Books

The theme of this issue of Pages was triggered by the idea of opium smoke as a ‘writing machine.’ Since the early opium trade, there has been writing not only on opium, but also through opium, especially in countries linked to past and present drug networks. In this issue we are tapping into the deeply rooted relationship between writing and drugs, especially beyond the Western literary tradition, and wondering about the current conceptual and material derivatives of intoxication with which we can machinate new extremities in our chemical, historical and technological relations to the world.

With contributions by:

- Jason Bahbak Mohaghegh / Smoke, Drug, Poison: A Philosophy of the Faramoosh-Khaneh (Opium Den)
- Pages / Dissolving, Mixing, Melting, Stirring (the Smoke)
- Hung-Bin Hsu / The Taste of Opium: Science, Monopoly and the Japanese Colonization in Taiwan, 1895—1945
- Saleh Najafi / Hedayat: The Opium of Translation and Creating the Impossible Memory
- Patricia Reed / The Toxicity of Continuity
- Fuko Mineta / A Monster Appears in Qingtian
- Morad Farhadpour / Inside and Outside Addiction
- Mohammad-Ali Rahebi / Of Junk and Time: Trauma, Habit, Capitalism

This new bilingual edition of Sebastian Castillo's long-out-of-print first book reintroduces a classic of American microfiction and features a translation into Spanish by acclaimed Mexican author Elisa Díaz Castelo.

Forty-nine pages of unique and surreal micro-fiction, Sebastian Castillo’s 49 Venezuelan Novels is a magical book with a new story on every page. Full of depth and imagination, Castillo uses imagery in a simple yet intense way. From stories of fish markets to spiteful violins, it almost seems that these novels are snippets of family stories long passed down, just now put to paper. With the nature of a born storyteller, Sebastian Castillo provides the readers of this fantastic read with gorgeous stories that define micro-fiction.

"Portrait of the Artist as a Writer" is a collection of short stories, quotes and drawings about dinosaurs, gay lesbians and how to lose a joke at the lake.

Risoprinted in pumpkin and purple, perfect binding with glue, first edition of 300, Berlin 2022.

+|`me'S-pace, doc. 001.b is book 1, volume 2 of a wider, ongoing project known as "For Love Alone" Christina'S-tead, a poetic enquiry into the current state of the English tongue.

"In a time when many are questioning if we still need formalism and feminism, Wertheim's +|`me'S-pace, doc. 001.b is a spirited and fun defense of both. Written in part as a didactic instructional manual that cannot keep itself from constantly going astray into beautiful and challenging language play, this is a book that asks crucial questions and reconfigures recent histories. It is essential for its arguments. But even more, it is fun to read for its word play"—Juliana Spahr.

Introduction by Dodie Bellamy and art by Lisa Darms.

Afternoon Editions no. 3: Language is a map of failures. Messy thoughts on reading, writing and dressing up by Runa Borch Skolseg.

In May 2019, Time has fallen asleep in the afternoon sunshine relocated its base to the Oslo Biennale headquarters in Myntgata, with a room of its own and ongoing activities. Runa Borch Skolseg visited the space at several occasions before its final closure, in 2021. Her invitation to write for the Afternoon Editions bridges the move from one room to another, and is a reflection on how fashion can be a world of fantasy, and drama, a language we all communicate through. With a personal narrative she makes readings of clothes, literature and writing, and how they merge and enrich each other.

This book is based on two related projects that take form as text, photography and film. Les Goddesses (2011) collapses the lives of Davey and her five sisters with those of the daughters of Mary Wollstonecraft, the 18th-century feminist writer and activist. Hemlock Forest (2016) weaves references to Wollstonecraft, Chantal Akerman and Karl Ove Knausgaard with her own family stories. During the making of Hemlock Forest, Akerman took her own life. Her death soon engulfed Davey's awareness, prompting a broader exploration of Akerman's and her own biographies, amid more universal themes of compulsion, artistic production, life and its passing.

Texts by Moyra Davey and an introduction by Aveek Sen
Design by Filiep Tacq

In this interview, Palestine solidarity activists form the Chinese diaspora speak with Iranian activists in exile about the uprising that took place in Iran in January 2026, comparing notes about resistance to various forms of authoritarianism.

Affiliation, de Mira Mattar, autrice londonienne issue de la diaspora palestinienne, explore des thèmes tels que le genre, la famille, la religion, la guerre, l’écologie, le colonialisme et l’amour, en lien avec des lieux comme la Jordanie, le Liban, la Palestine et le Royaume-Uni. Interrogeant nos affiliations personnelles et collectives, et la manière dont les systèmes de pouvoir influencent nos désirs et nos identités, le livre s’ouvre sur quatre Lettres d’Amman qui propulsent le texte poétique dans le mouvement du monde et attestent de la dynamique de l’exil palestinien, où l’éclatement, l’effacement et l’appropriation se mêlent avec les effets contemporains de la mondialisation. 

La deuxième partie du livre, intitulée Affiliation (pour mon père) est un long poème rétrospectif qui court sur une trentaine de pages. L’écriture à la première personne de Mira Mattar met en tension des contextes politiques, domestiques, intimes, économiques où se déploient des affiliations coloniales, capitalistes, patriarcales, nationalistes. Elle en restitue les violents processus internes, passant du refus de se soumettre à l’impossible échappée. Dans Affiliation, on fait l’expérience d’être en dehors: en dehors de son corps, en dehors d’un pays, en dehors d’une pièce. Il n’y a aucune position stable, et le sujet se construit dans un éclatement constant. Peu de livres articulent aussi finement expérimentation formelle et nécessité de l’expression verbale. Affiliation est un flux de langage dont on peut sentir l’urgence à chaque vers.

In collaboration with Laurent Poleo-Garnier, NIGHTNIGHT is an archive of images and texts from different sources addressing the theme of the night. Over the book as a party that degenerates with fatigue, alcohol and other stimulants, images and layout deteriorate, the subjects get tired, the vision is cloudy...

A brilliant novella from a legendary figure in American fiction.

A young woman drifts through dimly lit bars and rented rooms, reporting from the erogenous zones of New York and Europe. Encountering increasingly bizarre sexual situations, she turns her curious, comic, and fierce eye onto the contemporary world of sex and desire.

The men of this world evade and simper, they prey, preen, and fall hopelessly in love. In the narrator’s deadpan portraits, we see young women indulging their freedom through hope and disappointment, and young men wearing various guises of masculinity.

This novella surprises with unlikely fucks, disturbing fucks, outlandish fucks, and some truly weird fucks – all written with the smart, elegant, and tough style which could only be that of Lynne Tillman.

Phylactère est une revue annuelle à voix multiples, née du désir d’explorer l’écriture de l’oralité et les possibilités de retranscription de performance, à travers des visions authentiques, subjectives et spontanées. Donnant la parole à des amateur·ice·s, artiste·s, designer·s et penseur·se·s, la revue Phylactère regroupe des écrits de transition, assumant tous les glissements entre un script, l’action réalisée et sa traduction, avec une attention extrême et aventureuse pour la manière dont les contextes, gestes, émotions et espaces sont mis en jeu lors de cette retranscription.

Initiée par Roxanne Maillet et Auriane Preud’homme à l’invitation de Camille Videcoq lors de la résidence Entrée Principale (Marseille), Phylactère conjugue pratique graphique et éditoriale et démarche curatoriale en intégrant au processus de publication l’organisation de différents événements. 

Pour son deuxième numéro, Phylactère prend pour titre l’onomatopée Oh là là !

Avec les contributions de : Anne Lise Le Gac, Benoît Le Boulicaut, Camille Videcoq, Cecil Serres, Claudia Pagès, Considered to be Allies (Margaux Parillaud & Mie Frederikke Fischer Christensen), Ghita Skali, Giuliana Zefferi, Lauren Tortil, Loreto Martínez Troncoso, Louise Hervé & Clovis Maillet, Mona Gérardin-Laverge, Nygel Panasco, pauline l. boulba, Sarah Browne, Susie Green (with Kim Coleman, Simon Bayliss & Rory Pilgrim), Tahnee, L’autre and Tiziana La Melia.

Conception graphique : Auriane Preud'homme et Roxanne Maillet.

Through an Addict’s Looking-Glass is an exercise in meaning-making, a thinking-out-loud. Waithera Sebatindira unravels how it feels to live as an addict under capitalism, pondering how engaging with these experiences could bring the horizon of liberation towards us.

Through embodied explorations of addiction and recovery, Sebatindira invites us to inhabit crip time, a concept that describes different temporal realities in the lives of disabled people. In this collection, the addict’s crip time is distorted, mutable and non-linear, hopping backwards and forwards through memory loops and memory loss. Blackout is time travel; sobriety is failure; finitude, freedom.

An uncompromising rejection of the objectification of addicts across the political spectrum, this powerful meditation on illness, disability, solidarity and spirituality illuminates their indispensable contributions to the building of a new world.

Waithera Sebatindira is a Kenyan writer based in London. Their previous writing and research interests have included food imperialism, drag kings and gender transformation. They are a co-author of A FLY Girl’s Guide to University.

Manuel d’actions et réactions adaptées aux différentes situations, dessiné à partir de l’expérience d’Edwige Ehlinger.

Entirely comprised of poems contained in her latest collection, 2016’s Certain Magical Acts, Live in Seattle elucidates why Alice Notley is one of the world’s most revered poets, the recipient of the Los Angeles TimesBook Award, the Griffin Prize, the Shelley Memorial Award, the Lenore Marshall Prize, and the Poetry Foundation’s Ruth Lilly Prize. “I am alive outside written memory” is how one of the speakers of Notley’s poem “Voices” puts it and listening to the poet read her work live, in front of an entranced audience, serves to detail the intangibility of sound vis-à-vis language.

Live in Seattle also includes excerpts of the onstage conversation Notley had with Seattle poets John Marshall, Christine Deavel and Rebecca Hoogs. Among other topics, the talk revolves around concepts of success, what it means to write a female poetry circa 2017, and the importance of always creating from a position of disobedience.

As part of Seattle Arts & Lectures’ Poetry Series, Live in Seattle was recorded at McCaw Hall in Seattle, Washington on Wednesday, April 5th, 2017 and mastered and engineered by Gus Elg at Sky Onion in Portland, Oregon in the Summer of 2017. 

Purchase of Live in Seattle includes a 11×11 insert of Notley’s poem “FOUND WORK (lost lace),” as well as a download card for the entire album. Live in Seattle can also be found digitally on Spotify and Bandcamp. The record itself is not black but clear.

Bill Berkson's Invisible Oligarchs is like a book jotted on the back of a poet's hand—a hand that picks up everything that sings to it, from gold-leaf proverb to chopstick sheath, on its quick trip through a few places in urban Russia, 2006. Across faintly ruled Japanese paper, many pages reproduced here in facsimile, snapshots change hands, new poems blink, and poetry politics meet political gossip over lunch in St. Petersburg. Berkson's educated guesswork about that elusive quality once known the Great Russian Soul, is framed here by letters from his friend Kate Sutton and encompassing encounters with poets and cab drivers, Moscow conceptualists and a White Night at the Mariinsky Ballet. As a sharply observant poet and the most soulful art critic alive, Berkson knows how to get us behind the set, and reading this book is as nice as taking a high dive with him into a perfectly mixed White Russian.

Bill Berkson was born in New York in 1939. He moved to Northern California in 1970 and now divides his time between San Francisco and New York. He is a poet, critic, sometime curator, and professor emeritus at the San Francisco Art Institute, where he taught art history and literature for many years. A corresponding editor for Art in America, he has contributed to such other journals as Artforum, Aperture, Modern Painters, and artcritical.com. His recent books include PORTRAIT AND DREAM: NEW & SELECTED POEMS (Coffee House Press, 2009); BILL, a words-and-images collaboration with Colter Jacobsen; Lady Air; Not an Exit with drawings by Léonie Guyer; REPEAT AFTER ME (Gallery Paule Anglim, 2011), with watercolors by John Zurier; and a collection of his art writings, FOR THE ORDINARY ARTIST (BlazeVOX books, 2010), as well as a new collection of his poems, Expect Delays, from Coffee House Press in 2014 and INVISIBLE ORLIGARCHS out from Ugly Duckloing Presse in 2016.

More than a mere extension of the hands, the garden tool is what helps the gardener materialise their vision. Much like the painter’s brush and the sculptor’s chisel – without it, one would be helpless. This issue of Pleasant Place dives into the world of garden tools, the essential, the practical, and the beautiful. 

Including:
Instruments of Care – An introduction by Norbert Peeters with some philosophical remarks on garden tools.
Wardens of Good – A visual essay of the wonderful objects of Garden and Wood, a business selling vintage garden tools and ephemera.
Trusted Tools – Gardeners like Piet Oudolf and Jonny Bruce talk about their favourite tools that are illustrated in detail by artist Floris Tilanus.
Passing the Trowel – A visit to Sneeboer, the Netherlands most famous garden tool company, where the trowel has been passed down for four generations.
Toolmorrow – Artists are challenged to create new types of garden tools, for lazy gardening, stylish gardening and collective gardening.

Cover by Lou-Lou van Staaveren
Inside cover by José Quintanar
Centrefold miniatures by Zilan Zhao

Graphic design is by fanfare
Concept and editing by Guus Kaandorp, Floor Kortman and Lou-Lou van Staaveren

An English translation of Peter Handke’s 1986 novel Repetition, previously out of print for a quarter of a century.

“In Repetition, Handke allows the peculiar light which illuminates the space under a leafy canopy or a tent canvas to glisten between words, placed here with astounding caution and precision; in doing so, he succeeds in making the text into a sort of refuge amid the arid lands which, even in the culture industry, grow larger day by day.” —W. G. Sebald

“In his earliest work … Handke found a way of conveying a state of mind … where words seem to come between you and the world, where nothing coheres or appears natural, and from the vantage-point of which the ease with which other people talk and go about their business seems deeply suspicious. But just as Kafka felt there were moments when, miraculously, a written sentence – even one written by himself – seemed full light, seemed to fill its own space and establish its own rhythm, and when even the whole story seemed mysteriously to stand as solidly in the world as a tree or a rock, so it has been with Handke. He has, in his later work, appeared to make a conscious effort to escape from the debilitating awareness of his own lack of authority or authenticity, and tried to write as though somehow the story were already written, had, in a sense, always been there… Repetition is the triumphant climax of his career so far…

What saves the book from the sort of sentimentality we find in John Berger’s recent work is first of all Handke’s uncanny ability to convey what it is this urge for pattern has to overcome, and secondly, his extraordinary attention to detail, historical, geographical, botanical, and linguistic. (No review can possibly convey the richness of Filip’s meditation on his brother’s two books, or Handke’s magical way with images.)

His narrative … is one of the most dignified and moving evocations I have ever read of what it means to be alive, to walk upon this earth.” —Gabriel Josipovici

This publication proposes a set of aural exercises that show readers how to disappear, reappear, join a group, or leave a group. Its annex is a lexicon of some of the sounds that dwell in or are banished from the middle-class household. 

Text: Haytham El-Wardany
Editors: Maha Maamoun and Ala Younis
Translated from Arabic by Jennifer Peterson (Preliminary Exercises) and Robin Moger (Sounds of the Middle Classes)

“Sometimes I find myself explaining to someone at 2 a.m. what a subsidy is. Or how train tickets become cheaper if you have the increased allowance – and what that is exactly. Or in which months you should email a cultural centre if you want to sell a performance. Then those people often say: “Huh, why didn’t I know this?” And: ‘Why isn’t all this just explained somewhere in simple words?’

So I started writing it myself. Because I had to figure these things out myself as a new creator, I can speak from experience. I know better than Kunstenpunt or Cultuurloket what a starting creator struggles with, because I’ve only been doing this for a few years myself. I can explain it better because some things in practice are quite different from the theory.”

Egon Schoelynck (he/him, 1996) is a Sunday child and theatre maker. His work is political-ish and can be found in black boxes, on paving stones and in collective collaborations. His artistic practice was supported by detheatermaker (’22-’25), where he explored, among other things, how to run a soap opera in a café without actors. Together with Runa Robbroeckx and Lennert De Vroey, he created KAK, an ecological shitshow (2025). He also solves global problems with punk songs and children’s instruments, under the name Middle Class Babypunk.

A new book by poet-activist CAConrad combining essay, memoir and (Soma)tic poetry rituals. Documenting the pervasive homophobic violence of the 1980s and the overwhelming losses of AIDS, this work is an unwavering testament to queer resilience. CA’s text forms a resounding incantation to friends and lovers lost. SIN BUG is the first book published as part of the Open Narratives series.

he wrote “I have AIDS
and kissed this wall”
X marked the spot
I wrote “I’m not afraid”
and kissed him back
wherever he is

CAConrad has been writing poems for more than 50 years and working with (Soma)tic poetry rituals for over 20 years. Their latest book is Listen to the Golden Boomerang Return (Wave Books / UK Penguin 2024). The Book of Frank is available in 9 different languages, most recently French and Italian. They also exhibit poems as sculpture with recent shows in London, Melbourne, Porto, Santander, and Tucson. Please visit them online at CAConrad.com.

Ukrainian poet Anna Malihon’s English-language debut gathers daring, resilient, open-eyed poems written before and after Russia’s full-scale invasion. The difficult fates voiced by the protagonists of Malihon’s poems intertwine with her own experience, weaving an alarming but beautiful world where the young grow old and love is met with war. This world, at first shocking, holds the reader in suspension, compelling a desire to rethink and reread. With deft allegory and startling metaphor, Malihon crafts a poetry that seeks to influence the course of events, to reroute history.

Mystic Transport is an exhibition project initiated through a chance encounter between two artists, Koen Theys and Gülsün Karamustafa. Both are very much intertwined with the city they live in; Brussels and Istanbul and integrate visible and invisible materials and remnants from their immediate surroundings within their practice.

Intrigued by religious parades, the hamam, war propaganda, gender issues and the entertainment industry, Theys and Karamustafa use these phenomena as starting points for their video work, installations and performances. In doing so, both artists sketch a critical portrait of the society and culture in which we live and reside, reflecting on cultural canons and differing socio-economic realities. Mystic Transport thus results in unique crossovers.

The English translation of Zdanevich's Dadaist autobiographical lecture in Paris in 1922, where he adopts the name Iliazda. In this entertaining lecture, the achievements of the avant-garde is presented as a combination of zaum, polymorphous sexuality, aleatory forms and scatological interpretation of culture.

The second volume of the bie bao series presents a eulogy entitled Iliazda at the Birthday Party, a pseudo-autobiographical lecture delivered by Ilya Zdanevich in Paris in 1922. It reports on Zdanevich's artistic and political adventures up until then. Along with an autobiography full of self-admiration, in this lecture Zdanevich gives an interpretation of his zaum dramas inspired by Freudianism, and humorously describes a colourful image of the Russian microcosm in Montparnasse. 

Additionally, this second volume also includes Iliazd's letter to Ardengo Soffici from 1964, where one can read, in the most unambiguous terms, about Zdanevich's positions against war, imperialism, and all forms of nationalism. Subtitled 50 Years of Russian Futurism, the letter to Soffici presents us with an altogether new Zdanevich—a "fellow traveller" in both leftist and avant-garde circles. As well as the extended introduction and extensive annotations, the texts are further contextualised with Johanna Drucker's visual presentation of the birth of the Iliazd cult.

The bie bao series will include eight publications, covering many layers of Zdanevich's rich theoretical and artistic output. Each volume consists of a bio-bibliographical introduction, a commentary, a translation with annotations, and artistic intervention.

Iliazd (Ilya Zdanevich, 1894-1975) was a Russian poet, designer, typographer, theoretician, art critic, and publisher, close to the avant-garde circles and one of the promoters of Futurism in Russia, author of a poetic work, drama written in zaum abstract poetic trans-sense or "transrational" language, and novels.

Issue 04, Structure, traces the scaffolding of our lives, seen and unseen. We travel from the palaces of Versailles to the basements of Russian resistance, from origami folds to mechanized labor, from cosmic geometry to the twitch of a stimming hand. These are the choreographies that hold us, train us, divide us, and sometimes set us free. This issue moves through power's choreography with Vinícius Portella tracing repression from TikTok algorithms to Candomblé persecution, Sasha Portyannikova documenting dance as survival under Russian authoritarianism, and Ellen Jeffrey revealing how stimming becomes its own radical dance practice. Mariam Ala-Rashi finds cosmic alignment in contortion while Michael O'Connor explores the body as origami, structure folded into self. Katja Vaghi contrasts baroque precision with contemporary chaos, and Nathaniel Moore exposes the market forces shaping European dance. Cover and insert artist, Maria Harfouche, captures structure through double-exposed analog photography and layered compositions that reveal how moments build upon each other.

A Dance Mag is an independent magazine that looks at the world through the lens of dance. It transcends differences, distances, and disciplines to tell the stories of people from all over the world, who are dancing their lives and giving their bodies a voice.