Books

Mammoth’s protagonist is a disenchanted young lesbian. She’s inexperienced, irritated by life, eager to gestate, and determined to strip everything else down to essentials. She seduces men at random, swaps her urban habitat for an isolated farmhouse, befriends a shepherd, nurses lambs, battles stray cats, waits tables, cleans house, and dabbles in sex work – all in pursuit of life in the raw.  This small bomb of a novel, not remotely pastoral, builds to a howling crescendo of social despair, leaving us at the mercy of Eva Baltasar’s wild voice.

A post-apocalyptic retelling of William Shakespeare's The Merchant of Venice.

Who will survive when the world is destroyed? Can stories from the distant past teach us how to change a dismal present? Merchant shifts perspective between three survivors of a flooded world as they try to navigate the threat of mass starvation; Jessica, a patrilineal Jew from Venice (named after the Italian city but located on the mountain K2) who has memorized the complete works of Shakespeare; Cem, an orphan of Venice; and Shinobu, an advisor to the empress Ama in Fuji. Ama has been gifting edible algae blocks to nations worldwide, but Jessica's arrival in Fuji to beg for more food for Venice upsets the delicate international balance Shinobu has been maintaining. As a series of buried secrets and miscommunications carry consequences of potential global destruction, everyone must determine what they are willing to do to survive in a hopeless world.

Alexandra Grunberg attended New York University's Tisch School of the Arts earning a BFA in Theatre. She earned her MLitt and DFA in Creative Writing at The University of Glasgow. Grunberg presented her research at various academic conferences in the UK, including “Once and Future Fantasies” at the University of Glasgow, “CRSF 2021 10th Anniversary Conference—Speculative Futures & Survival” by the University of Liverpool, “Beast Modernisms Conference 2019” at The University of Glasgow, “Creative Writing: Processes, Theory, and Influences” at The University of Edinburgh, and “The Literary Self: From Antiquity to the Digital Age” at The University of Edinburgh.

Perfect Victims is an urgent affirmation of the Palestinian condition of resistance and refusal―an ode to the steadfastness of a nation.

Palestine is a microcosm of the on fire, stubborn, fragmented, dignified. While a settler colonial state continues to inflict devastating violence, fundamental truths are deliberately obscured—the perpetrators are coddled while the victims are blamed and placed on trial.

Why must Palestinians prove their humanity? And what are the implications of such an infuriatingly impossible task? With fearless prose and lyrical precision, Mohammed El-Kurd refuses a life spent in cross-examination. Rather than asking the oppressed to perform a perfect victimhood, El-Kurd asks friends and foes alike to look Palestinians in the eye, forgoing both deference and condemnation.

How we see Palestine reveals how we see each other; how we see everything else. Masterfully combining candid testimony, history, and reportage, Perfect Victims presents a powerfully simple dignity for the Palestinian.

F.R.DAVID is a typographical journal, edited by Will Holder, dealing with the organisation of reading and writing in contemporary art practises. This 13th issue of F.R.DAVID is edited with Riet Wijnen, and has its origins in her Registry of Pseudonyms, an online database which accounts for who is who and why who is who. ‘Inverted Commas’ follows ‘pseudonym’ through names, naming, bodies, brains, self, author, other, reader, labour.

In Sleigh Ride, a kinetically wondrous prose tale from poet Joe Fletcher, a father and his convalescing son plunge in carpentered, stallion-drawn sleigh slashing through lush forest, advancing through a sequence of diorama-like settings. The books ten chapters are interspersed with gouache collages by Kraków artist Mikołaj Moskal (REMMUS), rooted and riverine, functioning as curtains swept aside to reveal each chapter of Fletcher’s exhilarating nocturne.

There was a sleigh: jet black and gleaming.

The long steel runners curved at their termini like arabesques of ice. It was too dark to clearly discern the design on its side, but it was intricate, ornate, suggestive of cuneiform and the minarets of Cairo. Two orange lanterns mounted above the driver’s chair were each encircled by a cloud of gnats and moths. Draped in fabulously embroidered saddlecloths, Ajax and Hector stomped the earth.

Given that the only exit from the cellar was the door, hardly wider and taller than a man, I marveled at how father could have extracted his creation from his smithy and pointed it at the forest. But I said nothing as I climbed unaided onto the purple velvet couch.

About her collaboration with Robert Glück, Kathleen Fraser writes:

"In Commemoration of the Visit of Foreign Commercial Representatives to Japan, 1947 is a small picture book assembled as a memento of Japan’s finest tourist sites, to be given to their new allies (and recent adversaries). I discovered the book when my friend Bob Glück sent me to an Asian antique store, where he thought I might find 'little things' for Christmas gifts. Seeing this book in the $1 box, I bought a copy and began to write a poem sequence based on each of the photos and their captions, not knowing that Bob had also bought this book and was writing his own version from the same collection of pictures."

Featuring color reproductions of the entire postcard book, In Commemoration of the Visit is an accidental collaboration–and we couldn’t be happier for the accident.

Exhibiting for Multiple Senses looks into artistic and curatorial research practices that emphasize the multisensory character of the human body in the encounter with artworks. For some time now, numerous contemporary artists and curators have moved beyond the primacy of the visual in the experience of art exhibitions. The book discusses this shift by bringing together experimental exhibition-making, curatorial theory, art, design, and museum research, disability activism and crip theory. Its intent is to demonstrate resonances between curatorial theory and practice and between disability and crip art activism. While the latter is still often regarded as relevant for only small portions of visibly disabled people, in recent years neurodiversity and invisible disabilities have proven to be relevant for the sensory experiences of much larger parts of exhibition audiences.

Exhibiting for Multiple Senses shares famous and lesser-known examples of experimental exhibitions as well as of artistic practices linked to exhibitions. By mobilizing the senses of touch, smell, taste, and hearing, as well as applications of multimodal technologies and insights from neuroscience, these examples all explore abilities and possibilities of the complex and diverse sensory apparatus that is the human body.

Contributors: David Bobier, Luca M. Damiani, Stephanie Farmer & Hettie James, Eva Fotiadi, David Gissen & Georgina Kleege, Adi Hollander, Lilian Korner, Elke Krasny, Renata Pękowska, Caro Verbeek

Sean Bonney Tribute Issue

Don’t say “Rest in Peace,” say Fuck the Police: A Sean Bonney Tribute Portfolio, featuring: Katharina Ludwig, Lama El Khatib & Haytham El Wardany, Anahid Nersessian, Vicky Sparrow, Koshka Duff, Max Henninger, Joshua Clover, Jasper Bernes, D.S. Marriott, Fran Lock, Joey Frances, Mathilda Cullen, Nicholas Komodore, David Lau, Eve Richens, Sacha Kahir, Uwe Möllhusen & Marie Schubenz, Kashif Sharma-Patel, Linda Kemp, Daniel Eltringham & Fred Carter, Hugo García Manríquez, Jèssica Pujol Duran & Macarena Urzúa Opazo. With additional work by Belén Roca, translated by Noah Mazer, Adelaide Ivánova, translated by Chris Daniels, stevie redwood, Cait O’Kane, Mau Baiocco, Peter Bouscheljong, translated by Jonathan Styles. Zheng Xiaoqiong, translated by Zhou Xiaojing, Mayamor, translated by Eric Abalajon, Afrizal Malna, translated by Daniel Owen, Jorge Carlos Fonseca, translated by Shook, James Goodwin, Amalia Tenuta. Plus Engagements: Anne Boyer interviewed by Eduardo Rabassa, Gail Scott interviewed by Michael Nardone, Noah Ross on David Melnick, Guillermo Rebollo Gil on Pedro Pietri, Coco Fitterman on Ennio Moltedo, Sam Moore on Aaron Shurin, David Grundy on Lorenzo Thomas

“I had a dream last night in which I was being escorted across the Styx Bridge by a serpent. The bridge, long and thin and seemingly suspended in space, impressed me, and I asked the serpent who it was that had built it. He said something, but I cannot remember what. Upon awakening, I felt terribly lost. It seemed clear to me that my nights were being controlled by mystic forces.”

This 32-page chapbook is an “occult diary” of sorts.

BRENDAN CONNELL was born in Santa Fe, New Mexico, in 1970. He has had fiction published in numerous places, including McSweeney’s, Adbusters, and the World Fantasy Award winning anthologies Leviathan 3 (The Ministry of Whimsy 2002), and Strange Tales (Tartarus Press 2003). His works of fiction include Unpleasant Tales (Eibonvale Press, 2013), The Architect (PS Publishing, 2012), Lives of Notorious Cooks (Chômu Press, 2012), Miss Homicide Plays the Flute (Eibonvale Press, 2013), Cannibals of West Papua (Zagava, 2015), Jottings from a Far Away Place (Snuggly Books, 2015), and Against the Grain Again: The Further Adventures of Des Esseintes (Tartarus Press, 2021). As editor he has worked on various projects, including The Neo-Decadent Cookbook (Eibonvale Press, 2020), which was co-edited by Justin Isis.

Chapbook of 100 hand-numbered copies, lithographically printed on 95 g/m Italian gesso paper with a “hammered” texture. The cover is lithographically printed on 285 g/m recycled birch-colored Italian paper.

Carla Harryman describes GARDENER OF STARS as "an experimental novel that explores the paradise and wastelands of utopian desire." The book offers a mythic history of a post-historical city situated in a garden landscape whose inhabitants are engaged in perpetual tending, limitless generation. Their generatings and tendings take place in speculation and dream, practical and impractical invention, desire and copious sex - all facets of a politicized eros and an erotic politics. The utopia in question ("the unruly utopia of the senses that is not in conflict with the world's current") must be understood first not in terms of place but in terms of personage. M, Serena, Gardener (the eponymous heroine of the novel) are themselves utopias (as distinct from utopians) surviving in a painfully fraught (though sometimes beautiful) milieu. Negotiating this milieu, the various characters come into contact (or, more precisely, throw themselves into contact) with events that are in a ceaseless process.

This book is a novella filled with the pastiche of Americana and ending in the end of it. Breaking out every now and then. 24 hours in Los Angeles in minute details by two writers that have never been to the USA, but watched enough movies to dream of it. "If ever someone knew how to write sunsets, soft drinks in softer colors and the epic beauty of catastrophe." "A tour de force through screen-shots from Hollywood classics turned European teenage fan fiction of American dreams."

Cover by Robert Hawkins.

« [...] la stratégie de la terre brûlée c’est aussi un héritage mais adaptation 2024 on brûle désormais des arrêts de bus et des commissariats et si à la télé iels disent ces jeunes sont complètements cons détruire leur propre ville c’est que Bolloré a rien compris [...] » 

Fanny Souade Sow est artiste plasticienne, son travail est habité par des questionnements d’ordre sociopolitique et historique et évoque en outre la violence latente des structures urbaines qui excluent, séparent, condamnent et contraignent un certain nombre de corps et d’existences minorisées. 

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 virtuosic inquiry into the forms and uses of healing, from ancient and modern medicine to contemporary literature, ecology, and protest.

In the era of the “chronic acute” long predating COVID-19, Eleni Stecopoulos set out to investigate the imagination, aesthetics, and ideology of healing—its mysteries and mystifications, its many channels and codes. Fusing lyric inquiry with cultural criticism, Dreaming in the Fault Zone explores art’s treatment of our conditions at a time of both increased cynicism about healing and longing for it. Stecopoulos talks to physicians, poets, psychotherapists, disability activists, ethnographers, spiritual seekers; curates performances and takes part in community rituals; documents pilgrimages and visits therapeutic landscapes. Whether writing about the poet H.D.’s psychoanalysis with Freud or madness and apartheid in Bessie Head’s novel A Question of Power, the salve of demagogues or a global alliance of people with contested illnesses, Stecopoulos confronts the poetics and politics of affliction, empathy, memory, and survival. Weaving together esoteric scenes and everyday practice, with flashes of humor, these essays travel in a space of impasse and unending experiment.

A workbook by Flatform on displacement, conceived and curated by Giuliana Prucca.

The book is published under four different covers and with four different layouts, randomly distributed.

Founded in 2006 and based in Berlin and Milan, Flatform is a video and media arts collective, at the border between experimental cinema and contemporary art, that creates time-based works, film events, and installations, most of which revolve around landscape and biopolitics. Distributed by Light Cone in Paris and by Video Data Bank in Chicago, works by Flatform have competed in major film festivals including Cannes, Rotterdam, Venice, Toronto, and have been shown worldwide in art venues such as Centre Pompidou, Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Hirshhorn Museum, MAXXI Museum, Eye Filmmuseum, Wexner Center for the Arts and Garage Center for the Arts.

Co-published by Light Cone and Avarie.

Slide into spring with our mega-stimulating 38th issue. 

Hop in the jacuzzi with Italiano chart-topper Mahmood. Read the hustling tell-all with Ashland Mines aka deejay Bobby Beethovan. Zip to queer futures with internet-doll sensation @StarAmerasu. Go behind-the-scenes of some of the biggest French content creators with photographer @RaphaelChatelain. There’s hairy art from China, trans love affairs, cottaging evidence for court, d*ck arrangements, ladyboy activism, and so much more. 

Plus, a back section of smutty poetry submitted to us by our talented readers, and a visit to our favorite local cruise bar on BUTT’s 25th anniversary. At 152 pages, it’s sure to satisfy size queens all around the world. 

Sonnets, first published in 1989 as Tender Buttons Number 1 is widely considered to be one of the most generative and innovative works of contemporary American poetry, radically rethinking the traditional sonnet form. This expanded 25th Anniversary edition includes a new preface by Bernadette Mayer, an editor's note by Tender Buttons Press publisher Lee Ann Brown, and a selection of previously unpublished archival material including the Skinny Sonnets, described as "Hypnogogic Word Playing in Reporters' Notebooks" which further expand our map of Bernadette Mayer's ground-breaking works of writing consciousness.

Edited by Lee Ann Brown. Cover art by Sophie. Book design by Wayne Smith.

This collection of poetry, prose, and other texts is the first publication dedicated to the writing of the late performance, video, and visual artist Stuart Sherman.

The Stuart Sherman Papers presents a selection of facsimile reproductions from his archive at New York University's Fales Library. This collection of entries is not exhaustive but conveys the diversity in Sherman’s writing, which used the ever-expanding vocabulary of the English language as a plastic material to study the abundance of meaning that can be derived through playing with combinations, order, and proximity of words. The texts reproduced here leave his edits, scribbles, and notes to self intact, presenting the page as Sherman last engaged with it.

With text contributions by Sally Banes, Mark Bradford, Michiel Huijben, and Nicholas Martin. Photographs by Nathaniel Tileston and Paolo Rapalino.

Editor: Michiel Huijben
Graphic design: Loes Verstappen
Copy editing: Harriet Foyster
Lithography: Marc Gijzen

Stuart Sherman (1945–2001) was a New York-based artist best known for his performances and video, but working in a variety of visual and literary media. He performed, exhibited, and lectured throughout the United States, Europe, and Asia. Sherman died of AIDS in San Francisco in September 2001.

Wound Building is a volume of essays, with digressions, on one group of contemporary poets active in a self-organizing political poetry scene in the UK, most of whom have little to no audience outside of the little magazines that they publish and the reading series they put on. The book is a front-line report on the rapid development of this poetry in the period between 2015 and 2020, with a particular focus on the relationship of poetry to violence and its representation. The poets discussed here write violent love poems and violent elegies as well as violent fantasies composed in stabs of violent verse and violet prose. The poems themselves comprise fantasies of killing David Cameron, dreams of being split open along a seam, basement songs, hundreds of pages of notes on working life in a privatized care home in Hove, East Sussex, a four-line slogan about the Cologne groping scandal of New Year 2016, variations on the Refugees Medical Phrasebook, a life wasted in a factory in Guangzhou, an autobiographical sci-fi internet fever dream, an anarchist elegy, and a refusal to argue. Ultimately, Hayward argues that the lessons this poetry teaches is never to write a "worthy" narrative when a fucked up collage will do. Rather than a cohesive "account" of a "school" of poets, or a "contribution" to the boring tittle-tattle of aesthetic debates over British poetry as an institution, Wound Building is a front-line report on the local disasters of a contemporary UK poetry caught in the grip of the historical cataclysm of capitalist culture.

Wound Building is further concerned with aesthetic problems related to Marxism, anarchism, contemporary trans politics, and class, though its "theoretical" preoccupations are subordinated to its desire to provide a ground-level view on the writing itself, its production, its intellectual aporia, and the ways it finds itself outstripped by the ongoing "march of events." The book will be of interest not only for those concerned with contemporary British political and experimental poetry, but also more generally for anyone who wishes to think carefully about what it means to make art about present-day history and its many horrible enormities.

The book's title is derived from the idea of sublime woundedness that subtends the context of the poets discussed here: the impressions of wounds opening up like LED-lit shopfronts in the night, in a parallel universe in which injury is intoxicatingly impersonal and structural, and which forms the environment in which the poems fight to absolutize the value of every last breath, or face into the reality of extravagantly violent wish fulfillment, or dissolve themselves in a search for new ways of professing love, or transform into a kind of expressionism of vomiting up medical-diagnostic categories found in abstract social labor, or pump their verses full of the convulsive rhythms of surprise and sudden relief, without any guarantee that this is the right thing to do or that anyone will even fucking hear. Wound Building does not historicize this state of affairs as much as it attempts to live alongside the immediacy of this work, in order to see what is still possible for poetry, and criticism, to make and do.

In the mid-1960s, legendary artist and writer Joe Brainard (I Remember) teamed with poets such as John Ashbery, Frank O’Hara, Barbara Guest, Ron Padgett, Kenneth Koch, Ted Berrigan, and many more for these pioneering collaborative comic strips—unavailable for decades and collected here for the first time.

“PEOPLE OF THE WORLD… RELAX!”

In the creative hotbed of 1960s New York, Joe Brainard was a whirlwind. He was a maker of paintings, assemblages, collages, book covers, poetry-reading flyers, and more. But some of his most exciting work was done with his friends. In 1964, the twenty-two-year-old Brainard turned his talents to rewiring the lowly comic book form into something new and surprising. He invited his friends Frank O’Hara, Ted Berrigan, John Ashbery, Kenneth Koch, Peter Schjeldahl, Barbara Guest, Ron Padgett, and others—all of them New York School poets—to collaborate with him on comics that they would write and he would draw.

The results were unlike any comics seen before. Previously available only on the rare-book market (at very high prices) but available here under one cover for the first time, the two issues of C Comics still feel as fresh as when the first page rolled off the mimeograph machine more than sixty years ago. Brainard’s energetic line and joyful humor charge across every page, illustrating O’Hara’s recasting of a cowboy as a mash-note-writing lover, Padgett’s experiments with traditional cartoon sound effects (ROAR! GRRR! SKREE!), cameos by Ernie Bushmiller’s Nancy, and heaps of Dadaesque delights.

This edition includes a foreword from Padgett and an essay by comics historian Bill Kartalopolous, who details the creation (and creators) of C Comics. A masterpiece of collaboration and spontaneity, C Comics is a testament to the vastness of Brainard’s creativity and his ability to push any artistic form in a new and powerful direction.

Foreword by Ron Padgett
Contributions by Bill Kartalopoulos

Alvin Ailey is one of the most celebrated choreographers of the twentieth century. The creator of iconic works such as Blues Suite, Revelations, and Cry, he is widely recognized for the dance company he founded in 1958 when he was just twenty-seven years old. Ailey imagined and cultivated a platform for modern dance through his innovative repertoire, interdisciplinary sensibility, and support of dancers and choreographers. This expansive volume situates Ailey within a broader social, creative, and cultural context, looking at the artists who influenced and collaborated with him, the spaces and scenes he frequented, the dynamic themes within his dances, and how his vision and work changed contemporary dance. 

Essays by artists, scholars, and critics cover topics ranging from the Black church, the South, and the Great Migration to nightclubs, musical influences, and queerness. With more than four hundred images including photographs of works Ailey choreographed, archival materials such as notebooks, sketches, letters, and never-before-published behind-the-scenes photos, and conversations about the legacy of the company with Sylvia Waters, Judith Jamison, and Masazumi Chaya as well as several contemporary dancers and scholars, this study offers an unprecedented full picture of one of the twentieth century’s leading artists and the way his work continues to inspire today’s generation of dancers.

Contributions by Horace D. Ballard, Harmony Bench, Kate Elswit, Aimee Meredith Cox, Thomas F. DeFrantz, Malik Gaines, Jasmine Johnson, Joshua Lubin-Levy, Uri McMillan, Ariel Osterweis, J Wortham, CJ Salapare, Kyle Abraham, Claire Bishop, Masazumi Chaya, Brenda Dixon-Gottschild, Jennifer Homans, Judith Jamison, Sylvia Waters, Jamila Wignot and Jawole Willa Jo Zollar

Sinkholes are geological accidents that indicate the emptying of underground aquifers, places where the earth collapses and caves in, yielding to gravity and creating cavities of varying depths. Although they can occur for natural reasons, they are mostly the result of human activity: changes in river courses, intensive exploitation of water resources, mining activity and abandonment of mining sites. Over the last few decades, their number has increased considerably on the Iranian plateau.

This book presents Kimia Kamvari’s exploration of these cavities between 2019 and 2021. It showcases the core of the work, consisting of a careful and methodical series of photographs, accompanied by cartographic sheets and texts that help to understand the artist’s perspective on the phenomenon and stimulate the reader’s own.

Kimia Kamvari (Cologne, 1986) has a degree in painting from the Azad University of Art and Architecture in Tehran and a master’s degree in Art Research and Creation from the UPV-EHU. Since 2015 she has been living and working in Astigarreta, a small town in the interior of Gipuzkoa. His works go from figurative painting to an increasingly conceptual look that explores new formats and materials. Proof of this are his latest exhibitions Apeiron (Dastan Gallery, 2018), Nature Change (Fundación Cristina Enea, 2019), Event Horizon (Dastan Gallery, 2019) Alef (San Telmo Museoa, 2022) and Larruak eta Izurrak (Tabakalera, 2024)

Dans ce livre unique et fascinant, Avery F. Gordon examine l’expérience sociologique de la « hantise » en s’appuyant sur des références aussi bien littéraires que politiques. La hantise désigne un système qui altère l’expérience d’un vécu linéaire et déforme la façon dont nous séquençons habituellement le passé, le présent et le futur. En prenant pour terrain les romans de Toni Morrison ou Luisa Valenzuela et en les confrontant à des sources plus traditionnelles de la sociologie (articles de presse, comptes rendus judiciaires, rapports d’enquêtes), Matières spectrales démontre que les structures sociales héritées du passé influencent plus la vie présente que ne le présument la plupart des chercheur·ses en sciences humaines.

Afin de montrer comment les fantômes hantent le présent, l’autrice passe au crible une partie de l’histoire de la psychanalyse, avant d’examiner des épisodes de l’histoire tels que l’esclavage aux États-Unis ou les disparitions massives pendant la dictature militaire en Argentine, où des lois interdisaient à la population de parler des disparu·es.

Profondément interdisciplinaire et véritablement innovant par son approche, Matières spectrales est écrit avec une puissance à la hauteur de son sujet, et offre une vision nouvelle des intersections complexes de la race, du genre et de la classe.

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.