Gauby Bauble

Exit Ambition is a catalogue of practices, documents, videos, and other projects - virtual & actual. The book operates as an incomplete index of a series of installations, instructions, anti-plays, performance scores, descriptions, etc.

Jake Reber lives and works in Buffalo, NY, where he co-curates hystericallyreal.com.

In this special edition, double-cover issue of Worms, we bring you not one, but two cover stars. The  indelible Tyson Yunkaporta and the iconic Anne Waldman adorn both sides of Worms 8 which can also be thought of as ‘The Elements Issue’. It was dreamt up in a dreary and grey August in London, while the rest of the world suffered through the hottest days on record. As we witnessed, and continue to witness, such climate catastrophe, we turned to the literature we love to help us understand, to challenge us, and to offer us some comfort. 

The issue is split into four sections—earth, fire, air and water—but its roots and webs push beyond what we typically think of as ‘the natural’: tales from the kitchen from Rebecca May Johnson and Slutty Cheff, reflections on gardening and colonialism, writer's block and clogged pipes, how to blow up pipelines with Andreas Malm, grief and writing, recovery and nature with Octavia Bright, social mobility with Isabel Waidner, the wide range of issues raised by the underrepresentation of First Nations people in literature with Evelyn Araluen and much, much more. 

We hope that this issue can be a flame of hope, inspiration, or something that simply sustains in such turbulent times.

Featuring 
Tyson Yunkaporta, Isabel Waidner , Jamaica Kincaid, Melissa Broder , Evelyn Araluen, Bruce Pascoe, Octavia Bright, Nora Treatbaby , Nerea Calvillo , Anne Waldman , Alexis Pauline Gumbs , Léuli Eshrāghi, Madeline Cash , Andreas Malm, Rebecca May Johnson 

Contributors
Stella Murphy , Ben Redhead, Phoenix Yemi, Sam Moore, Devils Claws, Pierce Eldridge, Manon Mikolaitis, Caitlin McLoughlin, Isabel MacCarthy, Elodie Saint-Louis , Nettle Grellier, Amelia Abraham, Ryan Pfluger, Rose Higham-Stainton , Emma Crabtree, Ignota, Lydia Luke, Chloe Sheppard , Clem MacLeod , Carolyne Loreé Teston , Emma Cohen, Olive Couri, Raheela Suleman , No Land , Jacqueline Ennis-Cole , Sufia Ikbal-Doucet, Rhett Hammerton, Zara Joan Miller , Kate Morgan , Bug Shepherd-Barron, Zoe Freilich , Slutty Cheff , Clemmie Bache , Violet Conroy , Sarah White , Jemima Skala , Stephanie Francis-Shanahan

Featuring Zoe Leonard, Eileen Myles, Jimmy DeSana, Princess Julia, Olivia Laing, Simon Costin, Timothy Thornton, Mary Manning and many more. Published 2020.

Emerging from the dark ecology between lullaby and ghost story, The pedestrian meanders down a labyrinth of divinatory time where crimes demand a more defective detective. To conjure the source of this text’s trauma, the poet becomes a ritual detective, tracing the wound by its shadow. Meaning emerges through distortion and echo—courting what cannot be seen head-on to create a haunted grammar of grief. An ill pastoral of displacement, The pedestrian turns domestic spaces into underworlds, the body of the exiled child into a prophetic threshold—it listens as much as it speaks, attuned to forces beyond itself.

The pedestrian is a map to a terrain of shards and shadows. While reading it, I felt lost only to the land of the normative, a lush fugitivity. I traveled far with, because of, and in this book. Hsiung trusts in the politics of decomposition, making syntaxes that have been distorted by grief, and thus sharpened to what cannot be colonially extracted. Writers like this know that grammar, vocabulary, and the sentence itself are haunted, so they write not to exorcise or cure this condition of its ghosts, but to make a place for them to live, a place they belong.
— Johanna Hedva

A pulpy, mytho-poetic dispatch from an “anarchist jurisdiction” that explores the liberatory possibilities of community and womanhood. 

Enter: Local Woman, an archetypal figure, fresh from the forest into the streets of Portland, Oregon. She is a Black trans woman, seeking survival and satisfaction, giving seduction, disenfranchisement, and the contradictions of femme womanhood a face, body, and soul. In sensual, evocative lyrics, Jzl Jmz documents Local Woman’s movement through natural disaster, anti-fascist protest, romantic engagements, and an expanding sense of personal autonomy.

"All That's Left to You presents the vivid story of twenty-four hours in the real and remembered lives of a brother and sister living in Gaza and separated from their family. The desert and time emerge as characters as Kanafani speaks through the desert, the brother, and the sister to build the powerful rhythm of the narrative. The Palestinian attachment to land and family, and the sorrow over their loss, are symbolized by the young man's unremitting anger and shame over his sister's sexual disgrace. This collection of stories provides evidence to the English-reading public of Kanafani's position within modern Arabic literature. Not only was he committed to portraying the miseries and aspirations of his people, the Palestinians, in whose cause he died, but he was also an innovator within the extensive world of Arabic fiction.

Ghassan Kanafani was a refugee, a journalist, an editor, and a political activist. First and foremost, though, he was a writer, "a commando who never fired a gun, whose weapon was a ball-point pen," said his obituary in Lebanon's Daily Star. He was born in 1936 in Akka (Acre) and was part of the 1948 exodus from Palestine. A politically active journalist in Beirut during the 1960s, Kanafani was killed in the explosion of his booby-trapped car in July 1972. He is the author of the highly acclaimed novel Men in the Sun and is considered a leading novelist in the Arab world. His works have been translated into 17 languages and published in 20 countries.

Olivier Marboeuf takes us on a journey through myths, archives, and fables, where fire symbolizes Caribbean culture, colonial oppression, and ecological disasters, and where the echo of past revolts becomes the spark for future insurrections.

How to Live from Fire to Fire brings together two closely linked texts by Olivier Marboeuf. The volume opens with Marboeuf's latest work, How to Live from Fire to Fire, written as a new commission, and is followed by the first English translation of his earlier text The Night Just Before the Fire, originally published in French in 2025 by Atlantiques déchaînés.

Written as if in the same breath, the two texts follow one another in a fevered, relentless movement. In The Night Just Before the Fire, Marboeuf reworks Bernard-Marie Koltès's play La Nuit juste avant les forêts (Éditions de Minuit, 1977), transforming it into the delirious, unbroken monologue of a man with dark blue skin calling out to another man in the streets of a major European city. Through this act of rewriting, the echo of past revolts becomes the spark for future insurrections. Next time, a riot.

"The French believed that burning the king of the carnival would suffice to erase these old stories and impose a modicum of order in the beautiful Caribbean colony. They thought that everyone would return home and that the streets would take on their usual amnesiac calm after this necessary moment of release. At the end of the celebration, on Ash Wednesday, King Vaval would be burned and along with him, corruption, excess, and bad lives would burn too. But nothing was said about monopolies. Because even when residents returned home, exhausted by the festivities, even when the dark of night cloaked this whole little world and emptied its public squares, water continued to flow dark from taps and poison snaked a path into the land and its gardens. Somewhere, forests and cities continued to burn."
—Olivier Marboeuf

Olivier Marboeuf (born 1971) is an author-storyteller, artist, independent curator, cultural theorist and film producer from Guadeloupe. In the early 1990s, he co-founded éditions Amok (now Frémok) publishing and launched the Parisian literary café Autarcic Comix. He was artistic director of Espace Khiasma (2004–2018) which contributed to introducing postcolonial theories to the French art scene through numerous exhibitions and encounters

Translated from the French by Liz Duff Young.

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