rile*books

It is 1974. American and English expatriates, artists, writers, and eccentrics find their home in a quiet town on the island of Crete. Among them is Horace Vaughn, a sixty-five-year-old gay American writer who has long been at work on Household Gods, his attempt at the Great American Novel, and who in the meantime supports himself by dashing off detective stories.

Horace’s young Greek lover often annoys him, provides little satisfaction, and Horace idles his time away with alcohol, friends, and machinations. That is, until a young, enigmatic nineteen-year-old American woman named Helen arrives, another outsider. In Helen, Horace discovers someone brilliant, beautiful, and stubbornly mysterious. He is fascinated by her punk style and elusive pose. In this small town, gossip spreads fast, and Helen’s past begins to follow her to Crete: a suicidal ex-lover appears without warning, and there are whispers of her long-dead sister. The Henry Moore crowd dislike her, and a Greek waiter’s wife threatens to murder her.

When Helen vanishes, Horace is determined to follow her, to find her, especially her diary. His journey around Crete in his beat-up VW bug is funny and poignant, and for Horace, the mystery continues.

Sea-oath is a catalog of internal and generational mythologies, a procedural formalist poetic experiment, and a transcript of an internal trial between the speaker and God. 

Alter approaches the central theological reckoning of the collection through constructed metrical forms, neologistic indexing, and paratactic syntax in an attempt to articulate and organize memories and histories that had originally been buried by dissociation, self-punishment, and mental and physical escape. 

What kind of God permits and witnesses the cyclical transmission of suffering, and how can I understand my life and my path within my inheritance?

And death shall have no dominion / Killing ‘The Mother’ charts death inside healthcare bureaucracy through brutal, surreal and fragmentary poetic prose, grappling with the capitalist devastation of systems of social care and how writing might enact forms of conception in the face of such conditions. Victoria Guerrero-Peirano has been recognized as one of the most singular and powerful voices of contemporary Peruvian poetry.

Suzanne and Louise tells the story of two sisters, one widowed, the other never married, recluses in a hôtel particulier in Paris’s 15th arrondissement. Suzanne, the older one, controls the finances. Louise, a former Carmelite, serves as her humble, tyrannical maid.

The author, who is also their great nephew, is one of the few who visits them. Mixing his writing with his photos, Hervé Guibert crafted a unique “photo novel,” reissued here for the first time with a full English translation by Christine Pichini, a new introduction by artist and writer Moyra Davey, and an account of the book’s origins by Thomas Simmonet. [publishers’ note]

I am still transitioning, but I am unsure into what.

Who are all these Evas? They puncture and disrupt the domestic space and equilibrium of the narrator, who alternately relies upon them or administers their care. Foam is the latest boundary-blurring, genre-resistant, strange and speculative new fiction from Kate Zambreno, the inimitable and relentless literary stylist and conceptualist. Inspired by the absurdities of Eva Hesse and other soft sculpture, these are speculative art essays and textures, a document of precarity and slippery time—mischievous, moody, estranged—a masterwork of tone and atmosphere. 

Told through contradicting, unreliable narrators and almost entirely in dialogue, Seyed Qader Hedayati's GABOR fuses the experimentation of George Saunders with the absurdist satire of Joseph Heller to deliver a seldom explored portrait of friendship and boyhood under the anarchy of occupation.

In a Kurdish village under military occupation, a group of boys scrape together their savings and buy a hand-stitched football to prove they aren't losers to the other kids. When it lands inside the opposing military base, Karim sneaks in and takes it back—only for the soldiers to burn the neighborhood to the ground looking for it. Streets are bombed, homes are raided, snipers take aim at pedestrians, residents are dragged off and imprisoned. As the casualty rate skyrockets, Karim and his friends retaliate by firing junkyard scraps from their slingshots while raging bulls escape slaughterhouses to stampede into warfare.

Aesthetical Relations is a constellation of essays on art, fashion, cancer, comedy, Los Angeles, and your mom. Martinez whips elements of fiction and stand up material into bits and pieces addressing such concerns as: how many times you may kiss an art-world acquaintance, the theoretical stakes of sexting, and why German performance art is like French clowning. Aesthetical Relations is titled after Martinez’s ongoing conceptual comedy talk show of the same name. This new revised and expanded third edition includes new essays written from 2020-2025. 

Christina Catherine Martinez (Mexican American, b. Bellflower, CA) lives and works between Los Angeles, Mexico City, and New England. She was named both a Comedian You Should Know by Vulture and a Comic to Watch by TimeOutLA, and is a recipient of an Andy Warhol Foundation Arts Writers Grant for her varied approaches to art criticism, published in platforms such as The Los Angeles Times, Aperture, Frieze, Artforum, Bookforum, e-flux criticism, DOCUMENT Journal, Dirt.fyi and Texte Zur Kunst.

Gathering 13 amazing essays by artist and writer Dena Yago, co-founder of K-HOLE, That Figures retraces more than a decade of reflections on the creative industry—digging into topics such as Sporespace, Billie Eilish, LARPing, corporate cafeterias, ketamine, precarity, poetry, and the internet’s lures and failures. Yago exposes the contradictions of living amidst the sugarcoated deals of the attention economy, and further proposes a new lexicon to address the numbing and disorienting effects of late stage capitalism. Absorbing but refusing to metabolize the language of commercial culture, she opens a space where critical thinking can still happen.

That Figures also features a selection of artworks by Yago, in which the combination of conceptual legacies with pop cultural elements creates new poetical arrangements.

Get Rid of Meaning: A Journal of Interdisciplinary Writing is a biannual periodical by Sticky Fingers Publishing, exploring how and where meaning is produced, maintained and distributed. Through its first three issues, Get Rid of Meaning has become a site for interrogating the material conditions and affective systems of meaning-making, and strategies for surviving an intentionally nonsensical political landscape, through experimental non-fiction. This fourth issue builds on this by uncovering forms and methods of fugitive knowledge, from the heat of the land and the vibrations of the night, to the stoney rumblings of rivers and rock.

Featuring contributions from Alberto Álvarez, e v, Florence Hannah Evans, Lucy Petersen, Mark Sauter, mars k margetson & teresa amrita braggs.

LOOK HERE FOR: BLOOD BOILING, WHAT DEBT DOES, SEEING PURPLE, A PING-PONG BALL BENEATH THE RUBBLE, PSYCHOPOLITICS, ALIEN GOO, A ROD UP YOUR ASS, STONE SUMMONING FORTH, A MIRACLE, & THE BEGINNING OF THE END.

The love child of The L Word and Brontez Purnell’s 100 Boyfriends, with a disaffected flair all its own.

It’s San Francisco in the early aughts, and Howie Song is floundering. His failed projects—as a professional ballet dancer, as a boyfriend, as a friend—have left him forever the “third wheel.” But maybe he likes it that way? Leaping wildly between lovers, centuries, and an ever-changing cultural landscape, Howie might just feel most himself in the fracture. 

Delicious, poetic, and delightfully pornographic, Tricyclist is an ode to the “abnormal angles” of people and art. As Howie overcomes his own ambivalences—in large part thanks to two suitors, and a circle of supporters who happen to be lesbians—Joon Oluchi Lee portrays, with his signature flamboyance, all of life’s joys, pitfalls, and pirouettes.

Joon Oluchi Lee is one of my favorite writers. A quick-change artist with a blazing intellect, he startles with his wicked wit and mix of rawness and sophistication. In Tricyclist, vexed, sexed, and indexed types orbit the narrator Howie Song, offering all kinds of distractions and attractions. Identity is a flipbook of possibilities, malleable in a way that excites and also threatens dissolution (which is maybe a relief). Raunch, philosophical asides, and a scavenger hunt for connection and love are all propelled by Lee’s masterful maverick style and brilliant humor. - Nate Lippens

Across lush hangouts with friends and hookups with lovers, Joon Oluchi Lee’s Tricyclist paints shimmering portraits of the most beautiful blouses and bars and bodies laid bare alongside our hopelessly alluring narrator. Through Howie’s careening sex drives and death drives, sensuality is everything, and with Lee’s keen attunement to life’s viscera, Tricyclist aches gorgeously. What a rhapsodic balm to my 2026. - Benedict Nguyễn

Tricyclist is a sex-forward, strikingly original story of queer life in San Francisco that feels so fresh it left my fingers wet. Joon Oluchi Lee’s eye is as sharp as his prose, rendering characters and scenarios with gossipy frankness. Kinetic and true and hyper-alive. - Michelle Tea

The first English translation of recent poetry by the late Mahmoud Darwish, the most important Palestinian contemporary poet. 

Almond Blossoms and Beyond is one of the last collections of poetry that Mahmoud Darwish left to the world. Composed of brief lyric poems and the magnificent sustained Exile cycle, Almond Blossoms holds an important place in Darwish’s unparalleled oeuvre. It distills his late style, in which, though the specter of death looms and weddings turn to funerals, he threads the pulses and fragilities and beauties of life into the lines of his poems. Their liveliness is his own response to the collection’s final call to bid “Farewell / Farewell, to the poetry of pain.”

Mahmoud Darwish, born in 1941 in the village of al-Birweh, Palestine, was the author of over two dozen volumes of poetry and prose. When he died in the summer of 2008, he was mourned throughout the world as a voice of the Palestinian people—author of their official declaration of independence and, most importantly, a poet of the highest invention and beauty. Mohammad Shaheen is a professor of English at the University of Jordan. Amro Naddy has worked as an editor at the Virginia Quarterly Review. He teaches at the King’s Academy in Amman, Jordan.

Dans Les liens qui empêchent, Sarah Schulman analyse la reproduction de l’homophobie au sein du cercle familial, quand bien même ce dernier devrait être le lieu du développement et de l’épanouissement de chacun·e.

En s’appuyant aussi bien sur des théories sociologiques que sur des témoignages individuels, l’autrice décortique les mécanismes qui conduisent les familles à exclure certains de leurs membres. Bien que l’homosexualité soit de plus en plus représentée dans les médias et dans la culture populaire, Sarah Schulman montre en quoi celle-ci est souvent caricaturée et pathologisée. Ainsi, cette visibilisation ne s’accompagne pas nécessairement d’une meilleure acceptation des personnes homosexuelles dans le cercle familial.

Virulent plaidoyer visant à faire de l’homophobie une question de société qui ne serait plus uniquement reléguée à la sphère privée, Sarah Schulman offre ici des pistes permettant de mettre un terme à la souffrance endurée par de nombreux·ses homosexuel·les au sein du foyer familial.