the Wrong Side, a collection of eight short stories, continues the author's lifelong pursuit of granting visibility to the unseen and a voice to the voiceless. Here,...

An introduction for English-language readers to Georges Bataille's postwar philosophical and critical writings. In the aftermath of World War II, French thinker and writer Georges Bataille forged a singular path through the moral and political impasses of his age. In 1946, animated by "a need to live events in an increasingly conscious way," and to reject any compartmentalization of intellectual...

In recent years, social workers have raised a new concern about the appearance of a new category among the working poor. Even employed, there are people so overburdened by the cost of living and so undercompensated that they cannot afford a place to sleep. Contrary to popular opinion, according to the website for the Coalition for the Homeless, forty-four per...

Iconic French novelist, playwright, and essayist, Jean-Paul Sartre (1905-1980), is widely recognised as one of the most important philosophers of the twentieth century, whose work has remained relevant and thought-provoking through the decades. The Seagull Sartre Library now presents some of his most incisive philosophical, cultural, and literary critical essays in twelve newly designed volumes. On Revolution includes a long...

A gripping tale of education, violence, and hope, in which one man's dream for a better future collides with a community on the edge of transformation. Set in 1842, this novel foregrounds a Haiti that is grappling with the weight of an onerous debt imposed by France, forcing its citizens to pay reparations to French colonists in exchange for diplomatic...

Iconic French novelist, playwright and essayist, Jean-Paul Sartre (1905-1980) is widely recognised as one of the most important philosophers of the twentieth century. His work has remained relevant and thought-provoking through the decades. The Seagull Sartre Library now presents some of his most incisive philosophical, cultural, and literary critical essays in twelve newly designed volumes. Venice and Rome features three...

Weaving together history, literature, and personal experience, this recent book from a master of literature crafts a mesmerizing exploration of language, loss, and the enduring power of the spirit world. The strange word Mdeilmm was reported to have been uttered by the spirit of Shakespeare when called up during a séance in 1854 at the instigation of the French poet...

A genre-defying account of confinement and its literary echoes through history. As the pandemic sweeps through Paris in March 2020, the writer HC faces a choice: stay in Paris or flee to the countryside? The weight of historical responses bears down on her—those of her ancestors and Jewish writers during moments of persecution. Still uncertain, she flees to the country...

A major collection of essays and interviews from an iconic 20th-century philosopher in five volumes, now all available together in paperback. Roland Barthes was a restless, protean thinker. A constant innovator—often as a daring smuggler of ideas from one discipline to another—he first gained an audience with his pithy essays on mass culture and then went on to produce some...

Mingling fact and fiction, The Three Rimbauds imagines how Rimbaud’s life would have unfolded had he not died at the age of thirty-seven. The myth of Arthur Rimbaud (1854–1891) focuses on his early years: how the great enfant terrible tore through the nineteenth-century literary scene with reckless abandon, leaving behind him a trail of enemies, the failed marriage of an...

Hailed by the poet Paul Eluard as an 'absolute masterpiece' upon its first appearance in 1946, René Char's Hypnos is both a remarkable work of literature and a document of unique significance in the history of the French Resistance. Based on a journal Char kept during his time in the Maquis, it ranges in style from abrupt and sometimes enigmatic...

Writing in 2007, French social philosopher André Gorz was remarkably prophetic, foretelling the international economic meltdown of 2008: “The real economy is becoming an appendage of the speculative bubbles sustained by the finance industry—until that inevitable point when the bubbles burst, leading to serial bank crashes and threatening the global system of credit with collapse and the real economy with...

“Baudelaire is indeed the greatest exemplar in modern poetry in any language,” said T. S. Eliot. We experience Baudelaire in myriad ways through his multifaceted writing. His sensuous poems—dreams of escape to an impossible, preferably tropical, elsewhere—draw us in with their descriptive and perceptual richness. There is also the bitter, compassionate, and desolate Baudelaire. Ultimately, Baudelaire’s true genius might reside...

One of the foremost poets of the French Resistance, René Char has been hailed by Donald Revell as “the conscience of modern French poetry.” Translated by Mark Hutchinson, The Inventors is a companion volume to Char’s critically acclaimed Hypnos. It gathers more than forty poems that represent a cross-section of Char’s mature work, spanning from 1936 to 1988. All three...

Three short story collections that sink into the lives of characters seeking meaning in a post-war world, available in a boxed set. Sharp as a razor and as subtle as gossamer, Shmuel T. Meyer's masterfully crafted stories evoke unique individual sensibilities and destinies, resonating with the sensual details, smells, tastes, music, and sounds of a specific time and place. And...

A sharp, witty send-up of the literary world, set in the world of book publishing—a must-read for anyone who's ever dreamt of (or dreaded) getting published. The First Line follows Cyril Cordouan, the beleaguered editor at Fulmen, a distinguished publishing house known for its solid but not particularly popular literary titles. Every day, Cyril faces an avalanche of subpar manuscripts,...

Yves Bonnefoy was one of the greatest living voices of contemporary French poetry. In this, his sixth book published by Seagull Books, he explores in profound new ways the mysteries of human consciousness. Readers find snatches of conversations—overheard, dropped without any possible conclusion—each pregnant with half-hidden, half-visible meaning. Limpid, punctuated with silences, the poems of Ursa Major are like stones...

Iconic French novelist, playwright and essayist, Jean-Paul Sartre (1905–1980) is widely recognized as one of the most important philosophers of the twentieth century, whose work has remained relevant and thought-provoking through the decades. The Seagull Sartre Library now presents some of his most incisive philosophical, cultural, and literary critical essays in twelve newly designed volumes. Sartre was a prodigious commentator...

A genre-defying book about survival, transformation, and the human ability to rise from the ashes. Hélène Cixous's powerful new book, masterfully translated by Peggy Kamuf, is a vivid journey through fire. From the ashes of wars, wildfires, and upheaval, Cixous traces a dramatic path across time—from the Second World War and the Nazi occupation of Oran to the European wildfires...

In this strikingly original biographical novel, Marie Bronsard reweaves the history of her family—and the legend of her grandmother—leaving no stone unturned and no skeleton in the closet. Egocentric and domineering, Bronsard's grandmother was once a vibrant and sensual beauty. In Indochina at the end of the Second World War, she thrived in the social life of the French colony,...

Dominique Eddé met novelist and playwright Jean Genet in the 1970s. And she never forgot him. 'His presence', she writes, 'gave me the sensation of icy fire. Like his words, his gestures were full, calculated and precise [...] Genet's movements mimicked the movement of time, accumulating rather than passing.' This book is Eddé's account of that meeting and its ripples...

Iconic French novelist, playwright, and essayist, Jean-Paul Sartre (1905-1980) is widely recognised as one of the most important philosophers of the twentieth century, whose work has remained relevant and thought-provoking through the decades. The Seagull Sartre Library now presents some of his most incisive philosophical, cultural, and literary critical essays in twelve newly designed volumes. These four essays of varying...

In Paris, Montreal, Seville, Berlin and towns large and small, Diane Meur has dreamt—and she has remembered her dreams. In this small volume, the author shares her dreams of the years 2008–10, a time of global upheaval that happened to coincide with upheavals in her own life. As she writes in the preface, “They are not my life, they are...

In December 2015, six months before his death at the age of 93, Yves Bonnefoy concluded what was to be his last major text in prose, L’écharpe rouge, translated here as The Red Scarf. In this unique book, described by the poet as "an anamnesis"—a formal act of commemoration—Bonnefoy undertakes, at the end of his life, a profoundly moving exegesis...

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 helped find a job at the same television station: "My phone rang. I knew right away...

Pascal Quignard delves into the uncanny bond between recognition and loss, outlining how our earliest experiences shape our longing for a paradise we can never reclaim. What if paradise was not a place we lost, but one we never truly knew? In The Paradisiacs, the fourth volume of the Last Kingdom series, Pascal Quignard meditates on the nature of paradise—not...

Iconic French novelist, playwright and essayist, Jean-Paul Sartre (1905-1980) is widely recognised as one of the most important philosophers of the twentieth century, whose work has remained relevant and thought-provoking through the decades. The Seagull Sartre Library now presents some of his most incisive philosophical, cultural, and literary critical essays in twelve newly designed volumes. There is a crisis of...

Iconic French novelist, playwright, and essayist, Jean-Paul Sartre (1905-1980) is widely recognised as one of the most important philosophers of the twentieth century. His work has remained relevant and thought-provoking through the decades. The Seagull Sartre Library now presents some of his most incisive philosophical, cultural, and literary critical essays in twelve newly designed volumes. On Merleau-Ponty consists of a...

Iconic French novelist, playwright and essayist, Jean-Paul Sartre (1905-1980), is widely recognised as one of the most important philosophers of the twentieth century, whose work has remained relevant and thought-provoking through the decades. The Seagull Sartre Library now presents some of his most incisive philosophical, cultural, and literary critical essays in twelve newly designed volumes. On Poetry includes two long...

Should you find yourself strolling along the coastal heights of Douarnenez, a Brittany town near the westernmost point of continental France, you would do well to look out for a signpost marked, “Georges Perros (1923–1978) ‘Dazzled by the sea.’” Perros, who famously made that remark and settled there in 1959, was initially an actor but is now best known for...