The Things We've Seen

Francis Laurie Schaffer—an artist in her mid-40s—has recently separated from her husband after a two-decade long marriage and has fallen in love with a polyamorous young man who doesn’t fully reciprocate her feelings. In an attempt to express her dissatisfaction, she begins writing about the relationships between the people she imagines belong to her polycule. But things begin to shift into a game of mirrors when Francis meets some of the people she’s written about. A series of events will then culminate with Francis and her friends crashing the 40th birthday party of her husband’s new girlfriend. A disastrous outcome serves as a rite of passage, delivering the protagonists onto the other side of that experience with a transformed sense of self.

The selected journals of trans, mixed-race artist and dyke erotica writer Red Jordan Arobateau.

Best known for his erotic lesbian fiction, Red Jordan Arobateau was also a prolific painter who maintained and self-published a journal for roughly twenty years, documenting his experiences at the “abject bottom” of life in the US. Edited and introduced by poet and scholar Cameron Awkward-Rich with a foreword by Michelle Tea and paintings by Arobateau, Time Also Will Make It Interesting captures Arobateau’s life as a young dyke in the criminalized cultures of 1950s-60s gay bars of Chicago and New York; his transition from dyke to trans man in late 1990s San Francisco; and his return to painting and an unfolding spirituality within that rapidly gentrifying city. 

Queerly messy, ornery, and stuffed with Arobateau’s wisdom, this volume is what he might have called, “a novel combined with a journal—da novel/journal! Taking all the liberty in the world! A domain where verse can be inserted, dreams recorded, my everyday political rants printed out, combined with my forté—fiction! All under one binding & title!”

Foreword by Michelle Tea.

The Activist begins in the middle of a revolution. There is a protesting group of commuters with a missing leader. There is a bridge that may or may not have been bombed. People speak in nonsense and cannot stop themselves. In the midst of all this, the language of news reporters mixes with the language of confession. The art of this beautifully written book is in how it touchingly illustrates that relations between humans and cities are linked in a more complex interface than most realize. The book is full of entrances and exist, alternate routes and incommensurate geographies. The Activist does not analyze or explain the hopeful desires of protest at the turn of the century, but it does enable us to see them differently. — Juliana Spahr

"Whether this is a dream in which I'm captured or I've been captured and made to think I'm in a dream, I can't figure." Apropos to the rapturous tension The Activist evokes. A covert narrative operating as an event disguised as a repot. A grass trap glimpsed through the lashes of a sleepwalker. Topography of disrupted positionality, reflection girders flaccid memory against the romantic high up. Flea-bitten news and neuralgic placards. You are here**. Is dreaming the medium for crossing the ambiguous borders of talk, responsibility, collectivity, solitude? Or does reading anatomize a phantom bridge that carries you over to an unmappable reality and calls you by your secret name? Root, plan and faction, armed with tongue-tied intensity. You may ask how Renee Gladman knows that this city of slippage is your city, how she holds you within it, riveted. And therein lies the magic of this book. — Tisa Bryant

A vivid, haunting tale of intergenerational trauma and survival under Israeli occupation. 

A New Arab Book of the Year 2021.

The year is 1968. The recent Arab defeat in the Naksa has led to the loss of all of historic Palestine. In the midst of violent political upheaval, Mahmoud, a young Palestinian boy living in the Galilee, embarks on a school trip to visit the West Bank for the first time.

For Mahmoud, his mother and his grandmother, the journey sets off a flood of memories, tracing moments that bond three generations together. How do these personal experiences become collective history? Why do some feel guilty for surviving war? Is it strange to long for a time never lived?

In this groundbreaking novella, Yara Hawari harnesses the enduring power of memory in defiance of the constrictions on Palestinian life. Against a system bent on the erasure of their people, the family’s perseverance is unbroken in the decades-long struggle for their stone house.

Yara Hawari is a Palestinian writer and political commentator. She completed her PhD in Middle East Politics at the University of Exeter, where her research focused on oral history and Indigenous Studies. She currently works as a senior analyst at Al-Shabaka, a Palestinian think tank. The Stone House is her first book.

A warm-spirited elegy to an abandoned work, brilliantly comic and wryly contemplative, by one of the great artist-investigators of our time.

Originally published in 2008 in the groundbreaking Atelos series, To After That (TOAF) introduced a new kind of writing—somewhere between criticism and memoir and philosophy—that Renee Gladman has continued to explore in books like Calamities and My Lesbian Novel.

TOAF is a recuperative song, an effort to give space and life to an abandoned project, but it is also, itself, a beautiful meditation on process and distance and duration, and a reminder that time is the subject of any writing.