Books

In 2015, artist Patty Chang (1972) followed the South-to-North Water Diversion Project, the longest aqueduct in the world, which brings water from southern to northern China. While walking, she collected her urine in plastic bottles, drinking their contents before refilling them, in turn drawing a connection between the large-scale infrastructural attempt to control the flow of water and the uncontrollable flows of her own body. Once back in Boston, Chang began making a series of portable urinary devices from discarded plastic bottles, which were then hand-blown in New York by glass-blower Amy Lemaire. In fashioning them from discarded plastic and rendering them permanent in glass, the devices channel Chang’s unfolding ruminations on water as a point of connection between geopolitics, human excess and waste. Designed by Sabo day, this indexical publication is the first book dedicated to depicting the series of sixty-four sculptures in its entirety. It was published on the occasion of Patty Chang’s exhibition at A Tale of A Tub, which ran from September 14–November 3, 2024.

Emil Lime collects various materials that nurture and give shape to Esther Gatón’s artistic practice, including collages made with her phone pics, sketches, sporadic notes and drawings, together with the writing of authors that have been influential on the work: Fredy Massad, María Fernanda Ampuero, Darya Diamond and Cory John. 

Drawing on the history of “romance” as the troubadours knew it and the titular flower’s ancient allegories for sexuality and mystery, Reines plunges into feminine archetypes to explore masculine pain: “I have always liked helpless / & terrible men because they break my mind.” In these poems, inherited ideologies of gender performance are replaced with bold vulnerability: paradoxes of power and surrender transmute the speaker’s understanding of suffering, desire, and the soul.

The voice in The Rose is wry and bare, approaching the connection between erotic love and spirituality with humor. Investigating war, maternity, violent sensuality, and the role of language in magical acts, Reines is unafraid to uncover the “secret / & terrible shovelings / Of love,” and the result is a bloody and pulsing, sexy and unabashed bloom.

A moving story about love, AIDS, grief, and memory by one of the most adventurous writers to come out of San Francisco's LGBTQ+ scene.

Bob Glück met Ed Aulerich-Sugai in 1970. Ed was an aspiring artist; Bob wanted to write. They were young men in San Francisco at the high tide of sexual liberation and soon, and for eight years, they were lovers, after which they were friends. Ed was an explorer in the realms of sex. He was beautiful, fragile, exasperating, serious, unassuaged. In 1994 he died of HIV. His dream notebooks became a touchstone for this book, which Glück has been working on for some two decades, while also making his name as a proponent of New Narrative writing and as one of America's most unusual, venturesome, and lyrical authors. About Ed is about Ed, who remains, as our dead do, both familiar and unknowable, faraway and close. It is about Bob too.

The book is a hybrid, at once fiction and fact, like memory, and it takes in many things through tales of political activism and domestic comedy and fury to questions of art and love and experiences of longing and horror. The book also shifts in register, from the delicate to the analytic, to funny and explicit and heartbroken. It begins in the San Francisco of the early 1980s, when Ed and Bob have been broken up for a while. aIds is spreading, but Ed has yet to receive his diagnosis. It follows him backward through his life with Bob in the 1970s and forward through the harrowing particulars of death. It holds on to him and explores his art. It ends in his dreams.

Cumin Baleen is a forty-one-year-old writer living in Philadelphia—this city of hospitals—who works at the upscale grocery Sea & Poison and is navigating the onset of an autoimmune condition. To start a medication that may help, an eye exam is required and this leads to a nightmarish laser eye surgery. The laser shoots into her brain, making her language spare and her sentences clause-less, a vexing constraint that stalls her book on gynecological malpractice: she wants others, in the realm of our for-profit medical industry that "renders the Hippocratic Oath its opposite," to see poison.

Meanwhile, Cumin is kicked out of her boyfriend Mari's studio after he falls for Janine, their landlord, and starts renting a closet in Maron's bedroom—polyamorous Maron who is hooking up with Alix, whom Cumin lusts after. Disheveled from medicines and medical scams, Cumin declares, "I don't know what to say, I'm saying I have a cracked appearance. It's not a pity party, it's a character sketch. Insofar as you'll need to be looking at me, that your mind should fill me up with its own swaying cognitive and toxic reeds if we are to do this, your imagination should touch me with its ridiculous poison."

Caren Beilin's hypnotic and fractured story is at once an homage to Shusaku Endo's terrifying novel of human vivisection The Sea and Poison and the spirit of OuLipo, the pioneering French writing group that sought new literary potential through constraints.

Caren Beilin was born in Philadelphia in 1983. She is the author of the novel Revenge of the Scapegoat, which won the Vermont Book Award for Fiction. Her other books are Blackfishing the IUD, Spain, The University of Pennsylvania, and Americans, Guests, or Us. She lives in Cleveland and Philadelphia and teaches at Case Western Reserve University.

A young writer has his heart set on his aunt's large apartment. With this seemingly simple conceit, the characters of The Planetarium are set in orbit and a galaxy of argument, resentment, and bitterness erupts. Telling the story from various points of view, Sarraute focuses below the surface, on the emotional lives of the characters in a way that surpasses even Virginia Woolf. Always deeply engaging, The Planetarium reveals the deep disparity between the way we see ourselves and the way others see us.

The author of eleven novels, three works of criticism, a collection of plays, and an autobiography, Nathalie Sarraute (1900-1999) is well-known as one of the prime proponents of the New Novel, alongside Alain Robbe-Grillet, Robert Pinget, and Claude Simon. Among her books are Do You Hear Them?, Martereau, Portrait of a Man Unknown, Between Life and Death, and Tropisms.

"These sentences—they—will begin having already been sentences somewhere else, and this will mark their afterlife, and this will be their debut." So begins Renee Gladman’s latest interdisciplinary project, Plans for Sentences. A tour de force of dizzying brilliance, Gladman’s book blurs the distinctions between text and image, recognizing that drawing can be a form of writing, and vice versa: a generative act in which the two practices not only inform each other but propel each other into futures. In this radical way, drawing and writing become part of a limitless loop of energy, unearthing fertile possibilities for the ways we think about poetry. 

If Gladman ascribes to any particular type of poetics, here in Plans for Sentences, we are sure to find that it is robustly grounded in a poetics of infinite language.

The Totality for Kids is the second collection of poems by Joshua Clover. This volume takes as its subject the troubled sleep of late modernity, from the grandeur and failure of megacities to the retreats and displacements of the suburbs. The power of crowds and architecture commingles with the alienation and idleness of the observer, caught between “the brutal red dream/Of the collective” and “the parade/Of the ideal citizen.” The book’s action takes place in these gaps, “dead spaces beside the endlessly grieving stream.” The frozen tableau of the spectacle meets its double in the sense that something is always about to happen. Political furies and erotic imaginings coalesce and escape within a welter of unmoored allusions, encounters, citations, and histories, the dreams possible within the modern’s excess of signification—as if to return revolutionary possibility to the regime of information by singing it its own song.

In its second issue, Manufacturing Narratives, Makan focuses on how interrogating narrativity can provoke fundamental questions about how societies define or choose to accept societal or historical truths in today’s world. Spanning across [and beyond] the Mashreq and Maghreb, the various contributions reflect a shared space of inquiry that bridges geographies and fosters emergent dialogues across shifting territorialities. This issue invited contributors to right (as much as write) narratives: to question authorship and its social collectivities, to retell alternative public histories, to explore gender roles, and to unsettle the exoticism, folklorization, and political textures of fiction as a practice of indiscipline. Together, these contributions re-articulate the genealogies of our present through the pluralities of the past, offering tools to imagine and manufacture alternative futures, and realities otherwise.

With contributions by Ala Younis, Bari Abbassi, George Bajalia, Karim Kattan, Karima Kadaoui, Tamkeen, Kenza Sefrioui, Lahbib El Moumi, Laila Hida, Maureen Mougin, Mohamed Amer Meziane, Monica Basbous, Nadia Tazi, Sénamé Koffi Agbodjinou, Salma Barmani, Sonia Terrab, Soufiane Hennani, Yto Barrada.

Dear Miss Maxfeld . . . What I’m really afraid of is that I am a homosexual human being. I wish you were one too but I don’t think it’s possible there could be so many in one school, do you? Probably there is only one person who is homosexual in one place at one time and that one person (I am afraid) is me . . .

After sixteen-year-old Lynn writes her thirty-seven-year-old English teacher a letter they embark on one of the funniest and saddest love affairs in fiction, shrouded in secrecy and guilt. Set in the year Kennedy was shot, all Lynn knows about “lezbos” is that they wear their hair in crew cuts, buy suits like her father’s, and sprout mustaches over their upper lips. Trying to pass, Lynn continues to neck with her boyfriend and make bigoted jokes with her friends. Feigning innocence with her parents, each night she checks the mirror for tell-tale signs of perversion. Profound, witty, poignant, and highly charged, In Thrall is the first in Jane DeLynn’s trilogy of novels on sexuality and authority. It is as believable in its depiction of a closeted teen as it is heartbreaking.

With an introduction by Colm Tóibín

Flawless comic timing. —Colm Tóibín, from the Introduction

All Lynn’s phobias, aversions and hang-ups make her exaggerated but real . . . The great triumph of this novel is that DeLynn has captured the way adolescents felt, talked, and behaved during the early 1960s. —San Francisco Chronicle

A dazzlingly gritty exposure of a girlhood experience usually neglected by both private and public consciousness. —Reba Maybury

Eleven performance-based projects by Dora García, documented through letters, emails and other elements from the artist's private correspondence with various interpreters of performances, whether they were direct collaborators of simple spectators.

Edited and prefaced by François Piron, Steal This Book, a tribute to Abbie Hoffmann's pamphlet of the same name, is not a definitive attempt at rendering the pieces on which it is based; it calls for a free, active and contradictory reception, that of an open archive. Part epistolary novel, part rough screenplay and part user's manual, Steal This Book proposes a body of discussions, questions without answers and endless ramblings, in place of the critique's or the artist's voice. 

The book has also been presented in exhibitions as a Dora García sculpture meant to be stolen, but it can also be purchased in selected bookstores worldwide.

Contrary to the idea that would have art addressing the greatest possible number of people, Dora García (born in 1965 in Valladolid, lives and works in Barcelona), best known for her performance devices, is interested in what is enacted at the individual scale: in a radically conceptual form, at once accessible and elegant, she elects to transmit oddly coded messages, their ask being to bestir a specific relation with each and every visitor. Dora García is interested in everything that intervenes in the communication between an artist and his/her public: art no longer represents the world, but itself becomes a producer of realities often on the borderline of fiction and make-believe. It urges us to undergo experiences other than ordinary situations, at once simple and hard to grasp. 

Dora García has had solo exhibitions at the MACBA in Barcelona, the Reina Sofia in Madrid and the SMAK in Gent. She represented Spain at the Venice Biennale in 2011, and was a part of the Skulptur Projekte Münster 07, the Sydney Biennial in 2009, the Biennale de Lyon in 2009 and Documenta 13 in 2012.

A journey through the artist's work and life.

William Anastasi is the author of a prolific body of work. A major figure in conceptualism and in many respects one of its initiators, his trajectory cannot be solely confined to this chapter in the history of contemporary art. The book revisits, through the prism of multiple voices, the various aspects of an approach that unfolded with the use of complementary mediums. Drawing coexists with photography and "new" technologies, alongside objects, paintings, and installations. Within this corpus to be (re)discovered, sounds, images, and language, as well as artifacts, protocols, and processes, convey inquiries related to space and time, representation, and perception. With contributions from Dove Bradshaw, Chiara Costa, Béatrice Gross, Valérie Mavridorakis, Hélène Meisel, Sébastien Pluot, Julia Robinson, Robert Storr, and Erik Verhagen.

Edited by Erik Verhagen.
Texts by Dove Bradshaw, Chiara Costa, Béatrice Gross, Valérie Mavridorakis, Hélène Meisel, Sébastien Pluot, Julia Robinson, Robert Storr, Erik Verhagen.

Harryette Mullen is one of contemporary poetry’s most influential voices, for her inventive language play, keen wit, formal experimentation, and pointed critique of American culture. In Regaining Unconsciousness, her first new collection in twelve years, Mullen confronts the imminent dangers of our present to sound an alarm for our future, to wake us out of our complicity and despondency: Can we, even still, find our way to our unconscious selves, beyond our capacity to harm, subdue, and consume? 

In eleven taut sections written in the eleventh hour of our collective being, these poems address climate change, corporate greed, racist violence, artificial intelligence, the pollution of our oceans, individualism at the cost of mutual wellness, and the consequences of not addressing these pressing issues. Mullen imagines, as we must, our apocalypse, and yet, in an astounding feat, she does so with playfulness and wry referentiality that make these poems surprisingly buoyant, funny, and readable. Our end may be inevitable, Mullen admits, but maybe we begin with gratitude.

Extensive survey of the politically outward-looking Conceptualism emerging from Art & Language in the UK. Especially considering its critique of the norms of Modernist art practices in contemporary art, particularly practices of art education.

Edited, compiled and introduced by Paul Wood, Biting the Hand: Traces of Resistance in the Art & Language diaspora is about a dissident formation of artists active in the UK in the 1970s and 80s.

The book tells the story of artists engaging with a critique of then-contemporary modernist art education, who have embarked on a series of theoretical investigations which became increasingly politicised under the pressures of an evolving social crisis. Increased racism, unemployment and attacks on the organised working class all raised questions about how a critical art might respond.

By the late 1970s, these radical artists, mostly in the orbit of the Art & Language group, were producing posters and leaflets for a wide range of left-wing causes, as well as analyses of the politics of art and design education and the role of cultural ideology in maintaining consensus. In the 1980s, as Thatcherism tightened its grip, those involved went their separate ways into areas as diverse as media work, trade unionism, health and education.

Biting the Hand has three parts: a retrospective introduction setting the formation in its historical context, and two annotated documentary sections presenting examples of the work as both text and image, written and edited by Paul Wood.

It also includes a foreword by Sezgin Boynik, publisher, and an afterword by Ann Stephen, curator and art historian, further expanding on the book's subject.

For many years Paul Wood worked for the Art History Department of the Open University. His publications from that period include Conceptual Art (2000), Western Art and the Wider World (2013), and the four-volume anthology Art in Theory (1990-2020), co-edited with Charles Harrison and others.

Edited, compiled and introduced by Paul Wood.
Foreword by Sezgin Boynik; afterword by Ann Stephen.

In Spill, self-described queer Black troublemaker and Black feminist love evangelist Alexis Pauline Gumbs presents a commanding collection of scenes depicting fugitive Black women and girls seeking freedom from gendered violence and racism. In this poetic work inspired by Hortense Spillers, Gumbs offers an alternative approach to Black feminist literary criticism, historiography, and the interactive practice of relating to the words of Black feminist thinkers. Gumbs not only speaks to the spiritual, bodily, and otherworldly experience of Black women but also allows readers to imagine new possibilities for poetry as a portal for understanding and deepening feminist theory.

Alexis Pauline Gumbs is a poet, independent scholar, and activist. She is coeditor of Revolutionary Mothering: Love on the Front Lines and the Founder and Director of Eternal Summer of the Black Feminist Mind, an educational program based in Durham, North Carolina.

This zine is the result of the research residency "Plotting with the archive" that took place at Komplot between September 2025 and January 2026. The publication contains a subjective timeline of Komplot — its strategies, relations and projects — with the aim of organising them and at the same time speculating on possible future developments. The material was produced during a collective workshop in which the archive was explored and activated.

Work/Anti-work issue with writing by Nat Raha /. lisa minerva luxx /Ghayath Almadhoun, trans. Catherine Cobham / Jacqui Germain / Jazra Khaleed, trans. Peter Constantine / Finn Finneran / Cait O’Kane / Rebecca Kosick / Lara Durback Skye /Lotta Thießen / William Rowe / Danny Hayward / Rona Lorimer / Zoe Beloff / Jike Ayou, trans. Yě Yě / Miguel de Vallester, trans. Erasmo Pantoja / Lucas Martínez / ko ko thett / Hung Q. Tu / Raymond de Borja / etaïnn zwer, trans. Ilan A.L.S. Erikson Weisbrod / Annie Raab on Taylor Portela / Rachael Guynn Wilson on Lyn Hejinian / Will Rowe on Danny Hayward / Chloe Watlington on Joshua Clover. 

A horror story of one woman's awful reinvention, M. S. Coe's The Formation of Calcium is disturbingly funny and completely unexpected.

Middle-aged Mary Ellen Washie has finally freed herself of her stultified past life in western New York state and moved to Florida. With the husband she's grown to hate firmly in her rearview mirror, and all ties to her family cut off, she changes her name, bleaches her hair, and befriends Natalie, a seemingly kind, martini-loving woman whom she promptly begins to manipulate. As her machinations propel her beyond the brink of who she used to be, Mary Ellen seeks to unburden herself—but not one to sit down with pen and paper, she narrates the events of her new life into a cassette tape recorder, giving each tape an innocuous name to keep the curious away. A riveting account of one woman's awful reinvention, M. S. Coe's new novel is disturbingly funny and completely unexpected. With elements of pulp noir and confessional literature, The Formation of Calcium depicts the bland misery of modern American life as one woman seeks her own ill-fated transformation.

Born in Las Vegas, Nevada, M. S. Coe is an American writer living in Guadalajara, Mexico. After she graduated with an MFA in creative writing from Cornell University, Clash Books published her first novel, New Veronia, in 2019. Coe's stories have appeared in The Antioch Review, Cosmonauts Avenue, Electric Literature, Nashville Review, Waxwing, and elsewhere. She has held residencies from the Herbert Hoover National Historic Site, Petrified Forest National Park, and Ora Lerman Trust.

FUGUES is a study of objects. Elements repeat and imitate one another like a polyphonic canon of voices narrating stories of domestic confinement in looped time.

With images by photographer Nicole Maria Winkler & texts by artist Issy Wood, writer Ella Plevin, model Freja Beha Erichsen and curator Elaine Tam.

A collection exploring the intersections of gender and religion in post-secular knowledge production and visual culture.

Over the last three decades, religious practices and belongings have gained increased visibility across the globe, turning secularity and its relationship with religion into subjects of intense interdisciplinary and international debate. Previously marginalized in gender studies, the secular and the religious now attract growing interest in academic and activist feminism, prompting a critical reflection on secularity's emancipatory potential. This publication aims to foster this interest by providing a platform for interdisciplinary and transregional discussions on the complex dynamics of secularity, religiosity, and gender, as well as new approaches to explore these relationships.
 The contributions examine the entanglements and boundaries of religions and secularities in everyday life, art, culture, and knowledge production. By presenting relevant case studies, this book underscores an understanding of religion as both a category of knowledge and a marker of identity.

Le cinquième numéro de la revue d'art et de recherche « rétro-prospective » est consacré à l'artiste et performeuse Andrea Fraser, figure clé de l'art des années 1990 et 2000 et du courant de la « critique institutionnelle » (une monographie complétée par une grande enquête sur l'espace critique réalisée auprès d'une cinquantaine d'artistes, critiques et philosophes internationaux).

Avec contributions de Kader Attia, Eva Barto, Sophie Bonnet-Pourpet, Marie de Brugerolle, Gregory Buchert, Daniel Buren, Marie Canet, Gregory Castéra, Inès Champey, Thierry Chancogne, Claire Fontaine, François Cusset, Judith Deschamps, Paul Devautour, Philippe Durand, Joao Enxuto & Erica Love, Andrea Fraser, Nicolas Frespech, Dora García, Romain Grateau, Emmanuel Guez, Thomas Hirschhorn, Aliocha Imhoff & Kantuta Quirós, Béatrice Josse, Franck Larcade, Ju Huyn Lee, Sven Lütticken, Fabrice Mabime, Bartomeu Mari, Chus Martínez, Gwenael Morin, Claire Moulène, Jean-Luc Moulène, Yan Moulier Boutang, Vincent Normand, François Pain, Gerald Petit, Anne Querrien, Thierry Raspail, Sinziana Ravini, Delphine Reist & Laurent Faulon, Christophe de Rohan Chabot, Phillippe Roux, Jean-Baptiste Sauvage, Thomas Schlesser, Ida Soulard, Fabien Steichen, Michel Surya, Emmanuel Tibloux, Vier 5, Ulf Wuggenig, Italo Zuffi.

Là is an immersive, politically charged sound journey – a lament for the Al Naqab desert in Palestine. It is the result of a collaboration between Sirah Foighel Brutmann, Eitan Efrat, Laszlo Umbreit, and Ot Lemmens. The album combines acoustic instruments like flute and cymbals with processed electronics and mechanical sounds. 

The track Ensemble is made from sound recordings of eleven 16mm film projectors, playing simultaneously and in intervals, creating a texture centered around a single pitch – La/A. 

The tracks For Her, There, and No are recordings of live sessions played by Laszlo Umbreit and Eitan Efrat.  

The album also features an extended text by Rose Higham-Stainton titled Strategies for Survival, spread across a 12-page booklet.

The ultimate ambition of this book-tool is to “disappear on the street”. Its pages collect words and stories of people whose right to exist and be visible in public spaces was forced to confront the concepts of “legality” and “justice”.

Considering the assumption that the law is a fluid parameter, which changes depending on where we are in the world, the historical period in which we live and the sort of privileges we enjoy, the law defines what is considered moral, licit, in other words, what is right. It distributes power and the perception of power in society, defining, categorizing, dividing and controlling.

WILL YOU MARRY ME? is a public lecture and an artist’s book by Sara Leghissa and Marzia Dalfini, investigating a specific portion of the spectrum of illegality, namely the relationship between illegal acts and public space. It explores how we can act disobedience before everyone’s eyes, suggesting possible forms of complicity and public resistance.

All the content was collected by the artist during meetings and conversations that took place in Prato, Milan, Ramallah, Marseille, Madrid, Nyon and Lausanne and with this book-tool their words become manifestos that the reader is invited to detach and relocate into the public space.

Designed by Marzia Dalfini. Published by NERO with the support of L’Altra.

Format: 42 x 29,7 cm
Pages: 28
Language: IT / EN
Year: 2021

The latest collection from prolific American poet Clark Coolidge, who has often been associated with the Language School and the New York School but has truly forged a unique style. A life-long jazz drummer, his poems can be approached as improvisational compositions with strange arrangements of words, statements, and sounds that are vibrant, frequently hilarious, and jarring. His upended syntax and surprising associations reflect a world awash in information; an advanced civilization dealing with ever more rapid change. His poems are explorations into the possibilities of language. This kind of work could, serendipitously, lead to new patterns of thinking, new definitions, new meanings, perhaps even new ways of dealing with old problems.