Masturbatory Reader (2nd edition)

Orbiting around the saddest house in the history of Grand Designs, Sam Moore’s Chesil Cliff House and other failures takes us to North Devon where, standing at the cliff’s edge, we meet Edward Short: a man with a Fred Perry shirt and a dream. Amongst a chorus of characters including Kevin Mcloud as Father Time, Moore by means of Short leads us into a study of creative failure, gender, and, ultimately, the desire to keep writing.

"I struggle to see anyone living here. It feels like a distorted wonder of the world, a cautionary tale. Something that could never have been lived in, but that had to be made."

About the author:
Sam is a writer, artist, and editor. They are the author of All my teachers died of AIDS (Pilot Press), Long live the new flesh (Polari Press), and Search history (Queer Street Press). They are one of the co-curators of TISSUE, a trans reading and publishing initiative based in London.

About A Series of Attempts:
This new series published by Sticky Fingers Publishing explores the essay form through the etymological root of essay: to try, trial or attempt. In 1508, French theorist Michel de Montaigne published a collection of 107 texts called Essais, described by his contemporaries as ‘self-indulgent and embarrassingly confessional.’ It is through these roots we find the attitude and intentions at the heart of this series; that through thinking together, through trying to figure it out on the page, we can reach new and increasingly nuanced ways to understand each other and the worlds we inhabit.

Sean Bonney Tribute Issue

Don’t say “Rest in Peace,” say Fuck the Police: A Sean Bonney Tribute Portfolio, featuring: Katharina Ludwig, Lama El Khatib & Haytham El Wardany, Anahid Nersessian, Vicky Sparrow, Koshka Duff, Max Henninger, Joshua Clover, Jasper Bernes, D.S. Marriott, Fran Lock, Joey Frances, Mathilda Cullen, Nicholas Komodore, David Lau, Eve Richens, Sacha Kahir, Uwe Möllhusen & Marie Schubenz, Kashif Sharma-Patel, Linda Kemp, Daniel Eltringham & Fred Carter, Hugo García Manríquez, Jèssica Pujol Duran & Macarena Urzúa Opazo. With additional work by Belén Roca, translated by Noah Mazer, Adelaide Ivánova, translated by Chris Daniels, stevie redwood, Cait O’Kane, Mau Baiocco, Peter Bouscheljong, translated by Jonathan Styles. Zheng Xiaoqiong, translated by Zhou Xiaojing, Mayamor, translated by Eric Abalajon, Afrizal Malna, translated by Daniel Owen, Jorge Carlos Fonseca, translated by Shook, James Goodwin, Amalia Tenuta. Plus Engagements: Anne Boyer interviewed by Eduardo Rabassa, Gail Scott interviewed by Michael Nardone, Noah Ross on David Melnick, Guillermo Rebollo Gil on Pedro Pietri, Coco Fitterman on Ennio Moltedo, Sam Moore on Aaron Shurin, David Grundy on Lorenzo Thomas

For the Interjection Calendar each month Montez Press invites an artist, a writer, a poet or a doer of some sorts to say things. All 12 pieces have introspection and reflection in common. They are a subjective overview of writing in the expanded field of contemporary art and writing in the year 2019. This is the Interjection Calendar 2019, the fifth collection in this series. 

With contributions by sabrina soyer, Lisa Robertson, Hatty Nestor, Adrianna Whittingham, Sondria, Claudia Pagès, Laetitia Paviani, Bella Milroy, Georgina Tyson, Son Kit, Alix Jean Vollum, Rene Matic and bleubaglife. 

Find the last 12 PDF's on montezpress.com.

Responses to Untitled (eye with comet) (c.1985) by Paul Thek is the sixth and final anthology in a series that gathered responses to works of art made during a period of the ongoing AIDS Crisis, from the identification of the virus in 1981 to the introduction of life-saving drugs in 1996.  

In this sixth iteration, responses were sought to the painting Untitled (eye with comet) by Paul Thek. The work was found in his storage after his death from AIDS in 1988. 

List of contributors in order of appearance:

E.R. De Siqueira
Ben Estes
João Motta Guedes
Lucy Swan
Jon Rainford
Louis Shankar
Amy Evans Bauer
Hattie Morrison
Sammy Paloma
AN Grace
James Horton
Nick Wood
Sophie Paul
Jae Vail
Elizabeth Zvonar
Lars Meijer
Clay AD
Michel Kessler
Pablo Miguel Martínez
Emma Harris
Dylan McNulty-Holmes
Kitya Mark
Katherine Franco
Ainslie Templeton
Alistair McCartney
John Brooks
Jesse Howarth
jimmy cooper
Felix Pilgrim
Nicholas Chittenden Morgan
Murphy O’Neir
Rachel Cattle
Isabel Nolan
Susan Finlay
Ted Simonds
Brooke Palmieri
Kate Morgan
Ashleigh A. Allen
Diogo Gama
JP Seabright
Hugo Hagger
Amanda Kraley
Brendan Cook
Matt Bailey
Charlotte Flint
Rodney Schreiner
Lucy Price
Morgan Melhuish
Jordan Weitzman
Jaakko Pallasvuo
Alex Fiorentino
Harald Smart
Marguerite Carson
loll jung
Richard Porter
Nicholas Kalinoski
Hedi El Kholti
Edmund Francis English
Ted Bonin

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

Justin Allen’s Language Arts takes up writing as an integral part of an interdisciplinary art practice. Across poems, essays, lyrics, screenwriting, and drawings, works touch on themes of music and subculture, African diasporic language, visual art, and more, bringing together Allen's numerous influences into one collection.

Justin Allen's Language Arts is the 2022 Open Reading Period Editors' Pick.

About the author
Justin Allen is a writer and performer from Northern Virginia. With a background in tap dancing and creative writing, his work often combines a variety of art forms. He has been commissioned by The Chocolate Factory Theater and The Shed and has held residencies at ISSUE Project Room and the Center for Afrofuturist Studies. He has received support from Franklin Furnace, Foundation for Contemporary Arts, and the Jerome Foundation, and shared his work both stateside and abroad.

"In Hatnaha, Justin Allen has reinvented the myth of Atlantis for our postlapsarian age. His art of language cannibalizes the American grammar book, spawning gorgeous new idiolects. Through the buzz and rumble of Afro-diasporic sound clash, Allen hears the frequency of bodies becoming ungovernable. Set to a soundtrack of punk phonotactics, Language Arts is just the book to toss over the barbed wire fences that cordon us off from our post-Reparations future." —Tavia Nyong’o

"Language Arts shares a name with an elementary school class I always wished was more “art” and less rote memorization, and it fully delivers on that desire with its spellbinding assortment of prose poetry, screamo lyricism, screenplay, conlang, and Black political fiction as vibrant as any comp on physical media or stream. nunats nen-tuk nutaks dipa. Justin Allen creates an executable file, one that's bound to spread like Soulja Boy's "Crank That" renamed “britney_spears-hitmebabyonemoretimeremix.mp3," but without the need for tricknology." —Devin Kenny

A virtuosic inquiry into the forms and uses of healing, from ancient and modern medicine to contemporary literature, ecology, and protest.

In the era of the “chronic acute” long predating COVID-19, Eleni Stecopoulos set out to investigate the imagination, aesthetics, and ideology of healing—its mysteries and mystifications, its many channels and codes. Fusing lyric inquiry with cultural criticism, Dreaming in the Fault Zone explores art’s treatment of our conditions at a time of both increased cynicism about healing and longing for it. Stecopoulos talks to physicians, poets, psychotherapists, disability activists, ethnographers, spiritual seekers; curates performances and takes part in community rituals; documents pilgrimages and visits therapeutic landscapes. Whether writing about the poet H.D.’s psychoanalysis with Freud or madness and apartheid in Bessie Head’s novel A Question of Power, the salve of demagogues or a global alliance of people with contested illnesses, Stecopoulos confronts the poetics and politics of affliction, empathy, memory, and survival. Weaving together esoteric scenes and everyday practice, with flashes of humor, these essays travel in a space of impasse and unending experiment.

CONSTANT VIOLINS is a hybrid book consisting of two parts, each comprised of two texts of sci-fi auto-fiction: ‘FӔTAL ATRACTUS’ & ‘COQUETTES’, ‘RATS LIVE ON NO EVIL STAR’ & ‘SOPH MOB’.  CONSTANT VIOLINS follows mutating characters & contexts that grapple & contort in half-step with the logics of a vast labyrinth of psycho para-social references, playing out across a tête-bêche (or head-to-tail) format book. The myriad ‘worlds’ occupied & embodied narratively riff on the act of world-making in itself. 

As an only child, I used to climb up onto my grandmother’s vanity & collapse the 3 way mirror over my head so I could bask in the calm of the many me’s preening inside its reflective continuum. Sometimes I would just lean against the looking glass above her bureau or pretend the wall was my simultaneous lover. No one wants to be alone. Under covers, I initiate the same sequences of experiments that virtually anyone does. 

We all imagine what our pillows witness annually would baffle sane onlookers. That’s why we practice kissing on our dorsal carpal arches, peaches in the dead of night, or remove condoms from bananas with our teeth. CONSTANT VIOLINS wants what any book wants; to become a formidable power couple with its author like a Pokemon & its precocious Trainer.

Jordan/Martin Hell (b. 1993, USA) is a Black trans(2s) writer, artist, & scholar who attended Städelschule (DE) & Cooper Union School of Art. He is currently a PhD candidate at Queen Mary’s University of London. Hell’s work is interdisciplinary & interlaced with his writing as the seedbed for his various explorations across painting, sculpture, pedagogy, music, dance, etc. In all of his work Hell is invested in the embedded associations which proliferate in the global collective subconscious & how that frames intimate (& often violent) realities in the lives of individuals whether historical, celebrity, or obscure. Closely linked with his work is a spiritualist psychoanalytic practice which spans hypnosis, theology, philosophy, Black fugitivity, & indigenous somatics.