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In a novel capturing an era that seems at once familiar and grotesque, a New York writer lands in Los Angeles in 1994.

Originally published in 1997, Resentment was the first in Gary Indiana's now-classic trilogy (followed in 1999 by Three Month Fever: The Andrew Cunanan Story and in 2003 by Depraved Indifference) chronicling the more-or-less permanent state of “depraved indifference” that characterized American life at the millennium's end.

In Resentment, Seth, a New York–based writer arrives in Los Angeles (where he has history and friends) in mid-August, 1994, to observe what will become the marathon parricide trial of the wealthy, athletic, and troubled Martinez brothers, broadcast live every day on Court TV. Still reeling from the end of his obsessive courtship of a young SoHo artist/waiter, Seth moves between a room at the Chateau Marmont and a Mount Washington shack owned by his old cab-driving, ex-Marxist friend, Jack, while he writes a profile of Teddy Wade—one of the era's hottest young actors, who has “dared” to star as a gay character in a new Hollywood film. Studded throughout with scathing satirical portraits of media figures, other writers, and the Martinez trial teams, Resentment captures an era that seems, two decades later, at once grotesque, familiar, and a precursor to our own.

Introduction by Patrick McGrath
Afterword by Chris Kraus

Audio journals that document Wojnarowicz's turbulent attempts to understand his anxieties and passions, and tracking his thoughts as they develop in real time. 

"In these moments I hate language. I hate what words are like, I hate the idea of putting these preformed gestures on the tip of my tongue, or through my lips, or through the inside of my mouth, forming sounds to approximate something that's like a cyclone, or something that's like a flood, or something that's like a weather system that's out of control, that's dangerous, or alarming.... It just seems like sounds that have been uttered back and forth maybe now over centuries. And it always boils down to the same meaning within those sounds, unless you're more intense uttering them, or you precede them or accompany them with certain forms of violence."
—from The Weight of the Earth

Artist, writer, and activist David Wojnarowicz (1954-1992) was an important figure in the downtown New York art scene. His art was preoccupied with sex, death, violence, and the limitations of language. At the height of the AIDS epidemic, Wojnarowicz began keeping audio journals, returning to a practice he'd begun in his youth.The Weight of the Earth presents transcripts of these tapes, documenting Wojnarowicz's turbulent attempts to understand his anxieties and passions, and tracking his thoughts as they develop in real time.

In these taped diaries, Wojnarowicz talks about his frustrations with the art world, recounts his dreams, and describes his rage, fear, and confusion about his HIV diagnosis. Primarily spanning the years 1987 and 1989, recorded as Wojnarowicz took solitary road trips around the United States or ruminated in his New York loft, the audio journals are an intimate and affecting record of an artist facing death. By turns despairing, funny, exalted, and angry, this volume covers a period largely missing from Wojnarowicz's written journals, providing us with an essential new record of a singular American voice.

Poet, writer, and translator Cecilia Pavón emerged in the late 1990s as one of the most prolific and central figures of the young Argentine literary scene—the so-called “Generation of the 90s”: artists and writers whose aesthetics and politics were an earnest response to the disastrous impact of American-exported neoliberal policies and the resulting economic crisis of 2001. Their publications were fragile—xeroxed, painted on cardboard—but their cultural impact, indelible.

A cofounder of Buenos Aires’s independent art space and publishing press Belleza y Felicidad—where a whole generation of soon-to-be-famous Argentine artists showed their work for the first time—Pavón pioneered the use of “unpoetic” and intimate content—her verses often lifted from text messages or chat rooms, her tone often impish, yet brutally sincere.

In 2015, Pavón’s first volume of collected poems, ‘A Hotel with My Name’, was published in English. Contemporary writers in the United States, Australasia, and Europe discovered a deep affinity with her work. Pavón’s protagonists, Ariana Reines noted, “are absolute women, guileless dreamers, saints in sneakers, on sidewalks, in jail, in Zara, on buses, in nightclubs, in bed.”

Translated by Pavón’s own poetic protégé Jacob Steinberg, ‘Little Joy’ collects the best of Pavón’s short stories written between 1999-2020, originally published in three volumes in Spanish.

Leash extends the logic of S&M to its inexorable and startling conclusion, darkly and hilariously revealing the masochistic impulse as the urge to disappear from the chores, obligations, and emotional vacuity of daily life.

No more jobs, no more taxes, no more checkbook, no more bills, no more credit cards, no more credit, no more money, no more mortgages, no more rent, no more savings, no more junk mail, no more junk, no more mail, no more phones, no more faxes, no more busy signals, no more computers, no more cars, no more drivers' licenses, no more traffic lights, no more airports, no more flying, no more tickets, no more packing, no more luggage, no more supermarkets, no more health clubs... While her current spends the summer researching public housing in Stockholm, a moderately wealthy, object-oppressed, and terminally hip New York female of a certain age seeks adventure in the sedate dyke bars of lower Manhattan. Finding none, she answers a personal ad. She is ordered to put on a blindfold before the first meeting with the woman she knows only as Sir. Not knowing what someone looks like turns out to be freeing, as do the escalating constraints that alienate her not just from her former life, but from her very conception of who she is. Part Georges Bataille, part Fran Leibowitz, this is the Story of O told with a self-referentially perverse sense of humor.

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.

There is no such thing as a safe word. 

In Bad Language, So Mayer blends memoir and manifesto as they explore the politics of speech, while looking at how language has been used – and abused – in their own life. What is the relationship between language and sexual violence? And how can we ‘make ourselves up’ in language when words themselves are encoded by a dominant culture that insists we see ourselves as powerless listeners rather than active speakers? 

Examining the semantic traps of their multi-lingual childhood – and taking in texts from the Torah to Grimms’ Fairytales, from protest bust cards to the works of Ursula K. Le Guin – Mayer asks who gets to speak, and who is forced into silence. Bad Language calls out the harm that words can do, while searching for crafty ways through which we can collectively reclaim language for protest and pleasure. 

‘Mayer’s writing is generous, astute and sincere; in Bad Language, they choose their words carefully, using incantation and spell to distil a complex argument – the transformative power of language lay in its ability to shape sense perception. For Mayer, the task of ‘making ourselves up’ is another way of asking, what kind of world do we want to live in?’ – Lola Olufemi

SO MAYER is a writer, editor, bookseller and organiser. Truth & Dare, their first collection of speculative fiction, was longlisted for the Republic of Consciousness and Edge Hill Short Story prizes. With Sarah Shin, they co-edited Ursula K. Le Guin, Space Crone, winner of the 2024 Locus Award for non-fiction. Bad Language is their second book for Peninsula, after A Nazi Word for a Nazi Thing.

In this quintessential work of queer theory, Jack Halberstam takes aim at the protected status of male masculinity and shows that female masculinity has offered a distinct alternative to it for well over two centuries. Demonstrating how female masculinity is not some bad imitation of virility, but a lively and dramatic staging of hybrid and minority genders, Halberstam catalogs the diversity of gender expressions among masculine women from nineteenth-century pre-lesbian practices to contemporary drag king performances.

Through detailed textual readings as well as empirical research, Halberstam uncovers a hidden history of female masculinities while arguing for a more nuanced understanding of gender categories that would incorporate rather than pathologize them. He rereads Anne Lister's diaries and Radclyffe Hall's The Well of Loneliness as foundational assertions of female masculine identity; considers the enigma of the stone butch and the politics surrounding butch/femme roles within lesbian communities; and explores issues of transsexuality among “transgender dykes”—lesbians who pass as men—and female-to-male transsexuals who may find the label of “lesbian” a temporary refuge. Halberstam also tackles such topics as women and boxing, butches in Hollywood and independent cinema, and the phenomenon of male impersonators.

Featuring a new preface by the author, this twentieth anniversary edition of Female Masculinity remains as insightful, timely, and necessary as ever.

The prequel to Love Me Tender, narrating Debré's transformation from affluent career woman to broke single lesbian and writer.

I see all her beauty, I see the beauty of women. I see my own body, new. I tell myself there are so many things that are possible.

First published in France in 2018, Playboy is the first volume of Constance Debré's renowned autobiographical trilogy that describes her decision, at age forty-three, to abandon her marriage, her legal career, and her bourgeois Parisian life to become a lesbian and a writer.

The novel unfolds in a series of short, sharp vignettes. The narrator's descriptions of her first female lovers—a married woman fifteen years older than her, a model ten years her junior—are punctuated by encounters with her ex-husband, her father, and her son.

As Debré recently told Granta: “It was a bit like Saint Augustine and his conversion. In the same week, I had sex with a girl and I had the feeling that I could write. I had this incredible feeling that I could catch things, that life was there to be caught.”

Looking at the world through fresh eyes, the narrator of Playboy questions everything that once lay beneath the surface of her well-managed life. Laconic, aggressive, and radically truthful, she examines gender and marriage, selfishness and sacrifice, money and family, even the privilege inherent in her downward mobility.

Writing her way toward her own liberation, Debré chronicles the process that made her one of the most brilliant, important French writers today.