Alien Daughters Walk Into the Sun: An Almanac of Extreme Girlhood

Composed of stories, fragmentary essays, and even press releases Stagg has been commissioned to write, Artless captures the media landscape lived and generated in New York during the past half decade. Since the 2016 publication of her debut novel Surveys, Stagg has positioned herself as an in-demand expert on, and critic of, the psychic experience of self-mythology within the cruelly optimistic metaverse of infinite branding. Part voyeur and part participant, Stagg continues her exploration of the branded identity and its elusive, bottomless desire for authenticity.

Natasha Stagg is the author of a novel, Surveys, and a collection, Sleeveless: Fashion, Image, Media, New York 2011-2019. Her essays have appeared in the books Excellences and Perfections, Link in Bio: Art After Social Media, You Had To Be There: Rape Jokes, Intersubjectivity Vol. II: Scripting the Human, and 9th Berlin Biennale for Contemporary Art: The Present in Drag, among others.

A spiritual homage to Bernadette Mayer's monumental artwork of the same title, Dorothea Lasky's Memory is a cycle of "poet's essays" stirred by two profound questions. What constitutes personhood and consciousness? What memories get lost, and why?

Expansive in her quest for answers, Lasky launches an inspired investigation of the forces that form our lives and deepest senses of ourselves. She identifies three dimensions of memory—ancestral, personal, and poetic—and in her singularly clear voice, undertakes to enter into their mysteries. From those recesses, she returns with a wide-ranging collection of essays that like lyric poems find the universal inside the particular. Memory reflects on the banal; private emotions and historical trauma; dear departed poets (Diane di Prima, Lucie Brock-Broido); her father's battle with Alzheimer's; and cultural events that have become charged sites of collective reminiscence (the moon landing, the music of Neutral Milk Hotel). Other pieces face the flip side of memory, asking what's left where memory is absent, and what's "real" beyond the horizon of death. The book closes with "Time, the Rose, and the Moon," an ars poetica published here in English for the first time, which offers the ancient symbol of the Ouroboros as a figure for the nonlinear processes of time, memory, and art.

Like Mayer before her, Lasky reveals memory to be huge and haunting, as she accumulates impressions that challenge the very possibility of fixed meaning. "Every rose has the scent of death," she writes. "And poetry is a perfume. That will stay on your body forever.... Whatever happens this time around, remember that."

Dorothea Lasky is the author of six full-length collections of poetry, including, most recently, The Shining (2023). She is also the author of the prose book Animal (2019) and a forthcoming book about Sappho, as well as the editor of Essays (2023) and a coeditor of Open the Door: How to Excite Young People About Poetry (2013). Her writing has appeared in POETRY, The New Yorker, The Paris Review, The Atlantic, and Boston Review, among other places.

Leash extends the logic of S&M to its inexorable and startling conclusion, darkly and hilariously revealing the masochistic impulse as the urge to disappear from the chores, obligations, and emotional vacuity of daily life.

No more jobs, no more taxes, no more checkbook, no more bills, no more credit cards, no more credit, no more money, no more mortgages, no more rent, no more savings, no more junk mail, no more junk, no more mail, no more phones, no more faxes, no more busy signals, no more computers, no more cars, no more drivers' licenses, no more traffic lights, no more airports, no more flying, no more tickets, no more packing, no more luggage, no more supermarkets, no more health clubs... While her current spends the summer researching public housing in Stockholm, a moderately wealthy, object-oppressed, and terminally hip New York female of a certain age seeks adventure in the sedate dyke bars of lower Manhattan. Finding none, she answers a personal ad. She is ordered to put on a blindfold before the first meeting with the woman she knows only as Sir. Not knowing what someone looks like turns out to be freeing, as do the escalating constraints that alienate her not just from her former life, but from her very conception of who she is. Part Georges Bataille, part Fran Leibowitz, this is the Story of O told with a self-referentially perverse sense of humor.

Throughout the 1980s and 1990s, Reynaldo Rivera took personal photos of the Los Angeles that he lived in and knew: a world of cheap rent, house parties, subversive fashion, underground bands, and a handful of Latino gay and transvestite bars: Mugi’s, The Silverlake Lounge, and La Plaza. Most of these bars are long closed and many of the performers have died. But in Rivera’s photographs, these men and women live on in a silvery landscape of makeshift old-style cinematic glamour, a fabulous flight from unacceptable reality. 

As a teenager, Rivera took refuge in used bookstores and thrift stores, where he discovered old  photo books of Mexican film stars and the work of Lisette Model, Brassai, and Bresson. Inspired, he bought a camera and began  photographing people at his hotel. In 1981 he moved to Echo Park and began taking photos for the LA Weekly. 

This book is an ensemble of almost 200 images selected by Hedi El Kholti and Lauren Mackler spanning more than two decades in Los Angeles and Mexico. The  book also includes Luis Bauz’s story, “Tatiana,” about one of the  subjects of these photographs; a critical essay on Rivera’s work by Chris Kraus; and a novella-length conversation between Rivera and his  friend and contemporary Vaginal Davis about their lives, work, fantasies, and collective histories.

Edited by Hedi El Kholti and Lauren Mackler
With Luis Bauz, Vaginal Davis and Chris Kraus

Poet, writer, and translator Cecilia Pavón emerged in the late 1990s as one of the most prolific and central figures of the young Argentine literary scene—the so-called “Generation of the 90s”: artists and writers whose aesthetics and politics were an earnest response to the disastrous impact of American-exported neoliberal policies and the resulting economic crisis of 2001. Their publications were fragile—xeroxed, painted on cardboard—but their cultural impact, indelible.

A cofounder of Buenos Aires’s independent art space and publishing press Belleza y Felicidad—where a whole generation of soon-to-be-famous Argentine artists showed their work for the first time—Pavón pioneered the use of “unpoetic” and intimate content—her verses often lifted from text messages or chat rooms, her tone often impish, yet brutally sincere.

In 2015, Pavón’s first volume of collected poems, ‘A Hotel with My Name’, was published in English. Contemporary writers in the United States, Australasia, and Europe discovered a deep affinity with her work. Pavón’s protagonists, Ariana Reines noted, “are absolute women, guileless dreamers, saints in sneakers, on sidewalks, in jail, in Zara, on buses, in nightclubs, in bed.”

Translated by Pavón’s own poetic protégé Jacob Steinberg, ‘Little Joy’ collects the best of Pavón’s short stories written between 1999-2020, originally published in three volumes in Spanish.

Jackie Wang's magnetic and spellbinding debut collection of poetry that attempts to speak in the language of dreams.

The poems in The Sunflower Cast A Spell To Save Us From The Void read like dispatches from the dream world, with Jackie Wang acting as our trusted comrade reporting across time and space. By sharing her personal index of dreams with its scenes of solidarity and resilience, interpersonal conflict and outlaw jouissance, Wang embodies historical trauma and communal memory. Here, the all-too-familiar interplay between crisis and resistance becomes first distorted, then clarified and refreshed. With a light touch and invigorating sense of humor, Wang illustrates the social dimension of dreams and their ability to inform and reshape the dreamer's waking world with renewed energy and insight.

Jackie Wang is a student of the dream state, black studies scholar, prison abolitionist, poet, performer, library rat, trauma monster and PhD candidate in the Department of African and African American Studies at Harvard University, specializing in race and the political economy of prisons and police in the United States. She is the author of a number of punk zines including On Being Hard Femme, as well as a collection of dream poems titled Tiny Spelunker of the Oneiro-Womb. In 2018 she published a book, titled Carceral Capitalism on the racial, economic, political, legal, and technological dimensions of the US carceral state. She is currently an Arleen Carlson and Edna Nelson Graduate Fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study.

Ethical Portraits investigates the representation of the incarcerated in the U.S. criminal justice system. Through interviews, creative non-fiction, and cultural theory, Hatty Nestor deconstructs a range of different prison portraiture.

Prisons systematically dehumanise the imprisoned. Visualised through mugshots and surveillance recordings, the incarcerated lose control of their own image and identity. The criminal justice system in the United States does not only carry out so-called justice in ways that compound inequality, it also minimises the possibility for empathetic encounters with those who are most marginalised. It is therefore urgent to understand how prisoners are portrayed by the carceral state and how this might be countered or recuperated. How can understanding the visual representation of prisoners help us confront the invisible forms of power in the American prison system? Ethical Portraits investigates the representation of the incarcerated in the United States criminal justice system, and the state's failure to represent those incarcerated humanely.

Through wide-ranging interviews and creative nonfiction, Hatty Nestor deconstructs the different roles of prison portraiture, such as in courtroom sketches, DNA profiling, and the incarceration of Chelsea Manning. Includes a foreword by Jackie Wang.

Hatty Nestor is a cultural critic and writer, published in Frieze, The Times Literary Supplement, The White Review and many other publications. She is currently completing a PhD at Birkbeck, University of London.

Rip It Up is the first ever English translation of Kou Machida's award-winning novel, an undertaking over five years in the making and the inaugural title of Inpatient Press's new translation imprint Mercurial Editions.

Set in a kaleidoscopic hyperreal Japan circa Y2K, Rip It Up catalogues the misdeeds and misgivings of a down-and-out wannabe debonair who ekes out a meager living at the fringes of the art world, wracked by jealousy at his friend's success and despondency of his own creative (and moral) bankruptcy. In turn hilarious and also horrifying, Machida's pyrotechnic prose plumbs the discursive depths of the creative spirit, a head-spinning survey of degeneration and self-sabotage.

Kou Machida is a punk singer, actor, and author, who turned to poetry and fiction after releasing one of the seminal Japanese punk albums with his band INU, 1981’s Meshi kuuna! (Fuck Eating!). He has won the Akutagawa and Tanizaki prizes among many others, and his 2005 novel Kokuhaku (Confession) was named one of the three best books of the last thirty years by the Asahi Newspaper.

Daniel Joseph is a translator, editor, and musician who spent his salad days shouting in dank basements before getting a master’s degree in medieval Japanese literature. Recent translation projects include contributions to Terminal Boredom (Verso, 2021), a collection of stories by science fiction pioneer Izumi Suzuki; and the memoir Try Saying You’re Alive! (Blank Forms, 2021) by outsider folk maniac Kazuki Tomokawa.

Winner of the 2000 Akutagawa Prize for Fiction