Books

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.

What words made this world of captivity and extinction? If written language is a biological adaptation, how can a text reshape the environment? These are the questions at the heart of Grammar of the Cage, a startling first collection of poetry by Pam Ore. The Compulsive Reader calls Ore "a poet of great promise," and poet Eloise Klein Healy says she has found Ore's book "haunting but necessary...a stunning debut collection."

Grammar of the Cage is clean and heartbreaking as a bone, and yet, as poet Ingrid Wendt writes in her Introduction, "[like] Emily Dickinson, Ore's 'business' is 'to sing.' And sing she does."

When he was prevented from guiding a writing workshop, Quim Pujol resorted to collecting exercises for the participants to work with by themselves, either alone or in small groups. These exercises, suggestions and scores draw on a wide variety of sources, such as poetry, experimental literature, dance, popular performance practices, visual art and all kinds of text populating everyday life. Now expanded into a book, they are invitations to read, write and daydream, to ‘complicate our relationship to language’ and imagine texts in multiple guises. Potential literatures that give pause, redirect the attention or, at times, simply ‘produce a comforting doodle in the volatile palimpsest of human flesh’.

Quim Pujol is an experimental artist and curator working at the crossroads of language and live arts.

For decades, Fanny Howe has been the great poet of spirit and conscience, dislocation and bewilderment. In This Poor Book, completed just before her death, she assembled a selection of her writing from the last thirty years into a single, astonishing work.

Fanny Howe is a titan. Absolutely nobody writes like her. Nobody sounds like her. This Poor Book is a miracle she left for us. —Kaveh Akbar

This Poor Book is revelatory and casts Howe’s poetry in a new light, and for those who don’t know her work already, this is a perfect introduction. Fanny Howe is an essential poet. —Rae Armantrout

Fanny Howe spoke about “the difficulty of reconciling multiple registers of consciousness and language. Soul and sticky atoms.” In This Poor Book she delineates and shifts between these layers to conjure a bewildering yet ultimately galvanizing evocation of the human psyche. We are being warned every day that robots and software will soon replace us. Howe’s poetry makes clear that such a notion is based upon a very limited conception of what it is to be a human. We are complex. We are mysterious. We don’t make sense. We do make sense. You will lose and you will find yourself in her words. — Claire-Louise Bennett

This Poor Book is a testament to Fanny Howe’s life and writing. In it, she wields her powers of perception for a long poem that turns inward on the self and out at the world and in every other direction the poet can imagine with lines that speak directly and always suggest more than they say: “There is a little trouble in my eye.” The irony and beauty of its final line—“There was no more reason to die”—will be with me for as long as my memory of Fanny Howe herself. — Jericho Brown

In her final act of literary alchemy, Fanny Howe gathers the scattered constellations of her astonishing life work and forges them into a single unwavering spiritual reckoning. At the dynamic center of the poem, a live beating heart moves through a fractured world—haunted by power, estranged from institutions, yet fiercely open to mystery. There’s a radical humility here, paired with a radiant understanding—that doubt can be a form of faith, and that hope, when unflinching, is the most defiant music of all. This Poor Book is for the ages. — Peter Gizzi

This Poor Book is an astonishing document by an irreplaceable poet. A palimpsest of decades’ worth of writing, assembled here into a long poem as fractured and multitudinous as life itself, Fanny Howe’s last work captures the brutality and beauty of the modern world better than almost anything else I’ve read: “The structure failed to cohere at the end of the struggle. / It had some music in it.” — Maggie Millner

Through Fanny Howe's eyes we look at life differently. She makes us understand that we are part of a mysterious and complex world; one which we urgently need to be receptive to. Beauty appears in unexpectedness, as in “flowers attract scissors” and “why does an eye evolve in the dark?” Who else could turn things upside down with such a sleight of hand? This Poor Book reads like the testament of a newly discovered life-form, offering vital messages from the past and into the future. — Celia Paul

At once evocative and subtly incisive Howe’s writing seems almost like a new language, a language that has been in hiding. She can make the familiar haunting and the ordinary a provocation. — Adam Phillips

This gorgeous final statement by one of our most perceptual writers is a work of accrued understanding. ... Fanny Howe leaves us with profound investigations into the capacity of words, of juxtaposition, what a line, a page, and a book can give. — Sarah Schulman

In 1971, Michael Morris and Vincent Tarsov—founders of the Vancouver-based artist network Image Bank—invited Eric Metcalfe, Gary Lee Nova, Glenn Lewis and Paul Oberst to create their own, unique alphabet. NowForty years later, with the permission of the participating artists and the help of Image Bank, these historic silk-screened alphabets have finally been published together. The Alphabet Book is designed by Marc Hollenstein, who was inspired to reinitiate the alphabet publication project after having a conversation with Glenn Lewis during the opening of Lewis’ retrospective exhibition at Kunstverein back in 2014.

A comprehensive retrospective of the Spanish artist's work, covering his major exhibitions (Manifesta, Reina Sofia, MACBA, Raven Row, etc.) and including all of his texts published as fanzines over a period of twenty years, a new critical essay by Kim West, and a wide-ranging conversation.

Conceived as a compilation of works and writings of the last two decades, this book is structured as an alternating succession of four different registers: four recurrent modes. A long-form interview, a series of questions from different collaborators, documentation of a selection of projects, and a compilation of the facsimilia of the brochures published by the author since 2008. The aim of this concatenation of recurring sections is to delay the linear progression suggested by the narrative of a compilation, by the apparent causal string of decisions, ideas, references and works displayed as an accumulative "biography" of the artist's practice. However, this being a bound book, the suggestion of an interwoven relation between all the works, regardless of when, where or how they were made, must submit to the order locked by the sewn spine of its signatures, the folder of bound pages that forms each section of a book.

Designed by Filiep Tacq, the book includes an essay by Kim West and a long-form interview by Beatriz Herráez, punctuated by questions from Filiep Tacq, Lisa Tan, Jon Mikel Euba, Antonio Menchen, Alex Valijani, Johanna Gustafsson Fürst, Itziar Okariz, Olatz Otalora, Antonia Majaca, Pablo Lafuente and Koenraad Dedobbeleer.

In this wide-ranging and probing book Erin Manning extends her previous inquiries into the politics of movement to the concept of the minor gesture. The minor gesture, although it may pass almost unperceived, transforms the field of relations. More than a chance variation, less than a volition, it requires rethinking common assumptions about human agency and political action. To embrace the minor gesture's power to fashion relations, its capacity to open new modes of experience and manners of expression, is to challenge the ways in which the neurotypical image of the human devalues alternative ways of being moved by and moving through the world—in particular what Manning terms "autistic perception." Drawing on Deleuze and Guattari's schizoanalysis and Whitehead's speculative pragmatism, Manning's far-reaching analyses range from fashion to depression to the writings of autistics, in each case affirming the neurodiversity of the minor and the alternative politics it gestures toward.

I have been enthralled and held by this book! Erin Manning has given us a new theory of bearing, as well as a new elaboration of gesture, going beyond Balzac’s theory and Agamben’s interpretation of it. She doesn’t lament the loss of gesture but celebrates gesture's minoritization.
- Fred Moten

Michel Foucault offers an iconoclastic exploration of why we feel compelled to continually analyze and discuss sex, and of the social and mental mechanisms of power that cause us to direct the questions of what we are to what our sexuality is.

Infrastructural systems define our ways of seeing and responding to the world around us. Today, our everyday lives and visual cultures have become saturated by digital communications systems whose physical footprint has been rendered largely invisible from the public sphere.

In an age of ever-expanding computation and a foolish believe in AI’s utopian potential, resistance can seem futile. But if we detach our gaze from increasingly narrow realm of digital imaginaries, a new world of radically different infrastructural opportunities opens up in front of our eyes.

Street libraries, or Minibiebs, as they are called in Dutch, are an under-appreciated piece of urban technology. Part manifesto, part research note, this mini publication dives into the radical potential of public book sharing structures and what they might tell us about our broken information ecosystem. 

Printing: Risograph, Grafische Werkplaats Den Haag; Research and Photography: Livio Liechti; Design: Apsara Flury. 
First print run – May 2025: 35 copies.

In The Third Body, the poet, novelist, feminist critic, and theorist Hélène Cixous interweaves a loose narrative line with anecdotes, autobiography, lyricism, myth, dream, fantasy, philosophical insights, and intertextual citations of and conversations with other authors and thinkers. Cixous evokes the relationship of the female narrator and her lover, a relationship of alternating presences and absences, separations and rejoinings. This relationship assumes protean forms within a complex web of writing, creating a third body out of the entwined bodies of the narrator and her lover. 

Hélène Cixous is a professor emerita of literature and founder of the Centre d'études feminines, Paris VIII. Her numerous books include Stigmata, Three Steps on the Ladder of Writing, The Newly Born Woman, The Laugh of the Medusa, and Manhattan: Letters from Prehistory. In 2000, a collection in Cixous' name was created at the Bibliothèque nationale de France.

A novel of lesbian identity and motherhood, and the societal pressures that place them in opposition. 

The daughter of an illustrious French family whose members include a former Prime Minister, a model, and a journalist, Constance Debré abandoned her marriage and legal career in 2015 to write full-time and begin a relationship with a woman. Her transformation from affluent career woman to broke single lesbian was chronicled in her 2018 novel Play boy, praised by Virginie Despentes for its writing that is at once "flippant and consumed by anxiety."  

In Love Me Tender, Debré goes on to further describe the consequences of that life-changing decision. Her husband, Laurent, seeks to permanently separate her from their eight-year old child. Vilified in divorce court by her ex, she loses custody of her son and is allowed to see him only once every two weeks for a supervised hour. Deprived of her child, Debré gives up her two-bedroom apartment and bounces between borrowed apartments, hotel rooms, and a studio the size of a cell. She involves herself in brief affairs with numerous women who vary in age, body type, language, and lifestyle. But the closer she gets to them, the more distant she feels. Apart from cigarettes and sex, her life is completely ascetic: a regime of intense reading and writing, interrupted only by sleep and athletic swimming. She shuns any place where she might observe children, avoiding playgrounds and parks "as if they were cluster bombs ready to explode, riddling her body with pieces of shrapnel."  

Writing graphically about sex, rupture, longing, and despair in the first person, Debré's work is often compared with the punk-era writings of Guillaume Dustan and Herve Guibert, whose work she has championed. As she says of Guibert: "I love him because he says I and he's a pornographer. That seems to be essential when you write. Otherwise you don't say anything." But in Love Me Tender, Debré speaks courageously of love in its many forms, reframing what it means to be a mother beyond conventional expectations.

La nouvelle catastrophe subie par le peuple palestinien est pire que la Nakba de 1948. C'est le premier génocide perpétré par un État industriel avancé depuis 1945, avec la participation des États-Unis et la soutien de l'Occident, France incluse. Chercheur franco-libanais spécialiste du Moyen-Orient, auteur de nombreux ouvrages traduit en vingt langues et contributeur régulier au Monde diplomatique, Gilbert Achcar dévoile le processus historique qui a mené à ce génocide et mène une réflexion rigoureuse et documentée sur ses conséquences pour le peuple palestinien, les peuples de la région et pour l'ensemble des relations internationales.

« Quelques perles coulent entre ses doigts. Les récits de Larem se délient du temps que l’on connaît. Elle raconte, superpose, recule et avance, jouissant des temps qu’elle invoque. » 

Emma Berger-Pierre est artiste plasticienne et chercheuse. Dans son travail, elle reprend les objets de ses grands-parents pour tirer des récits familiaux de l’immigration algérienne, les enjeux liés aux guerres coloniales et aux banlieues françaises, plus particulièrement Mantes-la-Jolie. Liée à la silenciation de ces histoires et des violences, elle tisse les liens intimes et systémiques de continuation des stratégies et ambiance de guerre, et des résistances, qui se perpétuent dans les quartiers populaires et dans la sphère familiale. 

SABR/Collection est une série de publications qui rassemble des œuvres littéraires de format court et de genres variés. Dirigée par Nesrine Salem, la collection souhaite mettre en avant les macro-réalités des auteur·ices choisi·es pour rendre visible le caractère intersectionnel des luttes.

A sweeping centennial edition of Iran’s iconic twentieth-century poet of liberty, whose work shaped modern Persian poetry. Known for his political engagement and deep humanism, and his pivotal role in Persian poetry’s modernist turn toward free verse, Ahmad Shamlou (1925–2000) crafted poems that carried both lyrical intimacy and cultural force. A central, defiant voice in Iran’s modern literary history, Shamlou championed the power of poetry as an instrument of liberation. His work, long suppressed in his homeland, remains urgent for readers everywhere confronting censorship, exile, and erasure. This bilingual edition honors Shamlou’s centennial with the most expansive selection of his poetry to date in English, encompassing his wide thematic range: from fierce protest to intimate love, mythic storytelling to existential reflection. Niloufar Talebi’s vibrant translations and deeply researched commentary shine new light on Shamlou’s legacy and his relevance today.

Radical Rediscoveries: Performance Texts from the Women’s Theatre Movement 1969–1987 is the first of three volumes by Unfinished Histories as part of Montez Press imprint Scores, in collaboration with the Associate Artists programme at London Performance Studios. This collection brings together six seminal works of British alternative feminist and women’s theatre from the archive, with a contextual introductory text by Dr. Susan Croft, co-founder of Unfinished Histories.

The play texts included are: Vagina Rex and the Gas Oven by Jane Arden (1969), Go West Young Woman by Pam Gems (1974), Ophelia by Melissa Murray (1979), Minutes by Hesitate & Demonstrate (1979), Room by Natasha Morgan (1981) and The Wind of Change by Winsome Pinnock (1987).

Practicing Dying is a literary anti-memoir documenting life in a Zen Buddhist monastery in rural France where the protagonist, a woman in her late twenties, attempts to overcome chronic drug addiction and mental illness. 

Broken and severely unwell, our protagonist arrives at the monastery from London: starving, drug-addicted and disillusioned, having exhausted every conventional treatment route available to her. The book examines how, habituated to a life of benefits assessments, petty-crime and sex work, she struggles to adjust to the rules, discipline and religious life of the monastery—at times to devastating and comedic effect. 

As the story unfolds, she reflects on her addictions and past experiences, raising critical questions about what it means to be "an addict" and why there may be vested corporate and societal interests in maintaining a narrow, individualistic understanding of addiction. 

Anarchic and provocative, tender and self-deprecating, Practicing Dying differs from other contemporary memoirs in the genre of addiction-recovery by simultaneously challenging the dominant narratives surrounding mental health while proposing an alternative approach to treating the “sickness of self” from which we all increasingly suffer. 

‘Practicing Dying is brilliant, rewarding and difficult. Northall offers the most brazen and shocking account of addiction I’ve ever read. Committing herself to the practice of Mahayana Buddhism, she eventually finds a way out, but only on the most rambling, circuitious path. Her account of addiction and loss, displacement and grief is profound and it proves that nothing is ever one thing.’ — Chris Kraus, author of The Four Spent The Day Together

Charlotte Northall is a London-based writer. Her debut, Practicing Dying, blends autobiography and cultural criticism to explore addiction, capitalism, and spiritual practice. She works with rough sleepers, supporting those living with addiction and complex mental health needs.

If Aurora Mattia is a switchboard operator, then Unsex Me Here is her call log. Please hold. There’s someone on the other line. A spider, a sibyl, an angel, a mermaid, a goddess, or an ex-girlfriend.

Unsex Me Here is a prayer book tied together by the strings of a corset. Glamorous ramblers, haunted by the sense of another world drawing near, wander in and out of its inexplicable twilight. From a West Texas town with a supernatural past to a stalactite cavern in the birthplace of Aphrodite, from hotel rooms to gardens to the far horizon of a thought, they seek the source of the disturbance in their minds. Heartbreak is not so far from rapture; holy babble is another kind of gossip. Every pilgrimage is as dense with symbolism as it is refined by desire.

Dans Les liens qui empêchent, Sarah Schulman analyse la reproduction de l’homophobie au sein du cercle familial, quand bien même ce dernier devrait être le lieu du développement et de l’épanouissement de chacun·e.

En s’appuyant aussi bien sur des théories sociologiques que sur des témoignages individuels, l’autrice décortique les mécanismes qui conduisent les familles à exclure certains de leurs membres. Bien que l’homosexualité soit de plus en plus représentée dans les médias et dans la culture populaire, Sarah Schulman montre en quoi celle-ci est souvent caricaturée et pathologisée. Ainsi, cette visibilisation ne s’accompagne pas nécessairement d’une meilleure acceptation des personnes homosexuelles dans le cercle familial.

Virulent plaidoyer visant à faire de l’homophobie une question de société qui ne serait plus uniquement reléguée à la sphère privée, Sarah Schulman offre ici des pistes permettant de mettre un terme à la souffrance endurée par de nombreux·ses homosexuel·les au sein du foyer familial.

Jackie Wang's magnetic and spellbinding debut collection of poetry that attempts to speak in the language of dreams.

The poems in The Sunflower Cast A Spell To Save Us From The Void read like dispatches from the dream world, with Jackie Wang acting as our trusted comrade reporting across time and space. By sharing her personal index of dreams with its scenes of solidarity and resilience, interpersonal conflict and outlaw jouissance, Wang embodies historical trauma and communal memory. Here, the all-too-familiar interplay between crisis and resistance becomes first distorted, then clarified and refreshed. With a light touch and invigorating sense of humor, Wang illustrates the social dimension of dreams and their ability to inform and reshape the dreamer's waking world with renewed energy and insight.

Jackie Wang is a student of the dream state, black studies scholar, prison abolitionist, poet, performer, library rat, trauma monster and PhD candidate in the Department of African and African American Studies at Harvard University, specializing in race and the political economy of prisons and police in the United States. She is the author of a number of punk zines including On Being Hard Femme, as well as a collection of dream poems titled Tiny Spelunker of the Oneiro-Womb. In 2018 she published a book, titled Carceral Capitalism on the racial, economic, political, legal, and technological dimensions of the US carceral state. She is currently an Arleen Carlson and Edna Nelson Graduate Fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study.

Edited by Michael Corris, the expanded edition of In the Belly of the Beast: Art & Language New York Project 1972-1978 is a survey of the tumultuous years of the political Conceptualism in the mid-seventies New York.

Artists have always experimented with politics, either by organizing themselves or uniting in support of a broader political movement. Today, "activist art" is taught in universities, supported by foundations, and featured in museums and international exhibitions. Is this the only possible way?

In the Belly of the Beast tells a different story, of the work of politically engaged artists and the conflicts they experienced. It is the history of artists wishing to continue working within the boundaries of the artworld and those who were intent on establishing new ideological and class relationships with activists to build a political party.

During the 1970s in New York, the Art & Language collective pioneered institutional critique; published a Marxist-influenced journal; agitated against racism and sexism in museums; challenged the cultural imperialism of international exhibitions; and forged a framework for a socialist organization of artists. This new edition includes previously unpublished documents illuminating the contradictions and disputes that lay at the center of the organization and practices of Art & Language and left-wing groups, such as the Anti-Imperialist Cultural Union and the Artists' Meeting for Cultural Change, mobilizing artists in New York at the time.

The new and expanded edition of In the Belly of the Beast features an extensive interview with Michael Corris, who annotated a collection of previously unavailable documents from the period, including manuscripts, pamphlets, transcripts, and letters.

Art & Language is the name of a group of English artists who choose to work collectively, and the title of a magazine that they founded in 1968. Proposing a critical analysis of the relations between art, society, and politics, Art & Language marks, even in its name, the importance of the “textual turning point” in the 1960s.

Since 1976, Art & Language's project has continued, through Mel Ramsden and Michael Baldwin, with the literary and theoretical collaboration of Charles Harrison. Working with very varied mediums, from painting to rock, these co-founders of Conceptual art remain, even today, attached to observing the consequences of what they themselves call the “depressing collapse of modernism.”

"Ask audience to cut the part of the image on the screen that they don't like. Supply scissors."—Yoko Ono, Tokyo, June 1964

A dazzling range of unconventional film scripts and texts, many published for the first time, make up Scott MacDonald's newest collection. Illustrated with nearly 100 film stills, this fascinating book is at once a reference work of film history and an unparalleled sampling of experimental "language art." It contributes to the very dissipation of boundaries between cinematic, literary, and artistic expression thematized in the films themselves. Each text and script is introduced and contextualized by MacDonald; a filmography and a bibliography round out the volume.

This is a readable—often quite funny—literature that investigates differences between seeing and reading. Represented are avant-garde classics such as Hollis Frampton's Poetic Justice and Zorns Lemma and Morgan Fisher's Standard Gauge, and William Greaves's recently rediscovered Symbiopsychotaxiplasm: Take One. Michael Snow turns film loose on language in So Is This; Peter Rose turns language loose on theory in Pressures of the Text.

Some of the most influential feminist filmscripts of recent decades—Laura Mulvey and Peter Wollen's Riddles of the Sphinx, Su Friedrich's Gently Down the Stream, Trinh T. Minh-ha's Reassemblage, Yvonne Rainer's Privilege—confirm this book's importance for readers in gender and cultural studies as well as for filmmakers and admirers of experimental writing, independent cinema, and the visual arts in general.

Sea-oath is a catalog of internal and generational mythologies, a procedural formalist poetic experiment, and a transcript of an internal trial between the speaker and God. 

Alter approaches the central theological reckoning of the collection through constructed metrical forms, neologistic indexing, and paratactic syntax in an attempt to articulate and organize memories and histories that had originally been buried by dissociation, self-punishment, and mental and physical escape. 

What kind of God permits and witnesses the cyclical transmission of suffering, and how can I understand my life and my path within my inheritance?

Garréta’s first novel in a decade follows the mania that descends upon a family when the father finds himself in possession of a concrete mixer. As he seeks to modernize every aspect of their lives, disaster strikes when the younger sibling is subsumed by concrete.

Through puns, wordplay, and dizzying verbal effect, Garréta reinvents the novel form and blurs the line between spoken and written language in an attempt to confront the elasticity of communication.

Anne F. Garréta is a graduate of the Ecole Normale Supérieure, received her License de Lettres at the Université Paris 4 (Sorbonne), her Maitrise and her D.E.A at the Université Paris 7 (Diderot), and a PhD at New York University. The author of six novels, Garréta was coopted to the Oulipo in 2000. Her first novel, Sphinx (1986), which caused a sensation when Deep Vellum published its first English translation in 2015, tells a love story between two people without giving any indication of grammatical gender for the narrator or their lover. She won France’s prestigious Prix Médicis in 2002 and the Albertine Prize in 2018 for her book, Not One Day, which was also nominated for a Lambda Literary Award. Garréta teaches regularly in France at the Université Rennes 2, and more recently at Paris 7 (Diderot), and is a professor at Duke University.

A political and aesthetic critique of racial capitalism and modes of social experimentation in the form of resistance to the colonial commons.

Stefano Harney (born 1962) is Honorary Professor at The Institute of Gender, Race, Sexuality and Social Justice at the University of British Columbia and a Visiting Critic at Yale School of Art. He has held teaching positions in New York, Leicester, London, and Singapore. He now teaches at the Dutch Art Institute. An interdisciplinary scholar, his research spans (the intersections of) social sciences, arts and humanities, as well as the fields of business and management.

Preface by Jack Halberstam.
Collective translation (original title: The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning & Black Study, Minor Compositions, 2013).

Graphic design: Sophie Demay & Maël Fournier-Comte (In the Shade of a Tree).
 
published in February 2022
 
French edition
12,5 x 19,5 cm (softcover)
208 pages