Dust

Desiderata is a collection of Lizzy Mercier Descloux's poetry, photos, and diaristic fragments from her visit to New York City in the winter of 1977. Only eighteen at the time, Descloux fell into the orbits of the nascent No Wave scene festering in Lower Manhattan, where she befriended Richard Hell, Patti Smith, and ZE Records founder Michel Esteban. Desideratacharts the musician's early ambitions as a writer, revealing a potent poetic voice that careens from acid-tinged social observations to outright Dadaist semantic revelry, interspersed with collages and hand-written notes. Originally composed entirely in French, this is the first time these works have ever appeared in English and this edition includes the original French facsimile bound tête-bêche with the new English translation.

Martine-Elisabeth "Lizzy" Mercier Descloux (16 December 1956 – 20 April 2004) was a French musician, singer-songwriter, composer, actress, writer and painter. She collaborated with a wide range of musicians including Wally Badarou and Chet Baker.

Emma Ramadan was initiated into the mystery of Bastet at the age of thirteen and rose to the station of High Scioness. After leaving the temple she hopped freight across the Maghreb, where she began translating esoterica carved into the boxcar walls. She has independently discovered numerous uncatalogued cave systems and varietals of nightshade tea. Her name appears on the underside of stones and in various magazines whose pages seem to turn on their own.

Translated by Emma Ramadan.
Bilingual edition: FR/ENG

A chance encounter with two older fellows at the movie theater has the young vagabond Ligie on his way to Lot-8, a trailer park down the road with an unconventional local reputation. There, Ligie meets Big Joe and his extended Lot-8-family: a tight-knit community of freaks all sectioned together by the landlord at the outskirts of town.

Weaving together colorful characters and outright carnal debauchery, BIG JOE is a radical pastoral of community, desire, and the strangeness of knowing one another.

Featuring color illustrations by Drake Carr and Sabrina Bockler.

Cover illustration by Drake Carr

Samuel R. Delany is the author of numerous books and novels, including the Nebula Award-winning Babel-17 and The Einstein Intersection, as well as Nova (now in a Library of America anthology) and Dhalgren. His 2007 novel Dark Reflections won the Stonewall Book Award. Other erotic novels include Equinox, Hogg, The Mad Man, Throu gh the Valley of the Nest of Spiders, and Shoat Rumblin. Delany was the subject of a 2007 documentary, The Polymath, by Fred Barney Taylor, and he has written a popular creative writing textbook, About Writing. He is the author of the widely taught Times Square Red/Times Square Blue and numerous books of essays; his book-length autobiographical essay, The Motion of Light in Water, won a Hugo Award in 1989. As e-books, paperbacks, or audiobooks, his works are available through his website at: www.samueldelany.com

The involuntary whispering of the dew-harvest.

A grimoire carved in scarlet, SALAMANDER'S WOOL is the inaugural full-length collection of writing by V Manuscript, amalgamating a vast array of arcane rituals into an ensorcelling poetic corpus. To read SALAMANDER'S WOOL is to consort with spirits and scry with dæmons, a linguistic alchemy which transmutes both language and reader.

V Manuscript is a poet and scriptomancer living in New York City.

In the 2090s, Earth is somehow still here. Drones and clones are big business and Henries Ickles, debonair New Los Angeles infoarchitect, wants in on the action. Metaphysical theories are put into practice, invisible art is critiqued, quasicrystals are crafted, yogurt is spilled. From diplomatic misadventures with metallic herds in RealSweden to an underwater rendezvous in the free domes of MiamiVII, Ickles, ad Infinitum is a compendium of the exuberant and the abject, a refracted hologram of the absurdities of cultural production that swerves between incisive ode and knowing lampoon.

Mark von Schlegell has been pushing the envelope with independently-published experimental fiction and theory since the 1990s. He was born in New York, moved to L.A. in 2000, and currently lives in Cologne. His first novel, Venusia (Semiotext(e), 2005) was honor's listed for the Otherwise Award in Science Fiction.

A long lost poem purportedly by Rimbaud is finally made available in English.

Referenced only in a few letters of Paul Verlaine, The Spiritual Hunt is Arthur Rimbaud's forgotten masterwork, a poem in five parts that explored the mystic philosophy that guided the young poet's heart and hand. Considered lost for years, a typewritten manuscript appeared in Paris in the late 1920s, circulating around a close-knit group of booksellers, poets, and playwrights. Yet it wasn't until 1949 that Mercure de France took the initiative to publish the unauthenticated galley and unleashed a literary controversy that shook France. Sides were drawn, with Andre Breton leading the charge of forgery, calling the work an utter hoax, and others defending it as legitimate and an essential key to understanding Rimbaud and his work. Bookstores were raided for copies, critics were skewered in journals, and tempers flared on radio and in print, but no conclusive judgement could be drawn and Mercure de France withdrew the work from publication and pulped all the copies they could find.

Now, seventy-five years after its initial imbroglio, The Spiritual Hunt is available in English for the first time with a facsimile letterpress edition of the original. Featuring Pascal Pia's original introduction along with an edifying afterword by translator Emine Ersoy.

LA Warman transforme les rayons d’un supermarché bio en boîte à fantasmes.  Des clientes frustrées aux collègues en chaleur, de la boucherie au bar à fruit, de l’orgie à la pause dej’ au booty call dans la chambre froide, chaque recoin du supermarché est propice aux expériences sexuelles de la protagoniste.

Extrait : 
« B fait une liste de choses à lécher : 
— Du 100% coton, des contenants en plastique fraîchement sortis du lave-vaisselle, tout type de marbre, de la papaye (évidemment, 
donner une pichenette aux pépins 
avec la langue), des sacs en 
plastique remplis de raisin, 
n’importe quelle feuille 
d’arbre. 
— Qu’est-ce que tu lèches 
d’autre B ? 
— Les pommes, les huîtres, 
les prunes, certains 
métaux, le pudding, le 
lait, les confettis, les vieux 
bouts de papier (...) »

Name, the third novel in Constance Debré’s acclaimed trilogy, is at once a manifesto, an ecstatic poem, and a political pamphlet. By rejecting the notion of given identity, her narrator approaches the heart of the radical emptiness that the earlier books were pursuing.

Newly single, and having recently come out as a lesbian, the narrator of Debré’s first two novels embarked on a monastic regime of exercise, sex, and writing. Using the facts of her own life as impersonal “material” for literature, Playboy and Love Me Tender epitomized what Debré (after Thomas Bernhard) has called “antiautobiography.” They introduced French and American readers to her fiercely spare prose, distilled from influences as disparate as Saint Augustine, Albert Camus, and Guillaume Dustan. “Minimalist and at times even desolate,” wrote the New York Review of Books, these works defied “the expectations of personal growth that animate much feminist literature.”

Name is Debré’s most intense novel yet. Set partly in the narrator’s  childhood, it rejects Proustian notions of “regaining” the past.  Instead, its narrator seeks a state of profound disownment: “We have to  get rid of the idea of origins, once and for all, I’m not holding on to the corpses. … Being free has nothing to do with that clutter, with having suffered or not, being free is the void.” To achieve true freedom, she dares to enter this “void”—that is, dares to accept the pain, loss, and violence of life. Brilliant and searing, Name affirms and extends Debré’s radical project.

It was 1969, and temperatures were rising across the factories of the north as workers demanded better pay and conditions. Soon, discontent would erupt in what became known as Italy’s Hot Autumn. A young worker from the impoverished south arrives at Fiat’s Mirafiori factory in Turin, where his darker complexion begins to fade from the fourteen-hour workdays in sweltering industrial heat. His bosses try to withhold his wages. Our cynical, dry-witted narrator will not bend to their will. “I want everything, everything that’s owed to me,” he tells them. “Nothing more and nothing less, because you don’t mess with me.”

Around him, students are holding secret meetings and union workers begin halting work on the assembly lines, crippling the Mirafiori factory with months of continuous strikes. Before long, barricades line the roads, tear gas wafts into private homes, and the slogan “We Want Everything” is ringing through the streets.

Wrought in spare and measured prose, Balestrini’s novel depicts an explosive uprising. Introduced by Rachel Kushner, the author of the best-selling The Flamethrowers, We Want Everything is the incendiary fictional account of events that led to a decade of revolt.

Translated by Matt Holden
Introduction by Rachel Kushner