Of the Book and Other Stories

Join us for the first US screening of Pushan Kripalani’s documentary about the legendary publisher Seagull Books, a pre-eminent publisher of translated literature in the world and a major champion of German-language writers in all genres.
 
Of the Book and Other Stories
120 mins | Color | English and Hindi


In this visual memoir celebrating the fortieth anniversary of Seagull Books, authors, booksellers, and artists in India and abroad reflect on their role in this theatre of publishing, where hesitant and unconventional ideas find their place on the page. It features interviews with the Seagull team, especially Naveen Kishore, who shares fragments of his extraordinary journey from theatre-lighting designer to publisher, as well as Gayatri Spivak, Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, Peter Maravelis of City Lights Booksellers, Jeff Deutsch, the director of Seminary Co-op Bookstores, and Rick Simonson, veteran bookseller and literary impresario at Elliott Bay Books in Seattle.

Of the Book and Other Stories 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.


Director’s Note

Tired.
I suppose I was tired.
Had just finished a feature film and was overwhelmed by talk of distribution, strategies, market forces, bottom lines.
Tired and constricted.
Tired of a largely unquestioned idea about money being the only metric of success.
And I found myself in Calcutta. Quite by chance.
Coffee with old friends at Seagull. With people whom I had known practically my whole life. Safe.
But different.
They looked happy. They were engaged with the world. They did things because an idea moved them. They did not seem to look at a feasibility study before they made a decision. They jumped. And then looked around for a parachute. Because it seemed like a fantastic idea at the time.
It seemed mad. And amazing.
And they were turning 40. Divisible by five.
Banded together. Their fates intertwined, professional and personal. And I thought, this is a good room to be in.
And making a film, learning more about their work and lives, and the world they build, was a wonderful place to spend some time.
And perhaps be able to breathe again.
And so we spoke to some of the lives seagull had touched and asked for their insight. This took us from Calcutta, Bombay, Delhi, Jaipur, to Seattle, San Fransisco, Orange County, Chicago and New York.
We returned to try and make a coherent film of all these conversations. And we made seven.
Here’s one of them.


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, and 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 Festival Neue Literature, New York City’s annual festival of German language literature in English.

Colin Robinson is the publisher at OR Books. 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.