Books

Saidiya Hartman traces the history of the Atlantic slave trade by recounting a journey she took along a slave route in Ghana. Following the trail of captives from the hinterland to the Atlantic coast, she reckons with the blank slate of her own genealogy and vividly dramatizes the effects of slavery on three centuries of African and African American history.

Saidiya Hartman, professor of English and comparative literature at Columbia University, is a scholar of African American literature and cultural history.

Preface by Maboula Soumahoro.

Translated from the English (American) by Maboula Soumahoro (original title: Lose Your Mother. A Journey Along The Atlantic Slave Route, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2007).

This new body of work consists of paintings featuring heart-headed figures in various emotional states and situations that sometimes teeter between the ordinary and extraordinary. From tender amorous moments to unexpected skate scenes, the work is full of the next iteration of emotive "schmoo" characters.

Mark Gonzales ("The Gonz") is an American artist and professional skateboarder best known for his profound contribution to the development of street skateboarding from the mid-1980s onward. Gonzales' creative outlook is evident in his ability to perform inventive new tricks using the existing framework of urban architecture like handrails, stairs, and ledges. His artwork grew out of the same environment as his skateboarding and includes illustrating zines, which often have surreal and humorous characters, as well as producing and collaborating on projects with Harmony Korine and Spike Jonze. Born on June 1, 1968 in South Gate, CA, he began skateboarding by the age of 13 and formed the company Blind Skateboards in 1989. While pursuing his sporting career, the artist began drawing in his free time and created graphics for Krooked Skateboards. Since then, he has collaborated with the clothing brand Supreme and Adidas to name just a few. He lives and works in New York.

Hechtmappen bieden geen soelaas is wat overbleef na een vakantiejob waarbij de taakinhoud vooral bestond uit het verwijderen van nietjes uit verouderde documenten. Deze weken waren de bron voor fascinaties voor ongemakkelijke stiltes, gesprekken in liften, de diefstal van fluorescerende pennen en een ontplofte ventilator. 

Dictee is the best-known work of the multidisciplinary Korean American artist Theresa Hak Kyung Cha. This restored edition features the original cover and high-quality reproductions of the interior layout as Cha intended them. Produced in partnership with the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive, this version of Dictee faithfully renders the book as an art object in its authentic form.

A formative text of modern Asian American literature, Dictee is a dynamic autobiography that tells the story of several women: the Korean revolutionary Yu Guan Soon, Joan of Arc, Demeter and Persephone, Cha's mother Hyung Soon Huo (a Korean born in Manchuria to first-generation Korean exiles),and Cha herself. Cha's work manifests in nine parts structured around the Greek Muses. Deploying a variety of texts, documents, images, and forms of address and inquiry, Cha links these women's stories to explore the trauma of dislocation and the fragmentation of memory it causes. The result is an enduringly powerful, beautiful, unparalleled work.

Abandoned by their Dutch partner after giving up their home and their job to follow him to the Netherlands, humanities scholar Seasonal finds themself single in a strange place for the first time in a decade. 

Dipping into the rabbit hole of digital eroticism, Seasonal soon meets László, a male sub who volleys back their cerebral sexts and is seeking a  dominant guide. His dating-app profile—a photo of Foucault and the  ingenuous greeting “Hello, World?”—thinly veils his desire to be annihilated. It's a desire that Seasonal senses they can fulfill. But to do this means crossing the frightening gap between their desires and capacities.  

Seasonal and László embark on an experiment in remaking intimacy outside the Republic of Gender. But as it continues, the two realize they are staging separate confrontations with domination: Seasonal finds they must confront their own relation to the violence and anger that marked their upbringing in working-class, small-town Australia, while László stages his own confrontation with his  decision to leave Viktor Orbán’s Hungary. As they attempt to improvise a  theater of domination that opens up possibilities of reciprocity, the energies of their sexuality stalk this collaboration, threatening to give them exactly what they bargained or begged for. 

A feminist paean to perversity in the tradition of Pauline Réage’s Story of O and Anaïs Nin's Delta of Venus, Anna Poletti's hello, world? dares to fully inhabit female power, and to fully face the violence, beauty, and uncharted territories of human sexuality.

Jocelyn Saidenberg's third book of poetry begins in a "dusky" wood, but instead of descending to hell she journeys through the negativity of earthly relations. We hear of friends, lovers, and a declining country—all filtered by a consciousness equally troubled by its own suffering and the suffering of others. Saidenberg has written some of the most accomplished, grounded and reflective poetry of the last decade. She is previously the author of CUSP (2001) and MORTAL CITY (1998), and the founder and publisher of Krupskaya Books.

Caribbean Carnivals have been taking place around the UK since 1959. These joyous celebrations of culture and community began as acts of resistance in the face of enslavement — a defiant stand from communities who refused to lose who they were and where they came from.

Drawing from this rich and radical history, Aisling Serrant explores Carnival through one of its most vibrant and unmissable features: costume. First turned to by former slaves in the Caribbean as an act of reclamation and quiet resistance, with roots in West African and European masquerade alike, the colourful costumes of Carnival weekend remain a vital mode of self-expression, protest, and camaraderie. From Canboulay to Leeds and Notting Hill, the costume makers, wearers, and the communities they attract, embody Carnival in the spirit of an expression used across the Caribbean to signify unity among nations and peoples: all ah we is one.

‘Palestine is everywhere because it names a political subject of radical universal emancipation,’ writes teacher and writer Nasser Abourahme. In Palestine is everywhere, writers, thinkers, poets and artists map the Palestinian struggle for freedom and its global resonances.

Vital dispatches from Gaza, essays, poems, protest chronicles, images and letters from prison reflect upon resistance, solidarity and the right to self-determination. Amid a world-historical moment marked by unknowability and loss, this collection offers essential reading for those interested in Palestinian liberation.

This collection is edited by Skye Arundhati Thomas, with contributions from Alaa Abd El-Fattah, Nasser Abourahme, Amal Al-Nakhala, Muhammad Al-Zaqzouq, Maisara Baroud, Ahmed Bassiouny, Houria Bouteldja, Anees Ghanima, Sahar Khalifeh, Laleh Khalili, Lujayn, Mira Mattar, Lina Meruane, Mohammed Mhawish, Nahil Mohana, Rahul Rao, Nasser Rabah, Adam Rouhana, Ahmad Zaghmouri.

Co-published by TBA21.

All royalties from this project will be donated to Medical Aid for Palestinians (MAP) and The Arab Group for the Protection of Nature (APN).

A facsimile of the GALA Committee's mock auction catalog for an artistic intervention into the props and plots of Melrose Place.

Originally published in a limited run in 1998, Primetime Contemporary Art documented In the Name of the Place, a radical two-year intervention by a group of artists, initiated by Mel Chin and known as the GALA Committee, on the primetime television show Melrose Place. This extremely rare artist's book is reproduced for the first time as a facsimile edition.

The artists comprising the GALA Committee worked with the producers of Melrose Place to develop a series of political works that were used as props and plot devices across two seasons of the show, providing surreptitious commentary on reproductive rights, HIV/AIDS, the Gulf War, domestic terrorism, corporate malfeasance and substance abuse. Some of these topics were banned by the FCC at the time, and the group's works allowed for the artists and the show to create political commentary that went unnoticed by censors. The artworks they produced were exhibited at the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art in 1997 and then sold at an auction at Sotheby's to support several charities. Primetime Contemporary Art was created by Mel Chin and Helen Nagge as a mock auction catalog documenting the artwork made for the show and the conceptual framework of the GALA Committee.

Wet is an anthology of queer and trans writing about water. 

Our contributors swim pools, lakes and oceans, visit islands, coasts and hottubs. The water they describe is soft and hard, it erodes old rocks and old gender, it is a place to fall in wet love, it hides witches.

Contributors: Arlo Kean, Clara Davis, Eliot Walloschek, Finn Brown, Isabella Redmayne, Lizzie Rose, Lucie Arnoux, So Mayer, Tadhg Haran, Tallulah Griffith, Troy Cabida

Jochen Lempert brings his signature blend of scientific sensitivity and poetic vision to the remote Greek island of Kastellorizo.

Known for his black-and-white photographs and background in biology, Lempert turns his lens to the subtle presences of animal, vegetal, and mineral life on this isolated Mediterranean outpost.

Through a series of quietly observational images, Lempert documents the island's micro-ecologies with a field biologist's care and an artist's attunement to form and chance. As always, he eschews dramatic framing and post-production, relying on natural light, analog processes, and an acute sense of timing. 

What emerges is a slow, intimate portrait of a place, where natural history and everyday life are entangled, where the ephemeral and the enduring coexist. Not only a record of a particular geography, Local Ecology. Kastellorizo delves into themes of observation, belonging, and the delicate ecosystems that support life in isolated places.

The photographs included in this publication were taken in the summer of 2019 during a residency at La Società delle Api in Kastellorizo, Greece, based on an idea by Cristiano Raimondi.

Jochen Lempert (born 1958 in Moers) is a German photographer. Trained as a biologist specializing in dragonflies, he began his career as a photographer in 1989, at the age of 31, developing an artistic practice based on this scientific heritage, marked by images of nature where the animal and vegetal go hand in hand.

STILL LIFE is an online and printed zine about relationships and configurations in which one person is still while others are not. Or where one person is passive and others are active. It’s about how we put ourselves in other people’s hands. Or how we are put in other people’s hands. It’s about care and power and vulnerability and agency. And other things not so clearly named. It’s about the different kinds of knowledge that people have about their own and other people’s bodies. And the kind of philosophical and political understandings woven into that knowledge.

Is it the computerization of the planet
Or a loosening of my fidelity to suffering
I don’t understand the intensity
I’ve hidden here but I know I despaired
Of finding a physical place to keep
My tears. Now what. Seas that go turquoise
When you stop looking at them . . .
 
Wrestling with the mind of war, at times shocking in its self-analysis, Wave of Blood is a furious and sincere essay, an eclipse notebook, a family chronicle, all told in the poetry of witness.

Praise for Ariana Reines:

Ariana Reines is a go-for-broke artist who honors her traditions by being like no one else. Some of us have made a fetish of our stupidity, pretending to forget history, and some of us have made a fetish of despair, congratulating ourselves on melancholia, but Ariana is too brilliant and too alive for either of those sad luxuries... I am convinced of the authenticity of the summonses she receives and the summonses she issues and when I read her I am reminded that all of this is a calling before it's an identity or career. Her voice-which is always more than hers alone is a dialectic between the very ancient and the bleeding edge. - Ben Lerner

Reines's books are works of intellectual commitment and structural sophistication; at the same time, they allow the raw stuff of being, in all its messiness, to enter the page. -The White Review

Mind-blowing. - Kim Gordon

Her writing is queer and raunchy, raw and occult, seemingly never pulling away from her deepest vulnerabilities. Yet Reines simultaneously maintains a feeling of epic poetry, of ancient intention. She moves between worlds in search of the divine and the self. - The New York Times

These are the kinds of poems that reorient you in the world, make you understand how little you know, but how much is inside you. - NYLON

From the 1970s through the 1990s more than one hundred feminist bookstores built a transnational network that helped shape some of feminism's most complex conversations. Kristen Hogan traces the feminist bookstore movement's rise and eventual fall, restoring its radical work to public feminist memory. The bookwomen at the heart of this story—mostly lesbians and including women of color—measured their success not by profit, but by developing theories and practices of lesbian antiracism and feminist accountability.

At bookstores like BookWoman in Austin, the Toronto Women's Bookstore, and Old Wives' Tales in San Francisco, and in the essential Feminist Bookstore News, bookwomen changed people's lives and the world. In retelling their stories, Hogan not only shares the movement's tools with contemporary queer antiracist feminist activists and theorists, she gives us a vocabulary, strategy, and legacy for thinking through today's feminisms.

Winter Night Rabbit Worries is Yoo Heekyung’s fifth poetry collection, published in Korean in 2023. Structured as a series of stories, the book presents narrative and linguistic architectures that dissolve the opposition between those materials that construct the this and the that side of life—past and future, truth and falsehood, memory and fantasy. As readers move from one story to another, they will encounter a dizzying yet tender experience in which the boundaries between self and other unravel, and new stories begin to take shape.

“The story arrives like an overcoat emerging from a blizzard, its shoulders heavy with worries piled like snow. You shake off the snow, remove your wet coat, and pause to warm yourself by the stove. That pause is where Yoo Heekyung’s poems come into being: a moment when a kind heart stands quietly by the stove with its back turned to us.” —Kim So Yeon

Yoo Heekyung (b. 1980) is an acclaimed Korean poet, playwright, and essayist. He is the author of over ten collections of poetry and prose, including Today’s Morning Vocabulary (『오늘 아침 단어』), Photography and Poetry (『사진과 시』), and And Next Spring We Will (『이다음 봄에 우리는』). He is a playwright with the theater company dock (독) and a member of the poetry collective jaknan (작란). A recipient of Today’s Young Artist Award from the South Korean Ministry of Culture and Hyundae Munhak Literary Award (2020), Yoo lives in Seoul where he runs the poetry bookshop and project space wit n cynical.

Stine An is a poet, translator, and performer in New York City. Her poems and translations appear in Best Literary Translations 2024, Poem-a-Day, Best Experimental Writing 2018, Words Without Borders, Asymptote, and elsewhere. A 2024 NEA Translation Fellow and 2022–2023 Emerge—Surface—Be Fellow, Stine is the author of SMMER CRSH (Sarabande Books) and the translator of Today’s Morning Vocabulary by Yoo Heekyung (Zephyr Press).

Rage is not just a feeling—it’s fuel.

The Hajar Book of Rage ignites the first spark in the elements anthology series, harnessing the primordial force of fire as a fury that destroys and transforms. Bringing together fiction, poetry and essays by writers of colour, this Fire-themed collection delves into the fierce, animating power of rage as a catalyst for revolutionary change.

Here, rage teaches. It reveals what we’re fighting against and what we’re fighting for. It mobilises us into action, rouses our ideals and refuses to let us compromise. And it is unruly and consuming—a blaze that resists containment.

This is a searing tribute to the fires of anger that fuel our resistance and burn down the worlds that cannot hold us.

The Hajar Book of Rage is the first book in elements, a series by Hajar Press on the politically transformative power of Fire, Earth, Water and Air.

fanta for the ghosts by Elisabeth Molin

120mm x 210mm
edition of 500

Co-published with OneThousandBooks and Elisabeth Molin

In Dodie Bellamy's imagined "sequel" to Bram Stoker's fin de siècle masterpiece Dracula, Van Helsing's plain Jane secretarial adjunct, Mina Harker, is recast as a sexual, independent woman living in San Francisco in the 1980s. The vampire Mina Harker, who possesses the body of author Dodie Bellamy, confesses the most intimate details of her relationships with four vastly different men through past letters. Simultaneously, a plague is let loose in San Francisco-the plague of AIDS.

Bigger-than-life, half goddess, half Bette Davis, Mina sends letter after letter to friends and co-conspirators, holding her reader captive through a display of illusion and longing. Juggling quivering vulnerability on one hand and gossip on the other, Mina spoofs and consumes and spews back up demented reembodiments of trash media and high theory alike. It's all fodder for her ravenous libido and "a messy ambiguous place where pathology meets pleasure." Sensuous and captivating, The Letters of Mina Harker describes one woman's struggles finding the right words to explain her desires and fears without confining herself to one identity.

With a preface by Reni Eddo-Lodge and an introduction by Sara Ahmed.
Audre Lorde (1934-92) described herself as ‘Black, lesbian, mother, warrior, poet’. Born in New York, she had her first poem published while still at school and her last the year she died of cancer. Her extraordinary belief in the power of language – of speaking – to articulate selfhood, confront injustice and bring about change in the world remains as transformative today as it was then, and no less urgent. This edition brings Lorde’s essential poetry, speeches and essays, including ‘The Master’s Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master’s House’, together in one volume for the first time.

Strange Biology, Charlotte Strange’s first chapbook, opens with a social media advertisement marketing a probiotic as an alternative to the “nuclear bomb” of antibacterial acne medication. As Strange investigates the treatment of the human body as a landscape submissive to medical intervention, they ruminate on the contemporary relationship between microbes, gut-directed medical technologies, and capitalism’s encroachment on life. Drawing on the vernacular of social media marketing, they deftly oscillate between instructive and personal registers, stretching the private across a nexus of microbial interminglings. Strange Biology reflects on the semiotic science of the gut: how the language of medicine defines the mutating edges of the human body. 

A Mouth Holds Many Things collects hybrid-literary works from 36 women and nonbinary BIPOC writer-artists. Spanning experimental poetry and prose, image-text, collage, performance text, AI-generated writing, and more, this ground-breaking full-color print volume illuminates and expands the interstitial spaces where text blends, blurs, and morphs with visual and other media.

At the restless heart of this collection is a challenge to some fundamental questions: What is reading? What is writing? Lifting language beyond the domain of the letter, the works collected here present language in other forms: visual, embodied, sonic, asemic, tactile. Language, after all, is multi-textu(r)al, interwoven, punctured, fragmented, grafted, possessing power to construct and deconstruct, fed into by many rivers of experience: marginalizations and migrations, diasporas and displacements, invisibilities and hyper-visibilities.

A project of the Portland-based literary-social art project, De-Canon, which creates unique spaces and experiments to center works by writers of color, this collection is edited by Dao Strom and Jyothi Natarajan.

A Mouth Holds Many Things was, in the short stories/poetry/anthologies category, the winner of a 2024 PubWest Book Design Award.

Full list of contributors

Stephanie Adams-Santos, Kimberly Alidio, Samiya Bashir, Aya Bram, Victoria Chang, Jennifer S. Cheng, Gabrielle Civil, desveladas (Macarena Hernández, Sheila Maldonado, Nelly Rosario), Carolina Ebeid, Nadia Haji Omar, Christine Shan Shan Hou, Imani Elizabeth Jackson, Vi Khi Nao, Diana Khoi Nguyen, Quyên Nguyễn-Hoàng, Cindy Juyoung Ok, Monica Ong, Shin Yu Pai, Jenne Hsien Patrick, Jennifer Perrine, Alley Pezanoski-Browne, Kelly Puig, Ayesha Raees, Jhani Randhawa, Paisley Rekdal, Daisuke Shen, Sasha Stiles, Sandy Tanaka, Arianne True, Addie Tsai, Vauhini Vara, Divya Victor, Anna Martine Whitehead, Kathy Wu

Publication documenting the research made by Dora García for a video project on Oscar Masotta, pioneer of Lacanian psychoanalysis in Latin America and influential art critic.

It features a selection of Masotta's writings as well as contextual essays on his work.Segunda Vez is an art research project centered on the figure of Oscar Masotta (Buenos Aires, 1930, Barcelona, 1979), an author of groundbreaking texts about the Happening, art, and dematerialization, a pioneer of Lacanian psychoanalysis in the Spanish-speaking world, and a happenista. The project has yielded a full-length and four medium-length films by Dora García, two Cahiers documenting the research, and this book. Segunda Vez: How Masotta Was Repeated offers a selection of Masotta's writings, including his early study of Argentinean author Roberto Arlt, as well as texts that contextualize Masotta's thought and broaden the reach of his reflections on the intersections between performance and psychoanalysis, art and politics.

Edited by Emiliano Battista.
Texts by Dora García, Oscar Masotta, Roberto Bolaño, Jorge Jinkis, Inés Katzenstein, Ana Longoni, Emiliano Battista, Aaron Schuster, Julio Cortázar.

English edition

13,5 x 21 cm (hardcover)

320 pages (color & b/w ill.)

Movement Research announces Issue 52/53 of its print publication, the Movement Research Performance Journal. For this issue, Sovereign Movements: Native Dance and Performance, guest editor, choreographer Rosy Simas invited writer, Ahimsa Timoteo Bodhrán, to work with her. Together they assembled contributors from Native and Indigenous communities to reflect upon their practices, the historical conditions out of which they operate as well as movement, performance, and choreography as a socio-political project. Just as it is important for physical institutions to acknowledge that they sit upon occupied land of Native and Indigenous people, so too must institutions of history, practice, and epistemology acknowledge their occupation of knowledge and memory.

Throughout this issue, dance and movement is posited as a powerful strategy against settler-colonial mindsets and as an effective tool against erasure of Native and Indigenous cultural traditions. These pages discuss the importance of Native sovereignty and analyze various histories of resistance to settler-colonialism. Artists in the issue propose alternative artistic models to probe the roles of art and artists in society towards a more expansive constellation that fundamentally critiques the Western reward system in culture as well as the often celebrated cult of authorship.

From its anatomy and autonomy to its death and diet, this issue focuses on the motif Body and all its meanings, direct and indirect, for instance as in relation to human and non-human bearers of bodies, its inhabitants like bacteria and organs, its social, medical and juridical conditions, its intoxications, chemical processes, traumas, transitions, well-being, replacements, weaknesses, and its opposites.

Contributors: Adam Dickinson, Andrea Éva Győri, A.L. Steiner, Alexandra Ivanciu, Barak Zemer, Bernhard Willhelm, Clara Lena Langenbach, Clémentine Bedos, Constance DeJong, Daisy Hildyard, Fanny Howe, Hanne Loreck, Hasti, Holly Hunter, Ingrid Jäger, Jannis Marwitz, Jess Arndt, Johannes Kuczera, Jolanta Nowaczyk, Henriette Maier, Mag Gabbert, Maja Smrekar, Manuel Vason, R.I.P. Germain, Rebekka Endler, Sonja Yakovleva 

Within the format of a magazine, each page of Pfeil represents the floor, walls, or ceiling which together create an imagined room displaying a printed exhibition. Each issue is dedicated to a specific word, and artists are invited and given space to work on and with this term, and to construct or deconstruct the architecture around it. Combined, the contributions transform into an organic display surrounding the leitmotif.