Seagull Books, a Calcutta-based publishing house that “focuses on publishing world literature in English translation, serious non-fiction, culture studies, performance studies, art and cinema” is offering books as PDFs, free to download from its site during this lockdown.
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The initiative titled Apart, but not alone offers free downloads in the form of PDFs. Today’s seven books include, Bengali writer Banaphool’s Wildfire, featuring “45 short, sharp, sometimes cryptic stories, representative of his uncompromising, multifaceted talent”; French-Djiboutian poet Abdourahman A Waberi’s poetry, from Naming the Dawn, “introspective and inquisitive, reflecting a deep spiritual bond—with words, with the history of Islam and its great poets, with the landscapes those poets walked”; Chandrashekar Kambar’s novel Karimayi, translated by Krishna Manavalli, “plays with the idea of an eternal India that exists between myth and reality”, among others.
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The publishing house founded by Naveen Kishore in 1982 initially specialised in serious books on art, theatre and cinema, “it published plays by major Indian playwrights, monographs and essays by leading Indian artists, filmscripts from the best-known Indian and European filmmakers, along with academic titles on culture, society and the various arts. Since 2005, Seagull Books London Limited has ventured into newer fields of publishing, including English translations of fiction and non-fiction by major African, European, Asian and Latin American writers… Its hallmark ‘Africa List’ presents writers such as Ngugi wa Thiong’o, Maryse Condé, Ivan Vladislavić, William Kentridge, Kossi Efoui and Abdourrahman A. Waberi. European writers lesser known to the English-speaking world are also showcased by Seagull—Ralf Rothmann, Tilman Rammstedt, Inka Parei, Dorothee Elmiger, Tomas Espedal.”
Seagull authors include a Nobel laureate (Mo Yan for literature in 2012) a Man Booker winner (Laszlo Krasznahorkai in 2015), and an alternative Nobel winner (Maryse Condé in 2018).
Find free books, and more here.