Of the Book and Other Stories

Authors, booksellers and artists in India and abroad reflect on their role in this theatre of publishing where hesitant, unconventional ideas find their place on the page.

120 minutes | English and Hindi | English subtitles
Directed by Pushan Kripalani
“Of the Book and Other Stories” documents insights from some of the lives Seagull has touched over the last four decades: Romila Thapar, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, Ravish Kumar, Anjum Katyal, Urvashi Butalia, Rick Simonson, Peter Maravelis, Alice Attie, Namita Gokhale, Siddharth Basu, Sanjoy Roy, Sumit Lai Roy, Katy Lai Roy, Samik Bandyopadhyay and Jeff Deutsch among others.
Also featuring interviews with the Seagull team, especially Naveen Kishore, who shares fragments of his extraordinary journey from theatre-lighting designer to publisher, the film explores how Seagull Books remains proudly at home in Calcutta but is truly a publisher for and of the world.

The screening will be followed by a conversation about Seagull Books’ place in the international literary landscape with the publisher, writer, theater practitioner and photographer Naveen Kishore, Colin Robinson, the co-founder of the alternative publisher Or Books, bookseller Rick Simonson and translator and editor Tess Lewis.

Naveen Kishore is a theatre lighting designer, photographer, filmmaker, poet, and publisher of Seagull Books. Recipient of the Goethe Medal and the Chevalier Ordre des Arts et des Lettres. Recently awarded the Ottaway Award for the Promotion of International Literature, 2021 and the first Cesare De Michelis Award in 2022. Kishore has had his poems published with Scroll.in, Queen Mob’s Tea House, Beltway Poetry Quarterly, Another Chicago Magazine, RIC Journal, Gargoyle, Poetry at Sangam, Sylph Editions, London, Gazebo Books, Australia, Speaking Tiger Delhi amongst others. Knotted Grief, a collection of his poems, was published in 2021. Naveen has recently published his second book of poems, Mother Muse Quintet. He lives and works in Calcutta, India.

Tess Lewis is a writer and translator from French and German. Her translations include works by Peter Handke, Walter Benjamin, Anne Weber, Lutz Seiler, Philippe Jaccottet and Montaigne. Her translation of Maja Haderlap’s Angel of Oblivion won the ACFNY Translation Prize and the 2017 PEN Translation Award. Her essays and reviews have appeared in many journals and newspapers including The New Criterion, The Hudson Review, World Literature Today, The Wall Street Journal, The American Scholar, and Bookforum. A Guggenheim and Berlin Prize Fellow as well as a ‘scholar of note’ at the American Library in Paris, she serves as an Advisory Editor for The Hudson Review and has curated the , New York City’s annual festival of German language literature in English. www.tesslewis.org

Colin Robinson is the publisher at OR Books www.orbooks.com. He previously worked as a senior editor at Scribner and was managing director at Verso and publisher of The New Press. Among the authors he has published are Tariq Ali, Noam Chomsky, Alexander Cockburn, Mike Davis, Norman Finkelstein, Eduardo Galeano, Eric Hobsbawm, Lewis Lapham, Mike Marqusee, Rigoberta Menchú, Matt Taibbi and Jann Wenner. He has written for publications including The New York Times, The London Review of Books, The Sunday Times (London) The New Statesman and The Guardian (London), and has appeared on broadcast media including NPR (“On the Media”), CNN, MSNBC, CBC and CSPN.

Rick Simonson has worked at Seattle’s Elliott Bay Book Company, an independent bookshop, since 1976. He is senior buyer and founder of the bookstore’s internationally regarded author reading series - which has hosted authors published by Seagull along the way. He’s served on numerous literary boards, including Copper Canyon Press and the University of Washington Press, and presented on panels at festivals and conferences around the world. He has been visiting Seagull Books in their home office annually since 2012.

Event Venue & Nearby Stays

Goethe-Institut New York, 30 Irving Place, New York, United States