In Memoriam to Identity

Written with lyrical fire in a chorus of vividly rendered voices, Dionne Brand's second novel is an epic of the African diaspora across the globe.

It begins in 1824 on Trinidad, where Marie-Ursule, queen of a secret slave society called the Sans Peur Regiment, plots a mass suicide. The end of the Sans Peur is also the beginning of a new world, for Marie-Ursule cannot kill her young daughter, Bola, who escapes to live free and bear a dynasty of descendants who spill out across the Caribbean, North America, and Europe.

Haunted by a legacy of passion and oppression, the children of Bola pass through two world wars and into the confusion, estrangement, and violence of the late twentieth century.

"[Brand has] a lush and exuberant style that may put some readers in mind of Toni Morrison or Edwidge Danticat." — William Ferguson, The New York Times Book Review

First published in 1994, Robert Glück’s Margery Kempe is one of the most provocative, poignant, and inventive American novels of the last quarter century.

The book tells two stories of romantic obsession. One, based on the first autobiography in English, the medieval Book of Margery Kempe, is about a fifteenth-century woman from East Anglia, a visionary, a troublemaker, a pilgrim to the Holy Land, and an aspiring saint, and her love affair with Jesus. It is complicated. The other is about the author’s own love for an alluring and elusive young American, L. It is complicated. Between these two Margery Kempe, the novel, emerges as an unprecedented exploration of desire, devotion, abjection, and sexual obsession in the form of a novel like no other novel.

Robert Glück’s masterpiece bears comparison with the finest work of such writers as Kathy Acker and Chris Kraus. This edition includes an essay by Glück about the creation of the book titled "My Margery, Margery's Bob."

A revolutionary book tracing the collapse of the paradigms that have organized the world for centuries. 

In Dysphoria Mundi, Paul B. Preciado, best known for his 2013 cult classic Testo Junkie, has written a mutant text assembled from essays, philosophy, poetry, and autofiction that captures a moment of profound change and possibility. Rooted in the isolation of the COVID-19 pandemic, and taking account of the societal convulsions that have ensued, Preciado tries to make sense of our times from within the swirl of a revolutionary present moment.

The central thesis of this monumental work is that dysphoria, to be understood properly, should not be seen as a mental illness but rather as the condition that defines our times. Dysphoria is an abyss that separates a patriarchal, colonial, and capitalist order hurtling toward its end from a new way of being that, until now, has been seen as unproductive and abnormal but is in fact the way out of our current predicament.

With echoes of visionaries such as William S. Burroughs and Kathy Acker, Preciado’s theoretical writing is propelled by lyric power while providing us with a critical toolbox full of new concepts that can guide our thinking and our transition, cognitive emancipation, denormalization, disidentification, “electronic heroin,” digital coups, necro-kitsch. Dysphoria Mundi is Preciado’s most accessible and significant work to date, in which he makes sense of a world in ruins around us and maps a joyous, radical way forward.

Sticky Fingers' Fortune Teller features wisdom from McKenzie Wark, Octavia E. Butler, Kate Zambreno, bell hooks, Clarice Lispector, Eileen Myles, Kathy Acker, Johanna Hedva, Lou Sullivan, Audre Lorde, June Jordan, and Anne Boyer.⁣

A3, single colour risograph

Impossible Princess is the third collection of gay short fiction by PEN Award–winning San Francisco–based author Kevin Killian. A member of the “new narrative” circle including Dennis Cooper and Kathy Acker, Killian is a master short story writer, crafting campy and edgy tales that explore the humor and darkness of desire. A former director of Small Press Traffic and a co-editor of Mirage/Periodical, Killian co-wrote Jack Spicer’s biography, Poet Be Like God, and co-edited three Spicer books, including My Vocabulary Did This To Me: Collected Poems. His latest book, Action Kylie, is a collection of poems devoted to Kylie Minogue.

The first full-scale authorized biography of the pioneering experimental novelist Kathy Acker, one of the most original and controversial figures in 20th-century American literature.

Kathy Acker (1947–1997) was a rare and almost inconceivable a celebrity experimental writer. Twenty-five years after her death, she remains one of the most original, shocking, and controversial artists of her era. The author of visionary, transgressive novels like Blood and Guts in High School ; Empire of the Senses ; and Pussy, King of Pirates , Acker wrote obsessively about the treachery of love, the limitations of language, and the possibility of revolution.

She was notorious for her methods—collaging together texts stolen from other writers with her own diaries, sexual fantasies, and blunt political critique—as well as her appearance. With her punkish hairstyles, tattoos, and couture outfits, she looked like no other writer before or after. Her work was exceptionally prescient, taking up complicated conversations about gender, sex, capitalism, and colonialism that continue today.

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). 

A “witty, often-chilling, compulsively readable” (Vogue) horror debut following a woman who seeks refuge at an all-trans girl commune only to discover that demons haunt her fellow comrades—and she’s their next prey!

Herculine’s narrator has demons. Sure, her life includes several hallmarks of the typical trans girl sob story—conversion therapy, a string of shitty low-paying jobs, and even shittier exes—but she also regularly debates sleep paralysis demons that turn to mist soon after she wakes and carries vials of holy oil in her purse. Nothing, though, prepares her for the new malevolent force stalking her through the streets of New York City, more powerful than any she’s ever encountered. Desperate to escape this ancient evil, she flees to rural Indiana, where her ex-girlfriend started an all-trans girl commune in the middle of the woods.

The secluded camp, named after 19th-century intersex memoirist Herculine Barbin, is a scrappy operation, but the shared sense of community among the girls is a welcome balm to the narrator’s growing isolation and paranoia. Still, something isn’t quite right at Herculine. Girls stop talking as soon as she enters the room, everyone seems to share a common secret, and the books lining the walls of the library harbor strange cryptograms. Soon what once looked like an escape becomes a trap all its own. 

While trying to untangle the commune’s many mysteries, the narrator contends with disemboweled pigs, cultlike psychosexual rituals, and the horrors of communal breakfast. And before long, she discovers that her demons have followed her. And this time, they won’t be letting her go.