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Cover of The Things We've Seen

Fitzcarraldo Editions

The Things We've Seen

Agustín Fernández Mallo

€22.00

In The Things We've Seen, his most ambitious and accomplished novel to date, Agustín Fernández Mallo captures the strangeness and interconnectedness of human existence in the twenty-first century. A writer travels to the small uninhabited island of San Simón, used as a Franquist concentration camp during the Spanish Civil War, and witnesses events which impel him on a wild goose chase across several continents. In Miami, an ageing Kurt Montana, the fourth astronaut who secretly accompanied Neil Armstrong and co. to the moon, revisits the important chapters in his life, from serving in the Vietnam War to his memory of seeing earth from space. In Normandy, a woman embarks on a walking tour of the D-Day beaches with the goal of re-enacting, step by step, another trip taken years before.

Described as the novel David Lynch and W. G. Sebald might have written had they joined forces to explore the B-side of reality, The Things We've Seen is a mind-bending novel for our disjointed times.

Published in 2021 ┊ 488 pages ┊ Paperback ┊ Language: English

recommendations

Cover of Thora

Worms Magazine

Thora

Tilly Lawless

Fiction €18.00

It’s 2009 and summer is encroaching on the town of Bellingen when Rhiannon is forced to move from her local high school to one in Coffs Harbour. Initially reluctant to leave behind her best friend Ellie, she quickly finds herself infatuated with the enigmatic Vanora. It’s only on befriending her, does she discover that like her, Vanora is a girl whose home life is shrouded in a web of secrets. Secrets that relate to her mother.

Set in the verdant Mid North Coast of New South Wales, Australia, Thora deals with family dysfunction, emancipation through friendship, and how girlhood is affected by the isolation of the country and the solace of nature.

Tilly Lawless is a queer, Sydney-based sex worker and writer. Her debut title Nothing But My Body was published in 2021.

Cover art by Rufus Shakespeare

Cover of After Delores

Arsenal Pulp Press

After Delores

Sarah Schulman

A new edition of Sarah Schulman's acclaimed 1988 novel, a noirish tale about a no-nonsense coffee-shop waitress in New York who is nursing a broken heart after her girlfriend Dolores leaves her; her attempts to find love again are funny, sexy, and ultimately even violent. After Delores is a fast-paced, electrifying chronicle of the Lower East Side's lesbian subculture in the 1980s.

Sarah Schulman is the author of sixteen books, including the novels The Mere Future, The Child, Rat Bohemia, and Empathy (all from Arsenal Pulp Press) and the recent nonfiction works The Gentrification of the Mind: Witness to a Lost Imagination and Israel/Palestine and the Queer International. She was also co-producer with Jim Hubbard of the feature documentary United in Anger: A History of ACT UP and is co-director of the ACT UP Oral History Project. She lives in New York, where she is Distinguished Professor of English at City University of New York (College of Staten Island) and a Fellow at the New York Institute for the Humanities at NYU.

Cover of Split Tooth (Uk edition)

And Other Stories

Split Tooth (Uk edition)

Tanya Tagaq

Fiction €19.00

Fact can be as strange as fiction. It can also be as dark, as violent, as rapturous. In the end, there may be no difference between them. An Inuk girl grows up in Nunavut, Canada, in the 1970s. She knows joy, and friendship, and parents’ love. She knows boredom, and listlessness, and bullying. She knows the tedium of the everyday world, and the raw, amoral power of the ice and sky, the seductive energy of the animal world. She knows the ravages of alcohol, and violence at the hands of those she should be able to trust. She sees the spirits that surround her, and the immense power that dwarfs all of us.

When she becomes pregnant, she must navigate all this.

In this acclaimed debut novel – haunting, brooding, exhilarating, and tender all at once – Tanya Tagaq explores the grittiest features of a small Arctic town and the electrifying proximity of the worlds of animals and of myth.

Winner of the 2019 Indigenous Voices Award for Published Prose in English.

Cover of Ferrara Deux (Faits Divers)

Self-Published

Ferrara Deux (Faits Divers)

Ivan Cheng

Fiction €19.00

faits divers are the various reports in a news bulletin, miscellaneous human interest stories, theorised by Roland Barthes as ‘total’ and ‘immanent’ information.

ferrara deux (faits divers) scrolls around the discovered corpse of a talented street musician named Landau, mangled and sealed into vacuum bags in the walk-in of a modern Italian-American restaurant. Street performance is content for an attention economy, playing on authenticities and profiting from recognition.

In this debut novel, artist Ivan Cheng reconfigures recent performance texts into an approximation of a murder mystery.

Cover of Ripcord

Pilot Press

Ripcord

Nate Lippens

Fiction €18.00

A novel about escape and connection, class, sex, and queer intimacy in the American Midwest. 

The oldest story: an insider pretends to be an outsider and receives praise for his empathy and imagination and intelligence. Maybe some asshole even says bravery. An outsider pretends to be an insider, is exposed as a fraud, a liar, and burned to the ground. 

In Ripcord, Nate Lippens continues his meditations on escape and connection, class, sex, and intimacy. Stuck in Milwaukee, the narrator cobbles together a living by bartending and catering weddings, enmeshed in a semiaffair with a younger, married man. Cruising apps while tallying his youthful romantic failures, he fantasizes about disappearance but finds both solace and frustration in his friendships with Charlie, an aging punk who was prominent in the 1990s Chicago queercore scene, and Greer, a painter who never broke through but continues making work.