Shorter Views: Queer Thoughts & the Politics of the Paraliterary

The first bilingual edition of this radically original work.

Aimé Césaire's masterpiece, Notebook of a Return to the Native Land, is a work of immense cultural significance and beauty. This long poem was the beginning of Césaire's quest for négritude, and it became an anthem of Blacks around the world. Commentary on Césaire's work has often focused on its Cold War and anticolonialist rhetoric—material that Césaire only added in 1956. The original 1939 version of the poem, given here in French, and in its first English translation, reveals a work that is both spiritual and cultural in structure, tone, and thrust. This Wesleyan edition includes the original illustrations by Wifredo Lam, and an introduction, notes, and chronology by A. James Arnold.

Selected poems from a visionary feminist poet.

Considered by many to be among the most outstanding of living American poets, Alice Notley has amassed a body of work that includes intimate lyrics, experimental diaries, traditional genres, the postmodern series, the newly invented epic, political observation and invective, and the poem as novel. This chronological selection of her most notable work offers a delineation of her life and creative development. Formerly associated with the second generation of the New York School, Notley has become a poet with a completely distinctive voice. Grave of Light is a progression of changing forms and styles—an extensive panorama held together explicitly by the shape of the poet's times. Notley's poems challenge their subjects head-on, suffusing language with radiant truth.

This second print issue contains an interview with the abolitionist organizer Stevie Wilson, essays about nineties nightlife in support of queer intimacies in Santiago, Chile, Barbz against pinkwashing, a translation of the communization theorist Gilles Dauvé’s latest work on the reactionary tendencies in the sexual liberation movement in Weimar Germany, a missive by Samuel R. Delany, a ritual script by Lou Cornum, a meditation on intersex experiences as the untheorized marrow of trans liberation, and more. There are also world-building drawings by the artist Chitra Ganesh throughout.

Written in the course of the year following the publication of Book of Mutter, and inspired by the lectures of Roland Barthes, Anne Carson, and Jorge Luis Borges, Appendix Project collects eleven talks and essays. These surprising and moving performances, underscored by the sleeplessness of the first year of their child’s life, contain their dazzling thinking through the work of On Kawara, Roland Barthes, W.G. Sebald, Bhanu Kapil, Walter Benjamin, Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, Marguerite Duras, Marlene Dumas, Louise Bourgeois, Doris Salcedo, Jenny Holzer, and more.

A secret can be a private space for self-creation – or a shared site of pleasure.

We explore secrets in a plethora of forms and contexts. From layered accounts of mediaeval ecstasy to the unexplored sensory experience of smell. From camouflaged play to queer readings of astrological charts and the hidden history of house music. From a very analog point of view to the outskirts of the internet.

How To Become est une maison d'édition autogérée basée à Paris. Nous publions les textes d'auteuces engagés dans des pratiques féministes et peu diffusés par le réseau des grandes maisons d'édition françaises.

Créée en 2016, elle est composée d'artistes et écrivaires en majorité gouines, HTB publie de la litterature expérimentale née d'influences post-post- sapphiques ainsi qu'un choix de tradu d'auteuices non traduites en langue française. HTB s'articule autour d'ateliers d'écriture: How to Become a Lesbian, et d'une revue annuelle publiant les choses issues de l'atelier.

'Femme' describes a constellation of queer, gendered expressions that uproot expectations of what it means to be feminine. Building upon experiences of transformation, belonging and harm, this book is a transfeminist call for collective liberation.

Trans Femme Futures envisions the future through everyday actions that revolutionise our lives. Nat Raha and Mijke van der Drift discuss struggles around trans healthcare, the need for collectives over institutions, the importance of mutual care, and transfeminism as abolition.

The authors show how social change can be achieved through transformative practices that allow queer life to thrive in a time of climate, health, political and economic crises.

'A brilliant, useful, and immensely moving book that deals a critical blow to the epistemic austerity of our times' - Jordy Rosenberg

An epistolary sequence about sex, exchange and social space set along the Northeast Corridor. 

In A Queen in Bucks County, our protagonist Turner, who both is and is not the writer, makes his pleasurable way through miserable space. Men "buy him things," lovers drive across state lines, users down volatile cocktails to see what happens, landlords turn tenants out, and Turner writes poetic tracts to friends about it. Part pornography, part novel, all love letter, A Queen in Bucks County is an experiment in turning language upside down to see what falls out.

2023 LAMBDA LITERARY AWARD FINALIST