Beginnings

les petites histoires sont quatre courtes fictions contemporaines. Entre le lonely langoureux New York des années deux mille, le pont poétique et capricieux de Louis 2 de Bavière, l'histoire vraie de Sandy Stone dans les seventies et la satire cinglante et drôle d'une galerie d'art, ces livres sont de brefs univers vivants et curieux.

En 2025, quatre petites histoires sont racontées par quatre auteurices dans quatre livres : L'effondrement du pont de Sam Bouffandeau ; The Gallery de S. M. Drogo ; Exit de Juli Le Nahelec; «Que faire de Sandy Stone?» de Mia Trabalon.

L'édition des petites histoires a été imaginée par Élise Comte, Chloé Delchini, Perrine Estienne, Gabriel René Franjou, Justine Gensse, Bastien Hauser, et Cyprien Muth. Ce collectif d'éditeurices est né à Bruxelles, où les petites histoires ont été imprimées, chez Graphius. 
La maquette, réalisée par Chloé Delchini, à été composée avec Otto, une typographie dessinée par Sam de Groot et Laura Opsomer Mironov, chez Dinamo Typefaces.

New Ancient Words is the first translation of Ellen Lima Wassu's poetry into English. A trilingual edition between her native Tupi indigenous language of the land of Pindorama, now Brazil, Portuguese, and English, this collection offers a wider readership her resistant yet intimate poetry, which flows seamlessly between her relational woes, a decolonial voice, and an animated playfulness with words and imagery. In her poems, history is an unstable landscape, where the personal, the mythical, and the natural are ever entwined and ever shifting in meaning.

Ellen Lima Wassu is a multiartist, freshwater fish, perplexed human, apartment gardener, and more beast than person. Born in Rio de Janeiro, she is Indigenous to the Wassu Cocal people (Alagoas, Brazil) and currently lives in Portugal, where she is pursuing a PhD, developing artistic practices, teaching courses, giving lectures, and working as an activist. In addition to contributing to literary magazines and anthologies, she has published ybykûatiara um livro de terra (Urutau, 2023) and ixé ygara voltando pra ’y’kûá (Urutau, 2021). Her practice weaves together art, poetry, performance, activism, critique, counter-colonial studies, essayistic writing, good encounters, river baths, listening sessions, and conversations with flowers.

Translation by Isadora Neves Marques and Alice dos Reis, revised by Marta Espiridião

A widowed writer begins to work on a biography of a novelist and artist—and soon uncovers bizarre parallels between her life and her subject’s—in this chilling and singularly strange novella by a contemporary master of horror and fantasy.

The narrator of Lisa Tuttle’s uncanny novella is a recent widow, a writer adrift. Not only has she lost her husband, but her muse seems to have deserted her altogether. Her agent summons her to Edinburgh to discuss her next book. What will she tell him? At once the answer comes to she will write the biography of Helen Ralston, best known, if at all, as the subject of W.E. Logan’s much-reproduced painting Circe , and the inspiration for his classic children’s book.

But Ralston was a novelist and artist in her own right, though her writing is no longer in print and her most storied painting too shocking, too powerful—malevolent even—to be shown in public. Over the months that follow, Ralston proves a reluctantly cooperative subject, even as her biographer uncovers eerie resonances between the older woman’s life and her own. Whose biography is she writing, really?

A self-taught typographic letterer, Chrystel Crickx used to cut out letters by hand and sell them by the piece in her Publi Fluor shop in Schaerbeek, Belgium. Commercialized between 1975 and 2000 for local advertising and signage purposes, these letters have since been digitized and made more widely available to users outside of the Belgian borders and in other contexts. At the margins of standard means of communication, they have contributed to shape (and still do) the urban visual landscape, in Brussels and elsewhere.

This non-standard, collective essay attempts both to recount the life of a type model — as well as of its successive authors and their tools — while expanding the field of investigation to examine the cracks between the different stories summoned up by Chrystel Crickx's practice summons up.

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

The early writings of renowned poet and critical theorist Jackie Wang, drawn from her early zines, indie-lit crit, and prolific early 2000s blog. 

Compiled as a field guide, travelogue, essay collection, and weather report, Alien Daughters Walk into the Sun traces Jackie Wang's trajectory from hard femme to Harvard, from dumpster dives and highway bike rides to dropping out of an MFA program, becoming a National Book Award finalist, and writing her trenchant book Carceral Capitalism. Alien Daughters charts the dream-seeking misadventures of an "odd girl" from Florida who emerged from punk houses and early Tumblr to become the powerful writer she is today. Anarchic and beautifully personal, Alien Daughters is a strange intellectual autobiography that demonstrates Wang's singular self-education: an early life lived where every day and every written word began like the Tarot's Fool, with a leap of faith.

4SPIKE & howawfulallanis, Alex Less, Alice Royer, Alligataure, Amelie Clicquot, Anjol, Arañada, Axel Fievet , Axelle Bourguignon, Baron & Tosma, Charlie Cooper, Charlotte Sallan Gémard, Délora Abbal, Elliott Sanchez, Erimoczi, femo, Fleur Douglas, Gaia Bergelin & Inès Camrla, Justine Bouvet, Kara, Kiara Patry, Lilian Magardeau & Elisa Grondin, Loreleï, Lucile Moreau, Manon Souza, Marie Martin Design, Mira, Migraine, Nathan Peron, Nathanael Brelin, Nomaison, Ema Tomas, Othilie Jourde Ledoux, Piquico , Rémy Bellariva, Séraphin Degroote Ferrera et Arthur Diguet, Syan Fischer, Tanikawa Sari, Vanessa Kintzel, Virginie Contier, Viviane Le Borgne, Zoé Vincent.