[Available for preorders. Ships November 2024]

Dear Miss Maxfeld . . . What I’m really afraid of is that I am a homosexual human being. I wish you were one too but I don’t think it’s possible there could be so many in one school, do you? Probably there is only one person who is homosexual in one place at one time and that one person (I am afraid) is me . . .

After sixteen-year-old Lynn writes her thirty-seven-year-old English teacher a letter they embark on one of the funniest and saddest love affairs in fiction, shrouded in secrecy and guilt. Set in the year Kennedy was shot, all Lynn knows about “lezbos” is that they wear their hair in crew cuts, buy suits like her father’s, and sprout mustaches over their upper lips. Trying to pass, Lynn continues to neck with her boyfriend and make bigoted jokes with her friends. Feigning innocence with her parents, each night she checks the mirror for tell-tale signs of perversion. Profound, witty, poignant, and highly charged, In Thrall is the first in Jane DeLynn’s trilogy of novels on sexuality and authority. It is as believable in its depiction of a closeted teen as it is heartbreaking.

With an introduction by Colm Tóibín

Flawless comic timing. —Colm Tóibín, from the Introduction

All Lynn’s phobias, aversions and hang-ups make her exaggerated but real . . . The great triumph of this novel is that DeLynn has captured the way adolescents felt, talked, and behaved during the early 1960s. —San Francisco Chronicle

A dazzlingly gritty exposure of a girlhood experience usually neglected by both private and public consciousness. —Reba Maybury

Time has fallen asleep in the afternoon sunshine Appendix #3 Orality includes contributions by Simon Asencio, Bruno De Wachter, Peter Szendy, Clara Amaral, Itziar Okariz, Jude Joseph, Léa Poiré and Mette Edvardsen.

Time has The Appendixes #1–4 is an editorial series by Mette Edvardsen, Léa Poiré and Victoria Pérez Royo that developed out of the project Time has fallen asleep in the afternoon sunshine. For a two-year residency at Les Laboratoires d’Aubervilliers* (2022–23), they came together as a small work group, shaping the work process, hosting presentation formats and making this publication series on paper as four cahiers.

The cahiers comprise a collection of commissioned texts and contributions created for this context, selected documents and traces from work sessions and encounters organized during their residency, texts read together and republished for this occasion, a collection of references, notes in progress, unfinished thoughts and loose fragments – on paper, between pages.

The Appendixes are organized around four themes: (1) The gesture of writing, (2) How to organize a library, (3) Orality and (4) Translation. In addition to being published on paper, the editorial series also consisted of other formats of presentations, exchanges and meetings organized as workshops, fieldwork, performances, conferences, collective readings and oral publications, taking place during their residency at Les Laboratoires d’Aubervilliers and in the vicinity.

The Appendixes is the work that continues, material that adds on, some of it perhaps too long or too detailed, unfit or unfinished. The four themes that their research is formulated around originate in specific experiences and questions from the practices of Time has fallen asleep in the afternoon sunshine (2010 – ongoing), and also the large publication on the project ‘A book on reading, writing, memory and forgetting in a library of living books’ (2019). The research was both a means of exploring these themes in greater depth and also of bringing them into contact with other artists and researchers working on similar or related subjects. The Appendixes offered them both the contexts and the pretexts for things to happen (in time, in space, on paper).

The Appendixes #1–4, published in these cahiers, do not present an overview or a summary of all of the activities and presentations that took place during the two years at Les Laboratoires d’Aubervilliers. What these cahiers offer is a space in which to hold some thoughts together and to share them in this form. It is one more step along the way, extending the research and work already begun and that will now continue.

Translated by Kristine Ong Muslim with an introduction by Amado Anthony G. Mendoza III.

Feverish from the engrossing revelatory arcs of the uncanny, Glossolalia is a mind-bending foray into the twisted underlying logic of material reality and a rip-roaring romp through Philippine urban legends, psychogeography, and the uncomfortable, often seedy aspects of music, cinema, and art. Marlon Hacla—who is a computer programmer as well as a poet and created the first robot poet in Filipino, Estela Vadal—is a significant innovator in the Philippine poetic tradition. As Amado Anthony G. Mendoza III notes in his introduction, Hacla “eschews the spare language, subtle imagery, and quietism featured in most contemporary Philippine poetry. Hacla’s poems, especially here in Glossolalia (and in its informal sequel Melismas), read like an unapologetic statement against the New Critical tradition that has been pushing its weight in the Philippine literary scene for more than half a century.” This collection of relentless, densely layered prose poems is the third of Hacla’s books to be translated into English by Kristine Ong Muslim.

Marlon Hacla is a poet and artist living in Quezon City, Philippines. His first poetry collection, May Mga Dumadaang Anghel sa Parang (Manila: National Commission for Culture and the Arts, 2010), was published as part of UBOD New Authors Series II. His second book, Glossolalia, was published by High Chair in 2013. Kristine Ong Muslim’s English translations of his books are Melismas (Oomph Press, 2020), There Are Angels Walking the Fields (Broken Sleep Books, 2021), and Glossolalia (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2023).

The Seers follows the first weeks of a homeless Eritrean refugee in London. Set around a foster home in Kilburn and in the squares of Bloomsbury, where its protagonist Hannah sleeps, the novel grapples with how agency is given to the sexual lives of refugees, insisting that the erotic and intimate side of life is as much a part of someone’s story as ‘land and nations’ are.

Hannah arrives in London with her mother’s diary, containing a disturbing sexual story taking place in Keren, Eritrea, where the Allies defeated the Italians in the Second World War. In a gripping, continuous paragraph, The Seers moves between the present day and the past to explore intergenerational histories and colonial trauma alongside the psychological and erotic lives of its characters as their identities are shaped, but refused to be suppressed, by the bureaucratic processes of the UK asylum system. 

Sulaiman Addonia is an Eritrean-Ethiopian-British novelist. He spent his early life in a refugee camp in Sudan, and his early teens in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia. He arrived in London as an underage unaccompanied refugee without a word of English and went on to earn an MA in Development Studies from SOAS and a BSc in Economics from UCL. His first novel, The Consequences of Love (Chatto & Windus, 2008), was shortlisted for the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize and was translated into more than 20 languages. His second novel, Silence is My Mother Tongue (Indigo Press, 2019; Graywolf, 2020), was a Finalist for the Lambda Literary Awards 2021, the Firecracker (CLMP) Awards, the inaugural African Literary Award from The Museum of the African Diaspora (MoAD) in San Francisco, and longlisted for the 2019 Orwell Prize for Fiction. Addonia’s essays appear in LitHub, Granta, Freeman’s, The New York Times, De Standaard and Passa Porta. He is a contributor to Tales of Two Planets (Penguin, 2020) and Addis Ababa Noir (Akashic Books, 2020). 

In Prairie, Dresses, Art, Other Danielle Dutton imagines new models for how literature might work in our fractured times. Dutton’s writing is as protean as it is beguiling, using the different styles and different spaces of experience to create a collage of the depths and strangeness of contemporary life.

This hybrid literary collection covers an inventive selection of subjects in four eponymous sections which contrast and echo one another, challenging our expectations and pushing the limits of the dream-like worlds and moods that language might create.

‘Danielle Dutton is a writer whose work I wait for. When a new book comes, I keep it very close… Her growing body of work is among the most formally inventive (and therefore essential) I can think of, and Prairie, Dresses, Art, Other is a vital, enlivening addition to it.’ – Kate Briggs

Danielle Dutton is the author of the novels Margaret the First and SPRAWL, the prose collection Attempts at a Life, the illustrated nonfiction chapbook A Picture Held Us Captive, and she wrote the text interpolations for Richard Kraft’s Here Comes Kitty: A Comic Opera. Her fiction has appeared in magazines and journals including The New Yorker, The Paris Review, The White Review, Harper’s, BOMB, and NOON. Dutton teaches at Washington University in St. Louis and is cofounder and editor of the award-winning feminist press Dorothy, a publishing project. Born and raised in California, she has lived on the (former) prairie now for roughly twenty years.

You wake up in the footwell of a mid-sized hatchback somewhere on a highway in outer Bangkok. You compile neurotic spreadsheets of the best ‘party destinations’ in Europe, whilst your work emails pile up without ever being read. You quit your job. You launch a banal start-up. You grieve for a past relationship. You stare endlessly at the waves coming in from a beach in Koh Pha Ngan. You vape intensely. You spend money on feelings, on the performance of your own persona, whilst you observe yourself with a detached sense of horror.

i will pay to make it bigger is a novella, by poet and artist Ahren Warner, in which ‘you’ are the main character. Through text and image – autofiction, docufiction, and just plain fiction – you work your way through a tangle of preoccupations: from what it means to buy enjoyment, to the fragile construction of your own self as a cultural product.

i will pay to make it bigger is also a photobook, a collection of images produced whilst living in Thai ‘party hostels’. Although these photographs might seem to exist as the documentation of intimate or ecstatic moments, they are in fact quite painstakingly, and artificially, constructed: composited and manipulated from multiple still frames of film footage to produce images that advertise the calculated artifice of their own hedonism, emotion and seemingly raw experience.

With a Coda by Hana K. Ohnewehr, commissioned by Yu’an Huang

‘One Shape of the Language: Cyrillic Archives’ is an artist’s book documenting Inna Kochkina’s research into the history, style, and politics of traditional Cyrillic.

This research was born from Kochkina’s self-reflective curiosity about the relationship between cultural heritage and typography and evolved into an examination of the socio-political role of traditional Cyrillic. An ancient script, Cyrillic has been used to express various forms of cultural and territorial domination and continues to serve as an imperialist tool, having long been deployed in support of Slavic nationalism both in Russia and in the former USSR territories. 

This publication is the result of Kochkina’s own research into and engagement with archives of typography, as well as conversations with anti-colonial activists, artists, and historians who interrogate traditional Cyrillic and its relationship to colonial power. 

Alongside conducting scholarly research, Kochkina also produced drawings in response to archives of traditional Cyrillic. Making these drawings constituted a form of “studying by making.” With these efforts she has sought to construct an anti-colonial feminist narrative, employing both typographic artifacts and ‘patriarchal’ letterforms.

To make her drawings, Kochkina took samples from these low quality typographic archives, enlarging and transforming them into unexpected graphic shapes that were then recorded in a series of experimental prints. The drawing, collating and contact printing process that she followed allowed her to document and reveal the qualities lent to historical artifacts by digital noise. Through this working method she sought to rethink both the subject of her work as well as traditional approaches to type design practice. This book presents the prints in a roughly chronological sequence, poetically portraying Kochkina’s complex relationship with her native script. Variously precise, messy, and destructive, these works ultimately convey a series of “imaginary” shapes through which to reinterpret traditional Cyrillic of the past and present.

A unique limited edition accessible publication documenting a project to make Black Audio Film Collective’s seminal 1986 film Handsworth Songs more, and differently, accessible. Designed by Daly & Lyon it presents a new commissioned annotated audio description script from Elaine Lillian Joseph and new creative captions commissioned from the Care-fuffle Working Group alongside new essays by Clive Nwonka and Sarah Hayden.

The publication was produced in collaboration with Voices in the Gallery and with the support and advice of the UK Association for Accessible Formats and financial support from AHRC. The publication is also available in website form designed by An Endless Supply at slowemergencysiren.org.uk

REWIND PLAY presents a selection of key works from the first decade of artist's video practice in the UK. From early conceptual experiments exploring the parameters of the medium to works dealing with media culture and television this collection explores the range and diversity of the first years of video as new media.

This three DVD box set including 24 videos by: John Adams, Peter Anderson, Kevin Atherton, Ian Bourn, Ian Breakwell, David Critchley, Peter Donebauer, Catherine Elwes, Judith Goddard, David Hall, Mick Hartney, Brian Hoey/Wendy Brown, Madelon Hooykaas/ Elsa Stansfield, Tina Keane, Tamara Krikorian, Mike Leggett, Stephen Littman, Stuart Marshall, Chris Meigh-Andrews/ Gabrielle Bown, Marcelline Mori, Stephen Partridge, Clive Richardson and Tony Sinden. Plus a new essay by Sean Cubitt, Professor of Media and Communications, University of Melbourne.

Total running time: 336 minutes. 3 x DVD 9, PAL, Region 0

Published in collaboration with REWIND| Artists' Video in the 70s and 80s.

Disc 1:
Stories, John Adams (1982, 13 min) Eyebath Peter Anderson (1977, 8 min) In Two Minds (2 screen version) Kevin Atherton (1978, 25 min) Lenny's Documentary Ian Bourn (1978, 45 min) In the Home Ian Breakwell (1980, 10 min)

Disc 2:
Pieces I Never Did (3 screen version), David Critchley (1979, 31 min) Circling, Peter Donebauer (1975, 12 min) Kensington Gore, Catherine Elwes (1981, 15 min) Time Spent, Judith Goddard (1981, 12 min) TV Interruptions (7 TV Pieces), David Hall (1971, 23 min) State of Division, Mick Hartney (1978, 5 min) The Extent of Three Bells, Steve Hawley (1981, 5 min) Flow, Brian Hoey/Wendy Brown (1977, 17 min)

Disc 3:
Split Seconds, Madelon Hooykaas/ Elsa Stansfield (1979, 11 min) Clapping Songs, Tina Keane (1979, 6 min) Vanitas, Tamara Krikorian (1977, 8 min) The Heart Cycle, Mike Leggett (1973, 9 min) Mirror, Stephen Littman (1979, 5 min) Go thru the Motions, Stuart Marshall (1975, 8 min) Continuum, Chris Meigh Andrews/Gabrielle Bown (1977 5 min) 2nd and 3rd Identity, Marcelline Mori (1978, 10 min) Monitor, Stephen Partridge (1975, 6 min) Video Sketches, Clive Richardson (1972, 22 min) Drift Guitars, Tony Sinden (1975 21 min)

An autobiographical documentary, a fiction that's also an essay and an extended poetic meditation on the ability of the image to represent experience. Sarah Turner's film is a ghost story that explores what we forget and how we remember. The stunning imagery comes solely from the window of the Trans-Siberian train, shot first in 1987-8 and then again in 2007-8. The re-enactment of the journey is a memory work, a re-enactment of the past in the present through the process of filming. But the return journey is haunted by the voices of two dead friends that dominate the soundscape of the 'archive' footage. The film culminates at the haunting expanse of Lake Baikal, the deepest lake in the world.

Perestroika: Reconstructed re-mixes and extends Perestroika, into two sequences. Sequence one constitutes the 2009 version of the film, whilst the second sequence constructs a new framing narrative that reinterprets and reconfigures both the imagery and the experience of the first. Part psycho-geography, part dream and part environmental allegory, both sequences of Perestroika : Reconstructed conclude at Lake Baikal, contrasting experiences of terror and apocalypse with those of beauty and tranquility, the one contaminating the other. In this uncanny return, form stages thee through twinning the instability of memory and re-enacting that within the projective experience of cinema. This extended work delves further into ideas of momentary truth, identity, and how an uncontaminated experience of landscape is literally and metaphorically something that only exists in memory.

Publication contains DVD of Perestroika, which was released theatrically, blu-ray of Perestroika:Reconstructed, first exhibited as a gallery installation at London's Carroll/Fletcher Gallery April-May 2013, and a booklet of three essays by Elizabeth Cowie, Sophie Mayer, and Paul Newland.

This DVD includes three seminal early films: 
Key, 1968, 10 min.
Clouds, 1969, 10 min.
Room Film 1973, 1973, 55 min. 

Peter Gidal's films have been an influence on several generations of artists. An important theorist and writer as well as a filmmaker since the late 1960s, Gidal was a pioneer of 'structural-materialist' film and his work has been shown around the world, including retrospectives at the ICA in London and the Centre Pompidou, Paris. You can read more about Peter Gidal on LUX Online.

This DVD contains:
Light Reading, 1978, 20 min.
Pictures on Pink Paper, 1982, 35 min.
Cold Draft, 1988, 28 min.

Lis Rhodes has been at the forefront of British experimental filmmaking since the early 1970s. She studied at the North East London Polytechnic and the Royal College of Art. A strong formal aesthetic has been developed in her films, reflecting her involvement with the debates and practice which emerged from the London Filmmakers' Co-operative, where she was Cinema Curator 1975-6. Early 'expanded' works such as Light Music (1975) fused performance and multi-screen projection with an exploration of the visual qualities of sound. Her analysis of broader political and social questions can be traced to her later films, which combine formal rigour with a passionate critique of issues from nuclear power to domestic violence. As an active campaigner for women's rights, Rhodes was a founder member of Circles, the first women's artist film and video (1979) and was an Arts Advisor to the Greater London Council between 1982 and 1985. She lives and works in London and teaches at Slade School of Fine Art, University College, London.

Robida is a situated, multilingual cultural magazine published by Robida collective. Each issue explores a topic connected and generated by Topolò/Topolove, the village on the border between Italy and Slovenia where the collective is based.

The chosen topic is thrown into the world and interpreted by people who have never been to Topolò. What people send back after the open call is not only a contribution to the exploration of a defined theme but also a new interpretational tool to explore the collective’s relation to Topolò.

The tenth issue of Robida magazine, which celebrated its tenth year of existence, is made of correspondences, conversations, interviews and letter exchanges where the magazine becomes the pretext to establish new relationships or deepen existing ones. While writing and other creative activities can often be solitary endeavours, this year, Robida’s core purpose was decidedly tangible and hands-on: to go out there and talk, discuss, meet, write to each other, organise and create — together.

The issue contains correspondences about, among other things, fire, bread, dreams, wild tongues, public space, local architecture, community gardens, reading practices, sky, bees, postcards, type design, resistance, be-longings, regenerative agriculture, coding, radical equality and more.

〰️

CONTRIBUTORS
Adele Dipasquale ↔︎ Madison Bycroft, Alice Alloggio ↔︎ Alia Mascia, Antônio Frederico Lasalvia ↔︎ Cécile Malaspina, Anya Jasbar ↔︎ Chris Rocchegiani
Caterina Santullo ↔︎ Neva Zidić, Lukas Horn, Chiara Pavolucci ↔︎ Enrico Malatesta, Else/Xun ↔︎ Ahed Al Kathiri, Emma Verhoeven, Erika Mayr ↔︎ Aljaž Škrlep, Erin Honeycutt ↔︎ Priyam Goswami Choudhury, Tara Habibzadeh, Eva Garibaldi ↔︎ Eva Bevec, Gaja Pegan-Nahtigal, Ana Laura Richter, Lea Topolovec, Francesca Lucchitta ↔︎ Teo Giovanni Poggi
Garance Maurer ↔︎ Elise Boutié, Tonì Casalonga, Alice Cuenot, Daniel Parnitzke, Club de Bridge, Alona Rodeh, Giorgia Maurovich, Giulia Soldati ↔︎ Eline Ex, Suzanne Bernhardt, Agnese Podgornik, Salvatore Ceccarelli, Alysha Aggarwal, Ingeborg van Houwelingen, Sara Vande Velde, Sasha van Aalst, Greta Biondi ↔︎ Vittoria Rubini, Hannah Segerkrantz ↔︎ Mia Tamme
How Melnyczuk, Janja Šušnjar ↔︎ Marjetica Potrč, Karin K. Bühler ↔︎ Raimundas Malašauskas, Kim Kleinert ↔︎ Polina Lobanova, Kirsten Spruit ↔︎ Benjamin Earl, Lalie Thébault Maviel, Laura Cull Ó Maoilearca ↔︎ Rajni Shah, Linsey Rendell ↔︎ Gemma Copeland, LinYee Yuan, Madeleine Reinhart ↔︎ Greta Veresani, Michael Minnis ↔︎ Áine Nic Giolla Coda, Nai-Syuan Ye ↔︎ Merle Findhammer, Nolwenn Vuillier, Ola Korbańska, Ola Lewczyk, Paula König ↔︎ Aida Fernandes, Rachele Daminelli, Rita Gaspar ↔︎ Shams, Rossella Famiglietti ↔︎ Rocco Pisilli, Giuseppe Defilippis, Daniele Pirozzi, Alessandro Bosco, Sarah Marlene Sammito ↔︎ Rūta Žemčugovaitė, Leonardo Sammito, Soph Boobyer ↔︎ Annie Box, Sophie Mak-Schram ↔︎ Katherine Marie Agard, Esyllt Angharad Lewis, Vida Rucli, Alejandra Santillana Ortiz, Jeanne van Heeswijk, Tadej Urh ↔︎ Eva Bevec, Teresa Frausin ↔︎ Anne Kaivo-oja, Vida Rucli ↔︎ Donatella Ruttar, Yiannis I. Andronikidis ↔︎ Mojca Radkovič

The latest in writer and visual artist Renee Gladman's ever-expanding body of imaginative investigation is a sui generis novel of queerness and art-making, philosophy and sex. 

The narrator of My Lesbian Novel is Renee Gladman, an artist and writer who has produced the same acclaimed body of experimental art and prose as real-life Renee Gladman, and who is now being interviewed by an unnamed interlocutor about a project in process, a seeming departure from her other works, a lesbian romance. 

Between reflections on art making and on the genre of lesbian romance - "though aspects of the formula drive me crazy... people who write these stories understand how beautiful women are" - a romance novel of her own takes shape on the page, written alongside the interview, which sometimes skips whole years between questions, so that time and aging become part of the process. 

The result is a beautifully orchestrated dialogue between reflection and desire, or clarity and confusion, between the pleasures of form and the pleasures of freedom in the unspooling of sentences over time.

Renee Gladman is a writer and artist preoccupied with crossings, thresholds, and geographies as they play out at the intersections of poetry, prose, drawing, and architecture. She is the author of fourteen published works, including a cycle of novels about the city-state Ravicka and its inhabitants, the Ravickians, all published by Dorothy-- Event Factory, The Ravickians, Ana Patova Crosses a Bridge, and Houses of Ravicka. She has been awarded fellowships, artist grants, and residencies from the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard, Foundation for Contemporary Arts, the Lannan Foundation, and KW Institute for Contemporary Art (Berlin), and was a 2021 Windham-Campbell Prize winner in fiction. She makes her home in New England with poet-ceremonialist Danielle Vogel.

Sagawa Chika Translations, Anti-Translations, & Originals

Ten poems by Sagawa Chika are conveyed into English and other languages through a variety of translation techniques and procedures, some of them producing multilingual poems. Languages used include English, Japanese, French, Spanish, Chinese.

"Mouth: Eats Color is a brilliant infra-textual work, brainchild of the bi-cultural poet/translator Sawako Nakayasu. The collection provokes, expands, and disavows the parameters of language and person and tradition, to forge a beautiful weave of performance and interrogation. This is a project of multilingual wit and passion, echo upon echo upon echo." — Anne Waldman

Sawako Nakayasu is an artist working with language, performance, and translation – separately and in various combinations. She has lived mostly in the US and Japan, briefly in France and China, and translates from Japanese. Her books include Some Girls Walk Into The Country They Are From (Wave Books), Pink Waves (forthcoming, Omnidawn), The Ants (Les Figues Press), Texture Notes (Letter Machine Editions), and the translation of The Collected Poems of Chika Sagawa (Penguin Random House), as well as Mouth: Eats Color – Sagawa Chika Translations, Anti-translations, & Originals (Rogue Factorial), a multilingual work of both original and translated poetry. She is co-editor, with Eric Selland, of an anthology of 20th Century Japanese Poetry (forthcoming, New Directions). She teaches at Brown University in the Department of Literary Arts.

Much in our life at this moment is often marked by an absence of clarity. Many have experienced a malaise and come to know its persistence. We seem to have become used to stasis and theoretical discussions, lingering in silence and hoping from time to time for something extraordinary to happen. Yet it might also have been a blessing; an opportunity to free ourselves from overarching narratives, to direct our attention to the individual, the local, and to subjects that have long been part of our own lives—a more agile, intuitive mindset.

The third issue of te magazine took shape in this context, and chose to confront experiences of “plight”—plight of the persecuted, of the artists, of the forgotten, and of those living with colonial legacies. How might we, as individuals, transmute plights in order to learn to live in this world? If each piece in this issue can be said to propose a mode of healing, the aim is not only about specific pathologies, but rather to recommend adjustments and defenses in moments of crisis. While writing on the plights of others, the authors also look inward for the roots of questions that they have long harbored about their own experiences. As introduced by Jacques Lacan, the theory of “the mirror stage” refers to children's initial awareness of their own existence. As adults, we continue to grapple with the process of self-discovery and understanding, at times feeling trapped deeply in the “mirror.”

This issue’s theme, Mirroring represents a continuous exploration of the self. On the one hand, these pieces document the processes of setbacks, negating, questioning and reconciling; on the other, delineate the self through the other, a process discernible in several jointly-authored pieces in this issue, where a special connection and sense of fellowship formed through dialogue, correspondence, and collaborative research. In Siddhartha, Hermann Hesse described how the protagonist's worldview was shaped through seeking and struggle, and we hear in it an echo of the inspiration behind this issue of te: “But now, his liberated eyes stayed on this side, he saw and became aware of the visible, sought to be at home in this world, did not search for the true essence, did not aim at a world beyond.” (Siddhartha by H. Hesse, translated by Hilda Rosner, Bantam Books,1971)

Contributors:  Guadalupe Maravilla, Lucía Hinojosa Gaxiola, Kader Attia, Gantala Press, Peng Jen-Yu, An Mengzhu, Chang Yuchen, Chris Zhongtian Yuan, Chu Yun, Chen Zhe, Lieko Shiga

Sore is a serial anthology that brings together authors whose writing practices oscillate between the genres of diary keeping and fiction. For the second issue of Sore, ten contributors – both authors and visual artists – were invited to collectively develop their work through a series of informal critiques over the course of five months.

In the first issue of Sore, observations of everyday life intertwined with memories and cultural references to denote the significance of a certain soreness we each carry within us as we negotiate the various challenges of social existence. In this second ensemble, seven new authors widen our understanding of the term ‘sore’ by underlining a need to orient one’s gaze towards what’s hidden underneath, to enter the anatomy of all these necessary contortions and u-turns one performs in order to escape the grip of expected compliance.

With contributions from: Mathilde Heuliez, Lisa Lagova, Muyeong Kim, Nour Ben Saïd, Masha Ryabova, Adrienne Chung, Richard Dmitri Hees, Oscar Le Merle, Morra Kozlitina, Tindra Eliason, Helmer Stuyt, Ilya Stasevich, Kristina Stallvik.

Episodic and picaresque, Fanny Howe's novella What Did I Do Wrong? tells the story of a revolutionary mutt's journey through the kennels, parks, and suburban waste spaces around Boston in search of true freedom. This dog offers a firsthand account of the cruelty meted out to both animals and forgotten members of human society. Like The Golden Ass, What Did I Do Wrong? takes on moral and spiritual questions without abandoning earthly appetites. In a twist on the fabulous tradition established by Apuleius, we are urged not to maintain our humanity but rather to look for the dog within.

Illustrated by Colleen McCallion.

Largely set in Boston, Fanny Howe's Economics examines with an unwavering eye the necessary errors of the 1960s liberalism and consequences of cold war politics. A white liberal couple adopts a black child with troubling results; two old friends from the Kennedy campaign meet years later to discover how different their lives have become; a separated working-class couple drives to the Cape in order to collect the prize from an instant lotto game. In each story, love is eroded by class expectations and financial pressures, by racial tensions and ideological hypocrisies. As a result Economics offers a raw portrait of the last three decades that is at once comic and devastating.

Hole Studies is a book about care and the forms it may take. An essay collection on writing and labor, art and activism, attention as a transformative practice, difference and collaboration, adjuncting and the margins of the academy, whiteness and its weapons, professionalization and its discontents, the radical importance of surprise, friendship at work, the self and its public and private modes: Hole Studies keeps listening.

What is it we need from each other? What could we still make happen? This book looks for forms of responsiveness and moments that matter. It honors everyday acts of thinking and trying. Essays explore the music of the Swet Shop Boys, the literature of the US’s brutal war in Iraq, the career of Sinéad O’Connor, the aesthetics of the Dirtbag Left, the legacies of the “war on terror,” feminism on the job, and illness in America. Hole Studies is an intimate document and a critical guide. Hole Studies would like to work for you.

If Montaigne returned today as a feminist and Sontag a poet, they might have together crafted an essay collection as astonishing as Hilary Plum’s Hole Studies. Plum rigorously examines her many subjects (from a history journal’s MLA citations to Sinéad O’Connor’s infamous televised protest) and then rigorously interrogates her examinations. Each page holds more brilliance and artistry than should be possible. Hole Studies is an exciting read and a conceptual achievement, and Plum is one of the best American essayists around. — Jeannie Vanasco

The publication If You Don’t Believe in Yourself, Someone Else Should is between a monograph and an artist book with a text by Florentine Rungrama Muhry and a conversation between Anna Schachinger and the artist. Together with the graphic designer Alexandra Möllner, they developed a book concept that makes the various strands, the instinctive, methodical and processual working methods as much as the joyful experimental approaches in Katharina Höglinger's work tangible and entertaining.

"The image pulsates with alternating contrasts of light and dark. A sweeping, purple- coloured line unites a human countenance in half profile with the little head of a blue dog. Red strokes in the middle of the canvas, perhaps the arms of an animal-like being, reach into the widened eyes of the one facing it. Expressing its pleasure, the lively creature cheekily sticks its tongue out of its mouth, while the facial expression of the person remains indifferent, in spite of the affront."

(Excerpt from the text "Wandering Thoughts" by Florentine Rungrama Muhry, Translation: Miriam Stoney)

Juice is Renee Gladman's first full-length book. Gladman wields an idiosyncratic skill with description and characters that draw praise and attention from her contemporaries. Juice describes a world where seemingly minor obsessions and details (like the narrator's almost random preference for juice) can structure and develop an entire story, down to its tone and style. As her narrator puts it: "So far it has been sex and leaves that keep me alive."

TIME by Spencer Longo is a collection of printed work depicting government raids, religious visions, environmental catastrophe, and extremist fundamentalism tangled together in a narrative web of salvation, annihilation, and transcendence. Using pen plotter graphics directly on uncollated pages of Time magazine, Longo explores the conspiratorial trope that messages are secretly embedded in mass media, coaxing our millenarian anxieties out through an additive printing process using graphics from survivalist publications, end-times evangelical cartoons, and marginalia from the borders of underground occult material, all sprinkled with ecstatic bursts of star-spangled clipart. A must-have for your fallout shelter's library.

In What’s the Use? Sara Ahmed continues the work she began in The Promise of Happiness and Willful Subjects by taking up a single word—in this case, use—and following it around. She shows how use became associated with life and strength in nineteenth-century biological and social thought and considers how utilitarianism offered a set of educational techniques for shaping individuals by directing them toward useful ends.

Ahmed also explores how spaces become restricted to some uses and users, with specific reference to universities. She notes, however, the potential for queer use: how things can be used in ways that were not intended or by those for whom they were not intended. Ahmed posits queer use as a way of reanimating the project of diversity work as the ordinary and painstaking task of opening up institutions to those who have historically been excluded.

To Become Two: Propositions for Feminist Collective Practice offers a narrative of artist Alex Martinis Roe’s research into a genealogy of feminist political practices in Europe and Australia from the seventies until today.

These practices include those of the Milan Women’s Bookstore co-operative; Psychanalyse et Politique, Paris; Gender Studies (formerly Women’s Studies) at Utrecht University; a network in Sydney including people involved in the Sydney Filmmakers Co-operative, Feminist Film Workers, Working Papers Collective, and the Department of General Philosophy at Sydney University; and Duoda – Women’s Research Centre and Ca la Dona, a women’s documentation centre and encounter space in Barcelona.

Drawing from their practices and experiences, Martinis Roe’s research forms a proposal for a transgenerational approach to feminist politics. This is further developed as a practical handbook of twenty new propositions for feminist collective practice, which were formed in collaboration with a network of contributors through experiments with these historical practices.

The first comprehensive publication of the Swedish polymath Catherine Christer Hennix's written work in a two-volume set.

Volume one, Poësy Matters, is divided into two sections: poetry and drama, with each section also containing pieces of commentary by Hennix or her longtime collaborator Henry Flynt. Volume two, Other Matters, is divided into two sections: first, program notes and essays about a wide range of topics (including music, psychoanalysis, and mathematics), and second, a reproduction of Hennix's 1989 work The Yellow Book. The first comprehensive publication of Hennix's written work, Poësy Matters and Other Matters illustrates the singular depth and variety of her contributions to contemporary music, art, literature, and mathematics.

The texts in Poësy Matters and Other Matters reflect Hennix's diverse training as well as her long-standing personal interests in Lacanian psychoanalysis and Japanese and Middle Eastern poetic forms, resulting in a rich, diffuse collection of writings that reveal one of the avant-garde's most implacable, not to mention overlooked, creative minds.

Best known as a composer, Catherine Christer Hennix (1948, Stockholm – 2023, Istanbul) has, throughout her fifty-plus-year career, produced innovative work in the fields of not just minimal and computer music, but psychoanalytic theory, intuitionist mathematics, poetry, and prose as well. 

Edited and introduced by Lawrence Kumpf.

English edition
17 x 24 cm (2 individual books, packaged together)
311 + 448 pages (ill.)

A contemplation on the abstruse nature of machine learning, mathematics, and the deep incursion of racial hierarchy.

This book aims to introduce the history of statistical analysis and a knowledge of sociogenesis—a system of racism amenable to scientific explanation—into machine learning research as an act of impairing the racial ordering of the world. While machine learning—computer programming designed for taxonomic patterning—provides useful insight into racism and racist behavior, a gap is present in the relationship between machine learning, the racial history of scientific explanation, and the Black lived experience. Ramon Amaro explores how the history of data and statistical analysis provide a clear (and often sudden) grasp of the complex relationship between race and machine learning. Amaro juxtaposes a practical analysis of machine learning with a theory of Black alienation in order to inspire alternative approaches to contemporary algorithmic practice. In doing so, Amaro offers a continuous contemplation on the abstruse nature of machine learning, mathematics, and the deep incursion of racial hierarchy.

Ramon Amaro is Lecturer in Art and Visual Cultures of the Global South at University College London. His writing, research and practice emerge at the intersections of Black Study, psychopathology, digital culture, and the critique of computation reason.

In March 2020, Sora Y. Han learned her father was dying of cancer just as the COVID-19 pandemic arrived on California's shores. These two events led Han to introspection: “Who have I been writing to?” and “Who have I been writing for?” In her observance of the 49 days of mourning in Buddhist tradition, answers come in the form of mu – no thing, nothingness.

Han’s poetic meditations on freedom struggle come alive in the empty spaces between words, letters, and pictograms spanning her many languages—English, Korean, Chinese, jazz, law, and poetry.

Transliterating and dystranslating the writings of Fred Moten, Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, Jacques Lacan, Frantz Fanon, and others through the Korean alphabet, Han weaves the DMZ, Betty’s Case, the Thirteenth Amendment, Afro-pessimism, and psychoanalytic desire together into the open field of Bay Area radicalism. Mu is both a loving homage to and a playful subversion of political inheritances and the unsayable beyond law.

What words made this world of captivity and extinction? If written language is a biological adaptation, how can a text reshape the environment? These are the questions at the heart of Grammar of the Cage, a startling first collection of poetry by Pam Ore. The Compulsive Reader calls Ore "a poet of great promise," and poet Eloise Klein Healy says she has found Ore's book "haunting but necessary...a stunning debut collection."

Grammar of the Cage is clean and heartbreaking as a bone, and yet, as poet Ingrid Wendt writes in her Introduction, "[like] Emily Dickinson, Ore's 'business' is 'to sing.' And sing she does."

This publication is a collection of poems written through a method called Transtexting. Transtexting explores the body’s implication in poetic production positioning the body and its movement as a listening aid, acting as a filter; a net capturing words, syntax and sounds.

In this third Why I Write volume, Eileen Myles addresses the social, political, and aesthetic conditions that shape their work.

In this raucous meditation, Eileen Myles offers an intimate glimpse into creativity's immediacy. With erudition and wit, Myles recounts their early years as an awakening writer; existential struggles with landlords; storied moments with neighbors, friends, and lovers; and the textures and identities of cities and the country that reveal the nature of writing as presence in time.  

For Myles, time's "optic quality" is what enables writing in the first place, as attention, as devotion, as excess. It is this chronologized vision that enables the writer to love the world as it presently is, lending love a linguistic permanence amid social and political systems that threaten to eradicate it. Irreverent, generous, and always insightful, For Now is a candid record of the creative process from one of our most beloved artists.

Paperback edition - 2021.

One of America's most historic political trials is undoubtedly that of Angela Davis. Opening with a letter from James Baldwin to Davis, and including contributions from numerous radicals such as Black Panthers George Jackson, Huey P. Newton, Bobby Seale and Erica Huggins, this book is not only an account of Davis's incarceration and the struggles surrounding it, but also perhaps the most comprehensive and thorough analysis of the prison system of the United State.  

Since the book was written, the carceral system in the US has seen unprecedented growth, with more of America's black population behind bars than ever before. The scathing analysis of the role of prison and the policing of black populations offered by Davis and her comrades in this astonishing volume remains as pertinent today as the day it was first published.  

Featuring contributions from George Jackson, Bettina Aptheker, Bobby Seale, James Baldwin, Ruchell Magee, Julian Bond, Huey P. Newton, Erika Huggins, Fleeta Drumgo, John Clutchette, and others.

Emil Lime collects various materials that nurture and give shape to Esther Gatón’s artistic practice, including collages made with her phone pics, sketches, sporadic notes and drawings, together with the writing of authors that have been influential on the work: Fredy Massad, María Fernanda Ampuero, Darya Diamond and Cory John. 

Violence is arrayed against us because we’re Black, or female, or queer, or undocumented. There is no rescue team coming for us. With that knowledge, we need a different operational base to recreate the world. It is not going to be a celebrity savior. Never was, never will be. If you’re in a religious tradition that is millennia-old, consider how the last savior went out. It was always going to be bloody. It was always going to be traumatic. But there’s a beauty to facing the reality of our lives. Not our lives as they’re broken apart, written about, and then sold back to us in academic or celebrity discourse. But our lives as we understand them. The most important thing is showing up. Showing up and learning how to live by and with others, learning how to reinvent ourselves in this increasing wasteland. That’s the good life.

Foreword by Da’Shaun L. Harrison.
Afterword by Mumia Abu-Jamal.

"Joy James’s Revolutionary Love is umph-degree love; or love beyond measure. It is anything love. It is love without reckoning. It is love that dares all things, beyond which others may find the spirit-force to survive; to live to fight another day. Such love is also fighting itself, for the sake of ensuring that others may live." — Mumia Abu-Jamal