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Cover of Tone

Columbia University Press

Tone

Kate Zambreno , Sofia Samatar

€22.00

Tone is a collaborative study of literary tone, exploring its implications for community, politics, and ecology.

Both granular and global, infusing a text with feeling, tone is so difficult to pin down that responses to it often take the vague form of "I know it when I see it." In Tone, a cooperative authorial voice under the name of the Committee to Investigate Atmosphere begins from the premise that tone is relational, belonging to shared experience rather than a single author, and should be approached through a communal practice. In partnership, the Committee explores the atmospheres emanating from texts by Nella Larsen, W. G. Sebald, Heike Geissler, Hiroko Oyamada, Mieko Kanai, Bhanu Kapil, Franz Kafka, Renee Gladman, and others, attending to the chafing of political irritation, the hunger of precarious and temporary work, and the lonely delights of urban and suburban walks.

This study treats a variety of questions: How is tone filtered through translation? Can a text hold the feelings that pass between humans and animals? What can attention to literary tone reveal about shared spaces such as factories, universities, and streets and the clashes and connections that happen there? Searching and conversational, Tone seeks immersion in literary affect to convey the experience of reading-and living-together.

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Cover of Incubation

Kelsey Street Press

Incubation

Bhanu Kapil

Non-fiction €23.00

New edition of this long out of-print classic of diasporic literature, featuring a forward by Eunsong Kim, an afterword by Emgee Dufresne, and new endnotes by Bhanu Kapil.

Incubation: a space for monsters is a formally innovative, hybrid-genre book that incorporates poetry and prose. Set in a shifting narrative environment, where human bodies, characters, and text are neither one thing nor another, this fragmentary-diaristic text journeys through the spaces in-between. Originally published in America in 2006 by Leon Works, and out of print for the last seven years, this is the first time this seminal text has been available in the UK.

Following protagonist Laloo – Cyborg, girl, mother, child, immigrant, settler – on a roadtrip through American landscapes, genre styles, and form, Incubation creates radical space for what is ‘monstrous’. Appropriating iconic American tropes, and the structure of Jack Kerouac’s On the Road, Incubation explores the challenges faced by immigrants in attaining such notions of freedom in so hostile an environment. In this fragmentary document there is a celebration in the cobbling together of lives; global in scope, with an intimate focus on interior voice, this landmark text evidences the early innovations and talents of this T.S. Eliot prizewinning author.

Cover of The Touch Report

Book Works

The Touch Report

Katrina Palmer

‘Katrina Palmer’s The Touch Report asks a question that remains in motion for the duration of this extraordinary book. What is here?  What’s still here?  Here, Palmer writes an account of subjugation that is gestural, an on-going sequence of expulsions and punctures…  Is there a kind of writing so transient it’s barely there?  In Palmer’s writing, we encounter an ethics of presence and form that is deeply moving, completely and unbearably real.’ — Bhanu Kapil, author of How To Wash A Heart

An artist is invited to take up residency in a gallery filled with historical paintings. They are meticulously crafted, maintained, and revered. She begins to make an audit of the paintings, outlining the depictions of violence, subjugation and physical tension on public display. Eleven arrows in a torso, someone’s hair cut as they sleep, a man nailed to a cross. Horses, decapitations, memorable lobsters. 

Written in sparse, urgent fragments that invite closer reading, The Touch Report, turns the reader’s gaze into the dark, to question our notions of ‘civilisation’. 

Want to see something real, says the artist as she creeps through the darkness, keeping a log.

Katrina Palmer was commissioned by the National Gallery, London, as part of the 2024 National Gallery Artist in Residence Programme in collaboration with the Contemporary Art Society, generously supported by Anna Yang and Joseph Schull. This book is published as a result of research made during this residency.

Cover of Spells: 21st Century Occult Poetry

Spiral House

Spells: 21st Century Occult Poetry

Sarah Shin, Rebecca Tamas

Poetry €17.00

Spells are poems; poetry is spelling.

Spell-poems take us into a realm where words can influence the universe.

Spells brings together over forty contemporary voices exploring the territory where justice, selfhood and the imagination meet the transformative power of the occult. These poems unmake the world around them, so that it might be remade anew.

Kaveh Akbar, Rachael Allen, Nuar Alsadir, Khairani Barokka, Emily Berry, A.K. Blakemore, Jen Calleja, Anthony V. Capildeo, Elinor Cleghorn, CAConrad, Nia Davies, Paige Emery, Livia Franchini, Alexis Pauline Gumbs, Will Harris, Caspar Heinemann, Lucy Ives, Rebecca May Johnson, Bhanu Kapil, Amy Key, Daisy Lafarge, Dorothea Lasky, Francesca Lisette, Canisia Lubrin, Karen McCarthy Woolf, Lucy Mercer, Hoa Nguyen, Precious Okoyomon, Rebecca Perry, Nat Raha, Nisha Ramayya, Ariana Reines, Sophie Robinson, Erica Scourti, Sarah Shin, Himali Singh Soin, Tai Shani, Rebecca Tamás, Bones Tan Jones, Dolly Turing, Jane Yeh, Flora Yin Wong

Introduced by So Mayer
Afterword by Sarah Shin

Cover of Juice

Kelsey Street Press

Juice

Renee Gladman

Poetry €15.00

Juice is Renee Gladman's first full-length book. Gladman wields an idiosyncratic skill with description and characters that draw praise and attention from her contemporaries. Juice describes a world where seemingly minor obsessions and details (like the narrator's almost random preference for juice) can structure and develop an entire story, down to its tone and style. As her narrator puts it: "So far it has been sex and leaves that keep me alive."

Cover of Imaginary Languages: Myths, Utopias, Fantasies, Illusions, and Linguistic Fictions (paperback)

The MIT Press

Imaginary Languages: Myths, Utopias, Fantasies, Illusions, and Linguistic Fictions (paperback)

Marina Yaguello

In Imaginary Languages, Marina Yaguello explores the history and practice of inventing languages, from religious speaking in tongues to politically utopian schemes of universality to the discoveries of modern linguistics. She looks for imagined languages that are autonomous systems, complete unto themselves and meant for communal use; imaginary, and therefore unlike both natural languages and historically attested languages; and products of an individual effort to lay hold of language. Inventors of languages, Yaguello writes, are madly in love: they love an object that belongs to them only to the extent that they also share it with a community.

Yaguello investigates the sources of imaginary languages, in myths, dreams, and utopias. She takes readers on a tour of languages invented in literature from the sixteenth to the twentieth century, including that in More's Utopia, Leibniz's "algebra of thought," and Bulwer-Lytton's linguistic fiction. She examines the linguistic fantasies (or madness) of Georgian linguist Nikolai Marr and Swiss medium Hélène Smith; and considers the quest for the true philosophical language. Yaguello finds two abiding (and somewhat contradictory) forces: the diversity of linguistic experience, which stands opposed to unifying endeavors, and, on the other hand, features shared by all languages (natural or not) and their users, which justifies the universalist hypothesis.

Recent years have seen something of a boom in invented languages, whether artificial languages meant to facilitate international communication or imagined languages constructed as part of science fiction worlds. In Imaginary Languages (an updated and expanded version of the earlier Les Fous du langage, published in English as Lunatic Lovers of Language), Yaguello shows that the invention of language is above all a passionate, dizzying labor of love.

Cover of Salvage: Readings from the Wreck

FSG Books

Salvage: Readings from the Wreck

Dionne Brand

Dionne Brand explores English and American literature, and the colonial aesthetic that shaped her sense of self and the world, of what was possible and what was not.

In Salvage: Readings from the Wreck, Dionne Brand’s first major book of nonfiction since her classic A Map to the Door of No Return, the acclaimed poet and novelist offers a bracing look at the intersections of reading and life, and what remains in the wreck of empire. Blending literary criticism and autobiography-as-artifact, Brand reads Aphra Behn’s Oroonoko, Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe, and Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park, among other still widely studied works, to explore encounters with colonial, imperialist, and racist tropes from the seventeenth to the nineteenth centuries—tropes that continue in new forms today. Brand vividly shows how contemporary practices of reading and writing are shaped by the narrative structures of these and related works, and explores how, in the face of this, one writes a narrative of Black life that attends to its own consciousness and expression.

With the power and eloquence of a great poet coupled with the rigor of a deep and subtle thinker, Brand reveals how she learned to read the literature of two empires, British and American, in an anticolonial light—in order to survive, and in order to live.

This is the library, the wreck, and the potential for salvage she offers us now, in a brilliant, groundbreaking, and essential work.

Cover of Notes on Conceptualisms

Ugly Duckling Presse

Notes on Conceptualisms

Vanessa Place, Robert Fitterman

Poetry €16.00

What is conceptual writing, how does it differ from Conceptual Art, what are some of the dominant forms of conceptualism,where does an impure or hybrid conceptualism fit in, what about the baroque, what about the prosody of procedure, what are the links between appropriation and conceptual writing, how does conceptual writing rely on a new way of reading, a “thinkership” that can shift the focus away from the text and onto the concept, what is the relationship between conceptual writing and technology or information culture, and why has this tendency taken hold in the poetry community now? What follows, then, is a collection of notes, aphorisms, quotes and inquiries on conceptual writing. We have co-authored this text through correspondence, shared reading interests, and similar explorations. Notes on Conceptualisms is far from a definitive text, and much closer to a primer, a purposefully incomplete starting place, where readers, hopefully, can enter so as to participate.