One or Two

Religion, love and revolution collide in this swashbuckling saga of Risorgimento Italy. 

Set in Italy during the Risorgimento, The Gadfly is a thrilling tale of betrayal and revolution. It follows the adventures and misadventures of a mysterious satirist, a hardworking lady radical and a Catholic cardinal with a dark secret. Published in 1897 by Irish writer Ethel Lilian Voynich (or ELV, as she preferred to be known), The Gadfly sold millions of copies in the Soviet Union and the People's Republic of China, though it has been largely forgotten in the English-speaking world—until now. You'll laugh, you'll cry, you'll smuggle guns over the border and, if you're anything like the Gadfly, you'll do it all with incomparable style. Mandylion Press' second run of The Gadfly includes a new preface by Mandylion cofounder Madeline Porsella and a visual glossary illustrating the world of the novel.

Ethel Lilian (Boole) Voynich (1864–1960) was born in Cork, Ireland, and raised in Lancashire, England. Her peripatetic adult life was defined by passions for music and leftist politics. In 1902, she married Wilifrid Michael Voynich, a Polish revolutionary and antiquarian book dealer. She spent her final decades in New York City, where she worked in a music school and as a translator of Russian, Polish and French texts.

Edited by Mabel Capability Taylor, Madeline Porsella. Introduction by Madeline Porsella.

The debut novel by the acclaimed author of Flâneuse and Art Monsters, Lauren Elkin’s Scaffolding is a story of Paris, desire, love, psychoanalysis, and the turbulent affairs of two couples across time. 

Paris, 1972. The same apartment in Belleville. Florence and Henry are renovating their kitchen. She is finishing her degree in psychology, dropping into feminist activities, and devotedly attending the groundbreaking, infamous seminars held by the renowned analyst Jacques Lacan. She is hoping to conceive their first child, though Henry isn’t sure he’s ready for fatherhood.

Two couples, fifty years apart, face the challenges of marriage, fidelity, and pregnancy. They inhabit this same small space in separate but similar times—times charged with political upheaval and intellectual controversy. A novel in the key of Éric Rohmer, Lauren Elkin’s Scaffolding is about the way our homes collect and hold our memories and our stories, about the bonds we create and the difficulty of ever fully severing them, about the ways all the people we’ve loved live on in us.

Lauren Elkin is the author of Art Monsters and Flâneuse, a New York Times Book Review notable book and a finalist for the PEN/Diamonstein-Spielvogel Award for the Art of the Essay. Her essays have appeared in The New York Times, Le Monde, Frieze, and The Times Literary Supplement, among other publications. A native New Yorker, Elkin lived in Paris for twenty years and now resides in London.

Navina Sundaram is sitting in the editing room in Hamburg. She has managed to reduce the complexity of the Kemal Altun case to the required 2 minutes and 40 seconds for the political magazine; a journalistic feat considering the legal terminology and the international political situation, which must be presented in simple terms. She places her interview with the judge at the back. The audience therefore first gets an impression of perhaps the best-known deportation prisoner of the republic on trial here. The phone rings. I imagine she is displeased about the disturbance. It’s the day of the broadcast; the report still needs to be approved. It rings again. She answers. Peter Boultwood is on the phone and says, “Did you hear? Kemal jumped out of the window in the courtroom. He’s dead.” 

Merle Kröger lives in Berlin where she works as a novelist, screenwriter and dramaturg. She was a member of the Berlin film collective dog film (1992–1999) and founded pong  lm in 2001. Kröger is the co-author of Philip Scheffner’s internationally awarded films Revision (2012), Havarie (2016) and Europe (2022). Kröger has published five novels to date, including Grenzfall (2012), Havarie/ Collision (2015) and Die Experten/ The Experts (2021). Her novels have received numerous awards, including Best Crime Novel of the Year, the Radio Bremen Prize for Crime Fiction and the German Crime Fiction Prize.

Translated by Rubaica Jaliwala 

Mystique des rues vides et peu éclatantes des banlieues pavillonnaires, ce court poème en prose interpelle par sa langue sombre. Dans une parodie de messe noire – beigeasse comme le crépis des façades –, Théo Robine-Langlois dépeint le monde mystérieux des maisons individuelles, du repli sur soi démonique, et des vieilles qui marmonnent entre leurs gencives au retour du marché, le panier plein de gros sel et de radis noirs en guise d'hostie. Les mots occitans qui ponctuent le texte comme des conjurations en accroissent l’escur.

Once upon a time there was a shopping center just off Dam Square, a stone’s throw from the Madame Tussauds, not far from Primark, two streets across De Bijenkorf overshadowing the Magna Plaza, and just a couple doors down the Royal Palace in the middle of Amsterdam. It was the place where drag queen Tuu Lipa performed and Yeung sold eau de car engine oil. It was also where Mr. R looked for his human lover, where Inez became a millionaire, and where Yahoo launched its metaverse. “Welcome to the YAniverse,” greeted the Yahoo assistant…

Retail Vérité is the outcome of writing workshops organized by A Maior at San Serriffe. Through a blend of improvisation, larping and speed dating, the participants sketched characters and dialogues on-site.
This cohort featured Anouk Asselineau, Alva Bücking, Katherina Gorodynska, Chieri Higa, SeungJi Jo, Simon Marsiglia, Christina Ntanovasili, Young Eun Park, Ignacy Radtke, Matthew Senkowycz, Maja Simisic, Mehmet Süzgün, Simone Wegman, Bruno Zhu and others.

A Maior is a clothing and home goods store located in the outskirts of Viseu, Portugal. Since 2016, an eponymous exhibition program has taken place within the shopping environment. A Maior is managed by the staff, the artist Bruno Zhu and his family. A Maior has been featured in exhibitions at Melly, Rotterdam; Frans Hals Museum, Haarlem; Kunsthalle Freeport, Porto; X Museum, Beijing; Life Sport and BQ, both Berlin. In 2022, A Maior was the writer-in-residence at San Serriffe in Amsterdam, who commissioned Retail Verité, A Maior’s first novella.

With A Maior, Anouk Asselineau, Alva Bücking, Katherina Gorodynska, Chieri Higa, SeungJi Jo, Simon Marsiglia, Christina Ntanovasili, Young Eun Park, Ignacy Radtke, Matthew Senkowycz, Maja Simisic, Mehmet Süzgün, Simone Wegman, Bruno Zhu.
Designed by Elisabeth Klement

Part prose poem, part reflection on the relations between writing and place, Lagoon tells the story of the slow undoing of an idyll. In it the narrator walks for hours during long summer nights, gazing through the windows that line the streets. In between, she reflects on how she might write about the shifting space of the lagoon, where she spent summer holidays with her family years ago. In adolescence, the narrator watches quietly as her mother, father and sister go about building their holiday home. But she can sense something is awry, she just does not fully understand what.

Lagoon is the first novella by McCulloch.

Lagoon by Samantha McCulloch is the first title in Kunstverein Amsterdam's new imprint called First Drafts, which, inspired by artist and publisher Anne Turyn, celebrates experimental and commercially unviable work by publishing completed manuscripts that haven’t yet found a home in their first draft form. Importantly, each title is also the first attempt by the author to write in that particular form, or, to write at all.